Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence by Flickr user C.

Many teens around the world look forward to their governments “gifting” them the right to vote and/or permission to drink alcohol, when they reach their 18^th birthdays. Others receive absolutely nothing from the state. In Italy, however, teens born in 1998 will hit the jackpot this September. In addition to voting rights, they will receive a €500 “cultural bonus” from the Italian government. The program is intended to foster affinity between the country’s youth and its arts sector by providing Italy’s youngest adults with incentive to consume culture on their own terms. True to our times, the program will be administered largely through an app. Though other nations have experimented with “free money” vouchers, Italy is the only to target culture. Critics of the program question the wisdom of its launch in a struggling economy and its ultimate ability to empower workers in arts and culture. As this is the first program of its kind, we’ll have to wait and see.

Political Artists Feeling the Heat in the Middle East. Ever since the unsuccessful coup attempt to topple the regime of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July, experts have been raising the alarm about Erdoğan’s continued drift toward authoritarianism. Sure enough, soon after he regained power, Erdoğan shut down 29 publishing houses accused of affiliation with the political opposition, along with “a wide swath” of newspapers, magazines, and TV channels. Under Turkish law, the seizure means that all assets of these organizations are permanently transferred to the Turkish government with no possibility of appeal, leaving authors and other third parties in the lurch. It bears remembering that Erdoğan was once seen as a relatively moderate, democratically elected leader—especially in light of recent news coming out of Israel. A group of artists and arts organizations have filed a lawsuit against the country’s culture minister, Miri Regev, who has earned headlines for introducing a “loyalty test” for state-funded arts organizations and threatening cuts to those that refuse to perform in Jewish settlements in disputed territory. Want to help? Artists Rights Justice has a toolkit for you.

The Library is the Place to Be. Not so long ago, the future of public libraries appeared uncertain. What, wondered thousands of (usually digital) think pieces, would happen to those hallowed halls of books in the age of the e-reader, the audio book app, the personal hotspot? Well, it turns out that it wasn’t librarians lacking imagination.  It was all those writers. Public library systems are reinventing themselves as community spaces, where classes and meet-up groups, and special events and makers thrive. Seattle offers its public library cardholders access to free downloads of local music. In Erie, PA, the public library system is experimenting with mobile Wi-Fi hotpots, to help kids without access to broadband at home to keep up with their homework. Believe it or not, in Finland, a public library near Helsinki doubles as a karaoke bar.  The borrowers, it appears, are at the forefront of civic transformation.

Attack of the Short-Fingered Vulgarians. The more things change, the more the so-called alt-right tries to ensure they remain the same (as they were in the antebellum period). Once satisfied to post racist comments on 4chan, this online bastion of the Trump constituency is increasingly engaging in direct action up to and including the outright hijacking of actors’ social media accounts.   Another recent victim, science fiction’s Hugo Awards, opens up a new front in the culture war: vote-based artistic honors. For the second year in a row, nearly all of the shortlisted nominees were hand-picked by a collective known as the “Rabid Puppies,” thanks to a startlingly effective strategy of bloc voting that managed to put a short story called “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” up for an award. The Puppies’ ultimate aim? To ensure that the Hugo winners and nominees reflect themselves (white, male, conservative)—and no, they’re not subtle about this. Science fiction’s more, uh, culturally sensitive constituency has fought back using the same tactics, resulting in a victory for Puppy nemesis NK Jemisin in the Best Novel category and seven wins for “No Award” in the past two years.

Justice for Cultural Heritage. The Islamic State’s ongoing destruction of antiquities in the Middle East has received lots of coverage from Createquity over the past two years (see here, here, here, and here.) Unfortunately, such destruction didn’t start with ISIS; in 2012, fundamentalist group Ansar Dine’s destruction of world-famous heritage sites in Timbuktu made our round-up of the top stories of the year. This month, the International Criminal Court took Malian jihadi leader Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi to trial for the Ansar Dine actions. Mr. Mahdi pleaded guilty, and will now be sentenced. Although the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has handed down war crimes convictions for cultural destruction, this is the first time that war crimes against cultural heritage constituted the main charge of an ICC hearing. Though there is growing resentment among African states that the UN-backed ICC has concentrated its prosecutions on the continent, this case, which comes at a time of heightened international concern about the fate of similar antiquities, could prove useful. Currently, no international court has jurisdiction over crimes in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere; the Malian case could persuade other countries to pursue similar charges.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Two industry veterans recently announced their retirement. Alan W. Cooper, executive director of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, announced his retirement after 23 years with the organization. The search for his successor is underway. Meanwhile, Mary Kennedy resigned her position as CEO of the Mid-America Arts Alliance. Kennedy spent 27 years with the organization, including 14 as CEO, and will remain in a consulting role until her replacement is hired.
• Tracie D. Hall was named the director of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation’s Culture Program. In addition to her success as a community arts leader, Hall is a playwright, poet, and fiction writer.
• Claire Rice is Arts Alliance Illinois’s new Executive Director. She begins her tenure in September, after several years as the National Program Director of Harvard University’s Sustain Arts project.
• The Nathan Cummings Foundation is hiring for a newly created role: Director, Voice, Creativity & Culture.  No closing date.
• UC Davis’s Imagine America initiative is hiring a Faculty Director. Posted August 23; closes October 21.
• American Ballet Theatre is hiring a NYC-based Coordinator, Diversity and Inclusion. No closing date.
• Helicon is hiring a part-time Junior Research Associate. No closing date.
• Kickstarter is hiring an Arts Engagement Strategist. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• An Americans for the Arts survey on how the American public feels about the arts demonstrated that a majority supports arts education and government arts funding, and believes that the arts improve community quality of life.
• Chorus America released a first-ever systematic look at the motivations behind choral concert attendees–many of them social.
• An Australian study found that people who attend musical events and/or participate in dance are generally happier with their lives.
• According to an updated study by the Wellesley Center for Women on gender equity in leadership opportunities in non-profit American theater, lack of female representation in top positions is more of a “glass ceiling” than a “pipeline” issue.
• A new National Union of Students study of UK arts graduates found two out of three “don’t think a degree is worth £9k per year.”
• A UK study found an increasing decline in the number of children taking part in theater and dance.  However, research from the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport also shows that the country’s culture sector’s economic contribution has grown by 33% since 2010.
• New research explores the link between gentrification and racial boundary movements in major US cities. US colleges are also highly stratified by wealth, according to a new study from the Education Trust.
• A report from nonprofit consultancy Third Space Studio demonstrated the continued reliance of nonprofit organizations on individual donors.
• SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) recently launched its long-awaited KIPI Dashboard, a free online tool that allows arts organizations to compare their individual performance in nine finance and operations categories to that of similar organizations nationally.
• An analysis recently published in the journal Genome Biology found that a surprising number of scientific papers contain errors introduced by Microsoft Excel.
• As if expanded waistlines and slower cognitive response weren’t enough, a new study ties TV watching to blood clots.

The following notes accompany our feature article Making Sense of Cultural Equity, published on August 31, 2016:

(1) (Some) cultural equity pioneers

Our goal with this article is not to present a detailed history of the movement for cultural equity. Still, there are many artists, activists and arts institutions who have contributed significantly to this movement, and whom we would be remiss not to acknowledge. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather a handful of pioneers and pioneering institutions whose work we have followed in our research, and to whom we owe a great deal: 

• Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded in 1958
• Independent African American museums, established in the 1950s and 1960s, including the African American Museum in Cleveland (1953), the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (1961), the Museum of African American History in Boston (1963), Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit (1965), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (1968).
• Free Southern Theatre, founded in 1963
• El Teatro Campesino, founded in 1965
• Douglas Turner Ward, who along with producer/actor Robert Hooks, and theater manager Gerald Krone established the Negro Ensemble Theatre Company in 1965
• Katherine Dunham, a successful choreographer, who established a formal training program for other black dancers in 1967
• Dance Theatre of Harlem, founded in 1969
• El Museo del Barrio, launched by New York’s Puerto Rican community in 1969 with funding from the New York State Board of Education
• AB Spellman, a poet and activist, who became the director of the NEA’s Expansion Arts Program in 1975
• The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, founded by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega in 1976
• The Asian American Arts Alliance, born out of the Basement Workshop in 1983
• The Association of American Cultures, established in 1985 to advocate for cultural equity issues
• The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, founded in 1989 to foster the development and advancement of Latino arts in the United States
• The Godzilla Network, established by Asian American artists and curators in NY in 1990, which challenged the Whitney about representation of Asian artists
• Joan Myers Brown, founder of Philadanco, who established the International Association of Blacks in Dance in 1991
• The Sphinx Organization, launched in 1997 in Detroit to create opportunities for black and Latino classical musicians
• The Silk Road Rising project, which was created in 2002 to advance the creation of, and expand access to, the works of Asian American and Middle Eastern American artists
• The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, created in 2007 with initial funding from the Ford Foundation

(2) Equity is not just an nonprofit arts concern

The mandate to make institutions more reflective of a rapidly changing country is one that transcends the federal tax code. The for-profit entertainment industry, too, has been forced to confront the status quo in recent years, what with #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsStillSoWhite, #StarringJohnCho, the gender pay inequality debacle, studies showing minorities and women lagging behind in all film and TV categories (with particularly low numbers of LGBT and Latino players), studies bemoaning the dearth of women on screen and behind the camera, and studies revealing a lack of diversity in the publishing industry, and in Hollywood writers’ rooms.

(3) What we mean when we say ‘mainstream’ and ‘of color’:

Language can be a source of great confusion in conversations about cultural equity, and many commonly-used terms are highly contested. In this article, we employ several key concepts that can benefit from further elaboration. Please consider the following definitions as you read:

Mainstream institutions: In the course of our reading, we came across the term “mainstream” institutions or organizations with some frequency. Although rarely defined explicitly, we infer that this term typically denotes nonprofit organizations that 1) were founded by white people; 2) do not have a focus on an art form or an audience connected with a specific community of color or other oppressed community; 3) receive funding from foundation and government sources; and 4) have some professional staff.

Target community: We generally understand mainstream institutions’ target community to include all people in a local geographic area.

Institutions of color: We use this term to describe cultural institutions founded and led by artists of color that successfully pursue growth and long-term financial solvency through the following strategies: recruitment of a board with fundraising skills and/or connections to wealth; recruitment of new individual donors; and cultivation of new sources of institutional funding, particularly from private foundations.

“Of color”: We consider this descriptor synonymous, at least in the United States context, with the Grantmakers in the Arts-preferred term ALAANA. ALAANA stands for African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American people and communities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following sources were particularly central to our research for this article. We recommend them for further reading:

Matlon, M. P., Van Haastrecht, I., & Wittig Mengüç, K. (2014). Figuring the Plural: Needs and Supports of Canadian and US Ethnocultural Arts Organizations. Chicago, IL: Plural. Retrieved from http://www.pluralculture.org/programs-services/figuring-the-plural-book/

Mauldin, B., Laramee Kidd, S., & Ruskin, J. (2016). LA County Arts Commission Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative: Literature Review. Retrieved from http://www.lacountyarts.org/UserFiles/File/CEII_LitRev_Final.pdf

Moreno Vega, M. (1993). Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity. Trenton, N.J: Africa World Press.

Sidford, H. (2011). Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Retrieved from http://www.ncrp.org/files/publications/Fusing_Arts_Culture_Social_Change.pdf

Full Bibliography

American Alliance for Museums. (2014, February 26). Diversity and Inclusion Policy. Retrieved from: http://aam-us.org/about-us/strategic-plan/diversity-and-inclusion-policy

Americans for the Arts. (2016, May 23). Statement on Cultural Equity. Retrieved from http://www.americansforthearts.org/about-americans-for-the-arts/statement-on-cultural-equity

August Wilson Center for African American Culture. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2016 from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Wilson_Center_for_African_American_Culture

Boehm, M. (2015, October 12). Study sends ‘wake-up call’ about black and Latino arts groups’ meager funding. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-diversity-arts-study-devos-black-latino-groups-funding-20151009-story.html

Brutus, W. (2016, January 13). In Conversation with Oogeewoogee, Dr. Marta Moreno Vega Talks about Funding Diversity in the Arts. [Blog post]. Retrived from http://www.cccadi.org/cccadi-blog/2016/1/13/in-conversation-with-oogeewoogee-dr-marta-moreno-vega-talks-about-funding-diversity-in-the-arts

Bryan, B. (2008). DIVERSITY IN PHILANTHROPY A Comprehensive Bibliography of Resources Related to Diversity Within the Philanthropic and Nonprofit Sectors. Foundation Center. Retrieved from http://foundationcenter.org/getstarted/topical/diversity_in_phil.pdf

Campbell, M. S. (1998). A New Mission for the NEA. TDR: The Drama Review, 42(4), 5–9.

Chang, Jeff. (2015, October 26). Future Aesthetics. Arts in a Changing America. Retrieved from: https://artsinachangingamerica.org/nyc-launch-highlight-the-call/

City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Budget and Legislative Analyst. (October 10, 2014). Policy Analysis Report Re: Grants for the Arts Historical Funding. Retrieved from: http://www.sfbos.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=48407

Cuyler, A. (2015). An Exploratory Study of Demographic Diversity in the Arts Management Workforce. Grantmakers in the Arts. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from http://www.giarts.org/article/exploratory-study-demographic-diversity-arts-management-workforce

DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. (2015). Diversity In The Arts: The Past, Present, and Future of African American and Latino Museums, Dance Companies, and Theater Companies. Retrieved from http://www.devosinstitute.umd.edu/What-We-Do/News-and-Announcements/Announcements/Announcements/Diversity%20in%20the%20Arts%20paper

Dowling, K., Piccini, L. M., & Schofield, M. (2014, February). The Show Must Go On! American Theater in the Great Depression: Impact on African American Theatre. Retrieved from https://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/the-show/african-american-theatre-impac

Erickson, B. (March 8, 2016). From the executive director: Inclusion—what is it good for? Backstage: The TBA Blog. Retrieved from: http://www.theatrebayarea.org/blogpost/1071499/241120/From-the-Executive-Director-Inclusion-What-Is-It-Good-For

Farrell, B., Medvedeva, M., Cultural Policy Center, & NORC and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. (2010). Demographic transformation and the future of museums. Retrieved from http://www.aam-us.org/docs/center-for-the-future-of-museums/demotransaam2010.pdf

Garfias, R. (1991). Cultural diversity and the arts in America. In Public money and the muse, ed. Stephen Benedict. New York: Norton.

Grams, D. & Farrell, B. (2008). Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Grantmakers in the Arts. (2011, December 6-16). Online Forum on Equity in Arts Funding. Retrieved from http://blogs.giarts.org/equity-forum/

Grantmakers in the Arts. (2015, January 20). Racial Equity in Arts Philanthropy: Statement of Purpose. Grantmakers in the Arts.  Retrieved from http://www.giarts.org/racial-equity-arts-philanthropy-statement-purpose

Gordon, A., & Newfield, C. (1996). Mapping multiculturalism. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press

Haft, J. (2015). Article: Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity Through Critical Analysis. Retrieved from https://roadside.org/asset/article-voices-battlefront-achieving-cultural-equity-through-critical-analysis

Hartmann, D., & Gerteis, J. (2005). Dealing with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms. Sociological Theory, 23(2), 218–240.

Historical racial and ethnic demographics of the United States. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2016 from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States

History (continued). (n.d.). Asian American Arts Alliance. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://aaartsalliance.org/page/history-continued

Horowitz, E. (2016, February 26). When will minorities be the majority? The Boston Globe. Retrieved from: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/02/26/when-will-minorities-majority/9v5m1Jj8hdGcXvpXtbQT5I/story.html

Jensen, R. (1995). The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian’s Map. Journal of Social History, 29, 17–37.

Jewesbury, D. D., Singh, J., & Tuck, S. (2009). Cultural Diversity: Language and Meanings. The Arts Council of Ireland. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.ie/uploadedFiles/Main_Site/Content/Artforms_and_Practices/Arts_Participation_pages/Cultural_Diversity_language_meanings.pdf

Koch, C. (1998). The NEA and NEH Funding Crisis. Public Talk: Online Journal of Discourse Leadership, (2). Retrieved from http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptkoch.html

Kourlas, G. (2015, October 30). Push for Diversity in Ballet Turns to Training the Next Generation. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/arts/dance/push-for-diversity-in-ballet-turns-to-training-the-next-generation.html

LA County Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://ceii-artsforla.nationbuilder.com/

Lee, F. R. (2008, July 24). A Coalition Wants a New Kind of Equity in Arts Financing. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/arts/24group.html

London, T. (2013). An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art. Theatre Communications Group.

Lowry, W. M. (1991). How many muses?  Government funding for the multicultural. Journal of Arts Management & Law, 21(3), 264.

MacNamara, M. (2015, June 1). San Francisco funnels $7 million to the arts. San Francisco Classical Voice. Retrieved from  https://www.sfcv.org/music-news/san-francisco-funnels-7-million-to-the-arts

Moore, M. (1990). The politics of multiculture. Journal of Arts Management and Law, 20(1), 5–15.

National Endowment for the Arts. (2000). The National Endowment for the Arts: 1965-2000: A brief chronology of federal support for the arts. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEAChronWeb.pdf

National Endowment for the Arts. (2015). A Decade of Arts Engagement: findings from the survey of public participation in the arts, 2002–2012. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2012-sppa-jan2015-rev.pdf

National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2016 from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_African_American_History_and_Culture

Pankratz, D. B. (1993). Multiculturalism and public arts policy.. Bergin & Garvey,.

Pogrebin, R. (2016, January 28). New York Arts Organizations Lack the Diversity of Their City. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/arts/new-york-arts-organizations-lack-the-diversity-of-their-city.html

Pieper, K. M., Choueiti, M, & Stacy L. Smith, S. L. (n.d). Race & Ethnicity in Independent Films: Prevalence of Underrepresented Directors and the Barriers They Face. National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-Art-Works-Sundance.pdf

Ragsdale, D. Instead of more data perhaps we should discuss why we keep ignoring the data we have? (2011, November 26). Jumper Blog. Retrieved from: http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2011/11/instead-of-more-data-perhaps-we-should-discuss-why-we-keep-ignoring-the-data-we-have/

Ragsdale, D. (2011). Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy. RSA Journal, 157(5545), 37–39.

Ragsdale, D. The times may be a-changin’ but (no surprise) arts philanthropy ain’t. (2011, October 24). Jumper Blog. Retrieved : http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2011/10/the-times-may-be-a-changin-but-no-surprise-arts-philanthropy-aint/

Ravitch, D. (1990). Multiculturalism: E pluribus plures. American Scholar, 59(3), 337. The Denver Post. Retrieved from: http://www.denverpost.com/2015/08/30/colorado-arts-groups-take-sides-in-a-battle-over-millions-in-funding/

Regrets of a Former Arts Funder | Blue Avocado. (n.d.). Retrieved April 20, 2016, from http://www.blueavocado.org/content/regrets-former-arts-funder

Rinaldi, R. M. (2015, August 30). Colorado arts groups take sides in a battle over millions in funding.

Savage, E. (2016, February 9). A Call To Action. Arts in a Changing America.  http://artsinachangingamerica.org/2016/02/09/a-call-to-action/

Torres, F. J., McGuirk, J,. Torres, E., Turner, C., & Brown, C. (2012). Advancing Equity in Arts and Cultural Grantmaking. Grantmakers in the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.giarts.org/article/advancing-equity-arts-and-cultural-grantmaking

Voss, Z. G., Louie, A., Drew, Z., & Teyolia, M. R. (2016, January). Does “Strong and Effective” Look Different for Culturally Specific Arts Organizations? National Center for Arts Research. Retrieved from http://www.smu.edu/~/media/Site/Meadows/NCAR/NCARWhitePaper01-12

The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: One: About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. Two: By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. Three: For us. That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. Four: Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.

–W.E.B. Du Bois, from the program for the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theater in 1925, reprinted in Crisis magazine (published by the NAACP) in 1926

About us. By us. For us. Near us. It has been almost a century since the great W.E.B. Du Bois–one of the co-founders of the NAACP–offered this stirring call for what, today, we would call “cultural equity.” To say much has happened in those ninety years would be to oversimplify. Significant progress has been made. And yet for many, and on many levels, it is not enough. In a speech given just last year, Jeff Chang, executive director of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, exclaimed: “at a moment when…our images depict us as one happy rainbow nation, and yet the structures of power, including the national culture complex…is still overwhelmingly white, we begin to recognize that we have not yet achieved cultural equity.”

It is certainly not for lack of effort–a deep, ongoing, heroic effort by dedicated activists, institutions, artists, funders, and even the government. And yet, read Chang–and below, Campbell, Lowry, Rosen, Erickson, Kourlas, Sonntag, Vega, and Grams–and one thing soon becomes clear: “cultural equity” means different things to different people. Over the course of some ninety years, distinct, and sometimes competing, visions of success have jostled for attention, complicating a complex conversation, and creating tensions that often go unresolved. Diverse goals and desired outcomes–over time and between different groups–have made change a juggling act; meanwhile, efforts to add on fixes to a system that was not built with equity in mind have met with mixed results.

Just as we cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it, we cannot achieve cultural democracy or equity with the same tools, strategies, and structures that built and have maintained our current inequitable systems. To move forward, we must look, think, and act widely.

–Figuring the Plural, a research report about ethnocultural organizations published in 2014

The past few years have been deeply trying for race relations in the United States. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to widely publicized violence against unarmed black people at the hands of private citizens and the police, along with an increasing anti-immigration rhetoric on the political stage, have given new urgency to initiatives focusing on decreasing racial inequality and combating racial bias. The relevance of cultural equity in the nonprofit arts world is all the more immediate against this backdrop. As borne out by the results of our reader poll earlier this year, along with our own observations, perhaps no other issue is more present for arts professionals in 2016 than this.

Many of the core issues in today’s debate around cultural equity harken back to the beginning of arts in America. As outlined in our earlier article on growth and change in the nonprofit arts sector, the “beginning” here can be traced to the 19th century, when, in the aftermath of the Civil War and amid an influx of immigration, a new class of urban white commercial elites established institutions–such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and Metropolitan Opera, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–to preserve and present art in the classical European canon. While these well-heeled individuals–America’s early philanthropists–sought to promote civic pride and validate America’s position as a “civilized” world power, they also used these institutions to establish and protect their own class status. It was not until the 1960s that private philanthropy began to focus on broader cultural expressions. By then, however, this structural disparity, which showered the lion’s share of philanthropic funding and policy attention on art forms originating in Western European traditions and wealthy organizations upholding those traditions, had thoroughly defined the very word “arts” as well as nearly all of the infrastructure associated with it.

Institutional efforts to bring equity to the arts have a long history. The African American theater tradition envisioned by DuBois at the opening of this article, for example, was developed in part thanks to New Deal programs in the 1930s. Since then, the federal and some state governments have stepped in for periods of time to create dedicated funding streams for organizations rooted in communities of color. In 1968, the New York State Council on the Arts launched its Ghetto Arts Program (later wisely renamed the Special Arts Services Program), which provided opportunities for black artists to work in their communities, and three years later, the nascent National Endowment for the Arts launched the Expansion Arts Program, designed to support “community-based arts activities.”

The NEA has succeeded in encouraging programmatic diversity in terms of the projects offered by a wide range of institutions. What it now requires is structural diversity that is within the boards, staffs, and patronage systems of institutions.

– Mary Schmidt Campbell, former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner [From her 1998 A New Mission for the NEA]

Many of these policy interventions, however, ultimately proved fleeting in the face of shifting political winds, especially at the federal level. Undeterred, several generations of artists and activists worked in the latter half of the 20th century to support participation in and expression of cultural heritage, sometimes with the help of private philanthropy and sometimes without any outside help at all. The fruits of those efforts today include a number of prominent institutions presenting works by artists of color, several national service organizations such as the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and Association of African American Museums, and thousands of ethnocultural organizations providing important services within their communities.

In my own experience I have found that ethnic origin is not a bar to artistic response if there is equal access. I cannot believe that persons of color do not respond to good art.

–W. McNeil Lowry, former Vice President of the Ford Foundation who launched the foundation’s arts funding program, in a 1991 article in response to the
Arts and Government report from the American Assembly

In recent years, cultural equity has once again risen to the top of the national arts agenda in the United States. From coast to coast, foundations, arts councils, advocacy organizations, universities and others have doubled down on their commitment to diversity and equity in the arts. Though many factors have led to that shift, a clearly pivotal moment was the 2011 publication of Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” A monograph completed as part of the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy’s review of social justice grantmaking practices in various fields, “Fusing” reported figures suggesting that the majority of arts funding in the United States does not benefit communities of color, and called decisively for change. Grantmakers in the Arts gave substantial visibility to the report and its ideas within the arts funding community over a period of several years, which culminated in the organization releasing a statement of purpose detailing its commitment to racial equity in arts philanthropy in April of 2015.

[S]ocial inequities continue to be reflected in the funding practices of private philanthropy and governmental funders in the arts. Therefore, in order to more equitably support ALAANA [African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American] communities, arts organizations, and artists, funders should take explicit actions to structurally change funding behaviors and norms.

–Grantmakers in the Arts, Racial Equity in Arts Philanthropy Statement of Purpose

Sidford’s and GIA’s calls for equity have reverberated with increasing volume among other national service organizations, local arts agencies, and foundations across the land. In 2014, following in the footsteps of a Mellon Foundation program to increase the diversity of curatorial staff at encyclopedic museums, the American Alliance of Museums released a diversity and inclusion policy statement. In the past two years, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission have engaged in something of a bicoastal dance, with the former conducting a study of the diversity of the arts organizations it funds and the latter undertaking a Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative to improve “diversity in cultural organizations, in the areas of their leadership, staffing, programming and audience composition.” Americans for the Arts, the national service organization that represents these and other local arts councils, released its own widely circulated and discussed Statement on Cultural Equity in May of this year.

I heartily support the NCRP report’s recommendation that philanthropic investment in the arts should benefit underserved communities and promote greater equity, opportunity, and justice. But I take issue with the suggestion that foundation support to large-budget organizations and those that perform the Western canon is, by definition, at odds with these goals.

–Jesse Rosen, League of American Orchestras, 2011

Our goal here is not to present a detailed history of the movement for cultural equity. Folks far more qualified than us have done so already. Instead, we are more interested in looking forward: what is the change we collectively want to create, and what will it take to make that change happen?

At Createquity, we are on a long-term mission to investigate the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them. Yet in order to use research and evidence to help our sector move forward, we must have a clear, and shared, understanding of what success looks like. And therein lies the rub: the further we delved into the literature around cultural equity, and the more we consulted experts and connected with some of the activists who precede us, the more we came to realize that shared understanding simply doesn’t exist.

That there are different visions for cultural equity is clear. Where exactly the lines are drawn, however, is somewhat less so. There is an inherent difficulty in examining positions forged through dialogue via documents authored by a few, and any attempt to develop a taxonomy will have its flaws. But in our own conversations, we found it helpful to divide the visions for success we were reading and hearing from advocates into four archetypes: Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution, and Self-Determination. In the rest of this article, we present the differences between these visions, and consider the implications for a healthy arts ecosystem.

Let’s take a closer look.

Vision One: Diversity

There is another argument for inclusion, one that is at least as powerful as inequity in employment, and that is what it means for the audience to see a fully inclusive world on our stages….

–Brad Erickson, Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area, March 2016

The one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called “mainstream” institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous. The “Diversity” vision for cultural equity seeks to rectify this, calling for these institutions to become more reflective of the communities they serve.

What does that actually mean in practice? Over the course of the past half-century, conversations about diversity have tended to focus first on audiences, then on programming, and finally on leadership. Diversity’s core concern is about who is ultimately benefiting from the work; if diverse audiences are taking advantage, then that is the surest sign of success. Many early efforts thus adopted the theme of “access” to the arts, on the assumption that underrepresented audiences wanted to participate but could not because of barriers like cost or convenience. Gradually, however, as organizations discovered that simply offering free events and pursuing more targeted marketing wasn’t enough, the focus shifted to artists themselves–who was on stage, on the page, on the walls, on screen, or coming out of the speakers–and the cultural narratives they represented. In recent years, attention has turned more and more to the staffs and boards of arts organizations as advocates have sought to diversify the decision-makers behind the scenes. Thus, whereas the Diversity vision began as a simple push for more diverse audiences, today it calls for change at the infrastructural level in addition to the programmatic level.

“Misty Copeland, American Ballet Theatre” by flickr user Kent G Becker

More than equality is at stake when Ms. Copeland—the first African-American principal female dancer in the [American Ballet Theater’s] 75-year history—dances. When a company is diverse, the audience becomes more diverse, too, and for those faced with aging, dwindling audiences, that is priceless.

– Gia Kourlas, New York Times, 2015

Why do mainstream institutions and their stakeholders care about diversity? Much of the interest springs from a recognition of the changing demographics of America. Non-Hispanic whites have made up a smaller proportion of the US population in every Census since 1940, and the Census Bureau projects that people of color will become the majority nationwide by 2044. Meanwhile, figures from the National Endowment for the Arts show a long-term decline in rates of participation in so-called “benchmark” art forms (a definition that includes classical music, jazz, opera, plays, ballet, and visits to an art museum or gallery), as well as relatively lower engagement from non-white, young, poorer, and less-educated audiences. These statistics pose a strong threat to the narrative of universal relevance that many mainstream organizations actively promote, particularly when such institutions are located in heavily diversified downtown urban cores. The more an individual feels reflected within the culture of a mainstream institution, it is assumed, the more comfortable that individual will be engaging with the institution’s programming. If that reflection is not taking place, a significant proportion of the population is being left out in systematic ways.

While many proponents see Diversity as morally righteous on the strength of these arguments alone, there is a solid business case for relevance too. If the assumption above is true, mainstream institutions have a better chance of making out in the long run if they can successfully engage more members of their ever-shifting communities through diversification strategies.

Vision Two: Prosperity

It’s an incredibly appealing product. Ailey is an admirable company that has capitalized on its artistic strengths to ensure its financial future.

–Douglas C. Sonntag, director of dance at the National Endowment for the Arts, referring to Ailey’s artistic product, staff, and board, quoted in a 2004 article for the Washington Post

Though Diversity is unmistakably a call for change, its supporters share early American philanthropists’ faith that the institutions they founded can and must play a central, unifying role in the cultural life of their communities. Not everyone agrees.

The Prosperity vision takes Diversity’s belief in the power of organizational scale and applies it to institutions started and led by artists of color. These institutions follow the standard model of nonprofit growth–cultivating a wide audience, a fundraising board, diversified streams of income, and professional staff–all with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Though rarely stated outright, an underlying assumption of Prosperity is that large, established institutions of color will last longer, and thus provide more benefit to society over many generations, than an ecosystem of smaller organizations that may be more transitory in nature.

What we are calling the Prosperity vision evolved out of the success of a cohort of pioneering artists who created their own organizations in the late 1950s through the1970s in response to a lack of existing opportunities for pursuing their creative work. Many of these artists adopted the nonprofit model that was gaining ground during that period in order to improve their access to philanthropic resources. The seminal organizations they founded–like the Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, Studio Museum in Harlem, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Negro Ensemble Company, among others–received sustained support from private foundations early in their history, and the legacies of those organizations play an important role today both in the cultural life of their communities and more broadly.

Negro Ensemble Company National Tour, 1968 (source)

The Prosperity vision lives on in several more recent institutions, including the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, set to open this September in Washington, DC. It is worth noting that, like many of their predecessors, both of these institutions came to be thanks to a collaboration between one or more artists or advocates of color and a white champion or champions. The August Wilson Center materialized when Pittsburgh mayor Thomas J. Murphy, Jr. accepted a challenge from the local NAACP president, Tim Stevens, to organize a funding drive for the new institution that Stevens had dreamed up. Representative John Lewis (D-GA) introduced legislation for an African American Smithsonian museum and tried for many years to get it through Congress; it finally passed because of support from a new Smithsonian head, Lawrence M. Small. This pattern of community leaders of different races forming alliances to celebrate artists of color is highly characteristic of the Prosperity vision.

Vision Three: Redistribution

Eurocentric aesthetic products continue to be viewed as superior to those of people of color and poor white communities. Funders from both the public and private agencies have historically invested in institutions and art forms that reflect their assumed superiority; they have consistently under resourced and underfunded the art forms that they consider marginal, ethnic, folk, etc.

–Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, president and founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, in a 2016 online conversation posted to the Center’s website.

Diversity and Prosperity both embrace the standard market dynamics of the nonprofit arts sector, in which a small number of high-profile institutions dominate. By contrast, the Redistribution vision favors a larger pool of recipients for contributed income, particularly from grantmakers. Advocates of Redistribution argue that people of color, rural communities, LGBT communities, and others are socially and economically marginalized by our society and therefore have less access to wealth to support their work in the arts. The cultural contributions of these communities have likewise been devalued by arts funders historically. An equitable distribution–a redistribution–of funds towards organizations originating in and serving marginalized communities is the best way to address this imbalance. For advocates of Redistribution, therefore, a shift in the funding paradigm is what’s most urgently needed to achieve cultural equity.

The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute was founded in New York City in 1976 by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, pictured here third from the left. (Source)

Unlike Prosperity’s institution-centric frame, Redistribution focuses on the full ecosystem of individuals and institutions that comprise a community. A core belief of Redistribution is that all participants–from large institutions to one-person operations–should be afforded the opportunity to succeed. (Advocates of Redistribution don’t have a problem with large institutions that celebrate artists of color, as long as smaller organizations are able to share in the wealth.) Beyond the inherent justice in giving funds to oppressed groups, advocates point to the country’s changing demographics as additional justification for Redistribution. For advocates of Redistribution, it is more efficient to accomplish the goals of cultural equity by redirecting resources to organizations with already diverse staff and audiences rather than to put effort into diversifying mainstream organizations.

Redistribution gained a significant boost of attention from the publication of Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change,” which is perhaps best known for a much-cited statistic that just 2% of arts organizations in the United States receive more than half of total contributed income. Many of the most difficult conversations about arts policy in America in the past several years have centered on the future of longstanding public and private funding streams supporting those institutions in the proverbial 2%. That’s because many of those streams were set up following the logic that the size of an organization’s budget is its own justification for the amount of funding it receives.

For example, in the Denver region, small arts groups make up 90% of the organizations funded by the local Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, but share only 16% of the pie. These so-called “Tier III” organizations demanded a more equitable distribution of resources last year, arguing the current distribution was unfair and biased toward Denver’s big cultural institutions. (Redistribution advocates mostly lost that particular battle.) Another conflagration erupted in San Francisco in 2014, after the city released a damning study on the allocations to organizations serving communities of color through its Grants for the Arts (GFTA) agency. Cultural equity activists asked that resources be redirected from GFTA to the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, eventually winning a commitment of more than $2 million in new funds from Mayor Ed Lee. Major sources of operating support to arts organizations in New York City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and beyond operate in a similar tiered or graduated system.

Vision Four: Self-Determination

We finally determined that self-sustainability is not how many memberships or season subscriptions you have or any of those things. It’s if we lost our funding, if there was a global downturn, if the ferry stopped running, if any of these things happened, who’s going to keep the doors to the Debaj Creation Centre open? Who’s going to be standing there with us when the funding is gone? Oh, our neighbors, our friends, our families, the people around us, that’s who this matters to, that’s who our sustainability is linked to. No one else… It’s right here, it’s the people right around us. So our absolute priority has got to be the relationships with those closest to us…

–Figuring the Plural, The Debajehmujig Creation Centre case study, published in 2014

You may have noticed that each successive vision on this list represents a further rejection of the status quo. Self-Determination, in many ways, is the most radical departure of all. The Self-Determination theory of cultural equity calls for full participation in and expression of cultural life for communities of color through models that are organic to those communities, and that look beyond established nonprofit arts funding and advocacy tactics.

At its zenith, Self-Determination seeks nothing less than wholesale societal and cultural transformation. With Self-Determination, ownership of cultural decisions is located within the community: it’s the community members themselves who get to shape cultural life. Advocates of Self-Determination view the current nonprofit and funding system in the United States with heavy skepticism. To them, its legacy of racism and class hegemony is still very much alive today, and will remain so as long as it continues to be largely controlled by the same wealthy, white elite class that founded it.

Because of this history, Self-Determination questions the notion that people of color could ever feel truly welcome engaging with mainstream nonprofit organizations, regardless of changes to programming or diversification of staff, as imagined in Diversity. Furthermore, working within the system to grow nonprofits led by artists of color, as imagined in Prosperity, validates and perpetuates white capitalist models of success, and often takes decision-making power out of the hands of the community. Finally, as these disparities of access are the direct result of global white supremacy, resolving them will require moving beyond Redistribution to dismantling the inherently racist elements of the system and/or creating alternative elements outside of it. This thinking naturally leads to an emphasis on the application of art towards social justice goals, and a de-emphasis of the traditional nonprofit model — though advocates do agree that subsidy for arts projects and organizations remains important.

“Protest” by flickr user S Pakhrin

Self-Determination sees the battleground for cultural equity extending well beyond the nonprofit arts sector as conventionally conceived. For many, devaluing of non-European culture starts in the education system. Communities of color have unequal access to quality public education in general, including arts education. What arts education they do receive tends to emphasize European art forms and works by white artists. Advocates argue that the valuable contributions that members of oppressed communities have made to society should be validated by the prestigious label of “art” in curricula.

Advocates of this vision also note that a large portion of opportunities to participate in the arts exist outside of the nonprofit sector, and argue this is especially true for people of color. Many organizations outside of the professional nonprofit arts sector play an important role in the cultural life of communities of color: churches, social service agencies, businesses, small volunteer nonprofits, and unincorporated community groups. Self-Determination argues that these organizations should also be eligible for arts subsidy, and that distribution of that subsidy should honor the goals and approaches of those organizations rather than prescribing measures of success or activities that are not generated by the community.

Fault Lines

The above list of visions represents a distillation, though we hope not too much an oversimplification, of the efforts, thinking and successes of many different advocates over many years. It’s important to acknowledge that these visions are not mutually exclusive, nor are their advocates. They exist in dialogue with each other, and it’s not unusual to hear a single person endorse aspects of different visions at different points in the same conversation. Yet that should not blind us to the reality that in practice, the tensions between these ideas can be a source of great confusion if they are not called out explicitly.

In particular, we perceive five key fault lines running across and through these visions as we’ve laid them out:

The Role of Race
Cultural equity is a conversation that is rooted in, but not exclusively about, race. While race is undeniably important to all four visions of success, they each incorporate other aspects of identity and community infrastructure in subtly distinct ways. Diversity often starts from a reference point of race, but advocates for Diversity frequently encounter pressure to include measures of social difference such as age, class, and disability status. Prosperity tends to be squarely focused on artists of color, but the Redistribution and Self-Determination visions are more directly aligned with the social justice movement, and thus consider LGBT, rural and other frames alongside race (albeit from an intersectional perspective). Because Redistribution and Self-Determination consider community to be defined by heritage, they often treat marginalized white ethnic communities as part of the same conversation as communities of color. Finally, Self-Determination is particularly sensitive to class considerations, given its skeptical orientation towards capitalism.

The Value (and Cost) of Integration
Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” the Diversity vision is in love with the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, the expectation to share and share alike implied by this utopian, color-blind harmony ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own. The Prosperity, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination visions all incorporate elements of ownership based on common heritage and identity, with no explicit obligation to be inclusive toward other cultures within those contexts.

The Centrality of Institutions
There are stark differences between the visions in how they value (or don’t value) institutions and the traditional ways of growing and running them. Diversity and Prosperity see institutions as vital infrastructure with enormous potential for community benefit. Redistribution sees value in institutions too, but is also keenly aware of how institutional values (e.g., prioritizing financial growth, sustainability, and formal structures) have historically been biased against communities of color. Self-Determination thinks institutional values are a corrupting influence and rejects the idea of institutions being the only model of health, questioning even bedrock institutions like the nonprofit sector itself.

Cultural Norms
Implicitly, Diversity and Prosperity embrace several core elements of dominant American culture that Redistribution and Self-Determination tend to be wary of. One of the most important of these norms involves using an individual rather than group lens to talk about benefits and harm. The difference can be seen in how Diversity and Prosperity very often celebrate or cultivate specific people of color, LGBT individuals, etc., whereas Redistribution and Self-Determination more frequently speak of impacts on, and seek to represent, whole communities. Redistribution and Self-Determination also tend to see culture as defined more by heritage than creativity, placing a relatively higher value on elders, ancestors, and tradition, and critiquing Diversity and Prosperity’s emphasis on originality and individual expression in the context of judging artistic merit. Finally, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination see social consciousness as an important element of artistic work, and are less excited about purely abstract expressions.

The Money
The Redistribution vision sees a lack of access to financial capital as the principal (or at least most immediate) source of problems and restored access to foundation and government funding as the solution. Like Diversity and Prosperity, Redistribution thus implicitly buys into a capitalist framework. The Self-Determination vision, on the other hand, sees capitalism as a white supremacist institution and is more interested in creating spaces and contexts for communities of color to have full control over their circumstances, even if that means leaving money on the table.

Examining real-life debates in the context of these fault lines can be instructive. We noted earlier that many cultural-equity-themed battles in recent years have involved Redistribution trying to chip away at funding streams that disproportionately favor mainstream institutions. Often in response, mainstream institutions will seek to highlight their Diversity bona fides. In a 2011 forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts inviting responses to Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change,” the president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, Jesse Rosen, pointed out that the majority of concerts presented by his organization’s membership “are specifically dedicated to education or community engagement,” highlighting efforts such as “the South Dakota Symphony’s recent tour of their state to perform on three Lakota reservations with a newly commissioned orchestral work by a Lakota composer.” But in a post in the same forum the next day (trenchantly titled “So What’s New?”), Marta Moreno Vega described efforts at diversification by organizations rooted in a Western European tradition as “patronizing.”

A conflict between Prosperity and Redistribution was at the root of reactions to a controversial report issued by the DeVos Institute of Arts Management in 2015. The report investigated the financial and management challenges facing higher-budget black and Latino arts organizations, and concluded the field would be better served if funders provided larger grants to a smaller pool of promising organizations, even if that meant cutting funding to smaller organizations within communities of color. “It’s not politically easy or palatable, but it’s a potential solution that does need to be considered,” suggested DeVos Institute chair Michael Kaiser in defense of the report’s recommendations. This argument provoked a firestorm of criticism: Grantmakers in the Arts released a statement charging that the report “lacks the real understanding of the barriers faced by many of these organizations to surviving and thriving in the nonprofit marketplace,” while Jason Tseng’s widely circulated editorial cartoon highlighted the absurdity of suggesting that black and Latino organizations duke it out Hunger Games-style. In many ways, reactions like these surfaced the reality that, although Prosperity was once considered a daring and progressive vision, it is now increasingly seen as retrograde absent the additional value of Redistribution.

Finally, an especially instructive case study is the institutional arc of El Museo del Barrio, in New York City, which surfaced tensions between the ideals of Prosperity and the goals of Self-Determination. Founded by Puerto Rican activists and educators in 1969 with funding from the New York State Board of Regents, the museum originally had the mission of increasing representation for Puerto Rican culture. After losing much of its funding in the 1970s, El Museo broadened its mission to encompass art by all Latin American artists, transitioned leadership on the board from community members to individuals with traditional gallery and art world experience, and eventually relocated to the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. While these changes allowed the museum to increase revenue and attract new supporters, it also resulted in significant pushback from community members, who noted that the many changes had decreased opportunities for local Puerto Rican artists at the museum. Pressure to undertake mainstream model expansion resulted in a museum that, while successful by capitalist markers, failed to stay true to its original vision.

El Museo del Barrio’s Three Kings Day Parade, 2016 (source)

We can also use the four visions to help us understand the ramifications of new policy ideas intended to advance cultural equity. One proposal that has come up from time to time is to tie funding levels directly to the diversity of organizations. While many private funders in the United States ask questions about staff and board diversity and incorporate such information into funding decisions informally, the most assertive stands on this front are currently being staked out by other countries. In December 2014, Arts Council England announced that it would hold organizations accountable for promoting and developing diversity throughout their work across leadership, workforce, programming and audiences–or risk the loss of critical ACE funding. Meanwhile, the Canada Council for the Arts will now reduce funding for organizations that do not share a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of [their] geographic community or region.”

What reactions could we expect if the National Endowment for the Arts proposed to weigh diversity equally against its current review criteria of artistic excellence and artistic merit? Certainly, the Prosperity and Redistribution visions would see much to celebrate in such a proposal, given the increased access to different forms of capital it would represent. Supporters of the status quo, naturally, would resist. Perhaps the most interesting question is how such a policy move would sit with Self-Determination. While ostensibly a step in the direction of justice and thus unlikely to be opposed, it could be seen as giving too much emphasis to the goals of Diversity at the expense of broader social change. To maintain funding levels, mainstream institutions could shake up the composition of their staffs and boards, but the arts activities that take place through small organizations, churches, and informal collectives outside of the NEA’s reach might not realize much benefit. Moreover, the move would still leave control of resources firmly within the dominant system–resources that could disappear as soon as priorities shift, as has happened historically with NEA and state government funding.

Cultural Equity in a Healthy Arts Ecosystem

“Change is not a uniform process…the goal of building participation in the arts requires that leaders and organizations rethink the meaning of success.”

– Diane Grams and Betty Farrell, writing in Entering Cultural Communities, 2008

Createquity’s own vision of success is that every opportunity is taken to make people’s lives better through the arts. Clearly, in order to understand how to do that, we need to make sense of cultural equity in the context of our own work. Although this project started out as an investigation of the history of cultural equity activism, we soon realized we would provide more value both to ourselves and the field if we made an attempt to untangle the unnamed assumptions that so often confuse or complicate conversations about cultural equity.

As a first step, we set ourselves the task of writing arguments in favor of each of the four visions articulated above in the context of Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, in which each individual (now and in the future) has the opportunity to participate in the arts at a level suited to that person’s interest and skill. Because Createquity has identified specific outcomes that we believe characterize a healthy arts ecosystem, many of these arguments diverge a bit from the language that activists use (e.g., “institutions rooted in communities of color will hire more artists of color than mainstream institutions would and pay them a market wage, thus distributing very scarce opportunities to participate in the arts more equitably”). However, we tried our best throughout the exercise to make an authentic translation between each of the visions and our own.

Next, we took the arguments for each of the visions and attempted to articulate the fact-based assumptions undergirding each of them, staying as close to the healthy arts ecosystem definition as possible. (You can see these assumptions in the same document linked above.) To establish a preliminary sense of where we were as an organization, we asked our editorial team to rate each of the resulting fifty-odd assumptions on a scale of one (“I am very confident this is not true”) to five (“I am very confident this is true.”) The assumptions were presented at face value, without the context of a vision, and in no particular order. Ten Createquity team members participated.

In developing these arguments and assumptions, we wanted to acknowledge that one reason why cultural equity initiatives fall short is because they often face resistance from parties who argue against any change to the status quo. As a thought exercise, we included “Status Quo” as a fifth vision for success, developing as many arguments in its favor as we could think of. While Status Quo arguments in practice often take an institution- or discipline-centric frame that is at odds with Createquity’s concern for the entire ecosystem, we did manage to come up with a few rationales that could be consistent with the idea of making people’s lives better through the arts. For example, one could argue that mainstream institutions are crucial to artistic professions where it is difficult, though possible, to make a living as an artist (such as ballet dancer or orchestra musician). Perhaps it is the case that the Eurocentric programming presented by mainstream institutions is inherently expensive to produce, and thus it is natural and expected for institutions that offer this programming to receive a disproportionate amount of subsidy. Status Quo advocates frequently seek to avoid setting up the choice between maintaining subsidy or supporting smaller organizations as an either/or; they argue that mainstream institutions deliver a lot of benefits to their communities by operating at scale, which allows them to serve many more people and–importantly–to bring in tourism dollars. They may also argue that most donors to mainstream arts organizations would not have considered contributing to smaller organizations anyway.

“Museum Mile” by flickr user MichelinStar

On the whole, our team did not find the assumptions underlying the pro-Status Quo arguments particularly compelling, with one exception: we agreed that mainstream institutions could likely serve as an anchor for tourism, regardless of efforts to diversify. The remaining ratings did not yield an unambiguous endorsement of any vision in particular. That said, the following assumptions received high ratings across the board, and we presently consider these to be our “working assumptions” in the context of our work on cultural equity:

• At a basic level, we agree that mainstream institutions grew out of a white, racist system, and continue to disproportionately serve white people and certain other demographics.
• There is further agreement that funding disproportionately flows to these mainstream institutions.
• We agree that a lack of diverse cultural programming, either from mainstream institutions or those that receive some other form of validation from the broader culture, is problematic for the wellbeing of people of color.
• There is a general trust that people of color, whether in the context of mainstream institutions or institutions of color, will be more likely to provide programming opportunities to artists of color.
• And finally, there is agreement that many of the dominant organizing logics within the current nonprofit sector provide disproportionate control over individual institutions to those with wealth and influence.

It’s important to note that these are working assumptions, which means they could change in response to new information or data. But for now, the combination of these views means that Createquity sees the concentration of resources within mainstream institutions as likely problematic absent meaningful diversification of those institutions. It also offers an endorsement of involving more people of color in programming decisions, whether through mainstream institutions or some other means.

We are much less clear as a group on how resources should be optimally distributed than we are on the idea that the current arrangement is probably not for the best. That outcome is not terribly surprising; after all, little is known about many of the assumptions that distinguish the Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution and Self-Determination visions from one another. We see this as a crucial opportunity for future research in the sector. In our own efforts, we plan to prioritize the following questions going forward:

VALUABLE CULTURAL EXPERIENCES
What are the ingredients of a cultural experience that people find valuable? Are those ingredients consistent across demographics? Are the demographics of the staff (artistic, programming, and administrative) and board at arts and cultural organizations predictive of a) the demographics of their participants and b) the quality of experience that participants have?

THE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF SCALE
What effect does the scale of an arts organization (or an organization with arts programming) have on its ability to create specific benefits for artists, audiences, and communities of color? How do networks of larger and smaller organizations perform relative to each other in facilitating these benefits? Does the influence of wealthy donors, funders, and customers tend to promote or harm an organization’s ability to deliver these benefits?

ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Are arts activities designed to combat racism and other forms of oppression effective in that goal? How do they compare to other anti-oppression strategies, and do they make those strategies more effective when used in combination?

In the United States, we have data showing the distribution of funding to different kinds of arts organizations, including those primarily serving communities of color. We have data on the demographics of arts audiences, of artists, and increasingly of the cultural workforce. And there’s more research on these topics being commissioned all the time. Isn’t that enough?

We would argue that it’s not. Knowledge of this nature can only ever establish that there might be a problem; it gives us very little insight on what we should do about it. We might each have intuitions about the right path forward, but as this article amply demonstrates, reasonable people are coming to different conclusions about where those paths lead. So long as that remains the case, we suspect the fight for cultural equity will continue to be a long, slow, uncertain slog.

At Createquity, we’ve embraced the framework of wellbeing–which groups the various components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella–as a way of binding together the outcomes of a healthy arts ecosystem holistically. While there are many ways of conceptualizing and measuring wellbeing, one of the most common involves simply asking people how satisfied they are with their lives–which sounds pretty self-determining to us. Pursuing future inquiry through a wellbeing or quality-of-life lens may be an effective tactic for building bridges between visions and the ideologies they represent, by enabling the relative value of components of each vision to be understood as part of an integrated whole. We can all agree, hopefully, that the goals of cultural equity are compatible with the goal of a happier and more meaningful life for all. We hope our work here can be one small step towards creating that better future.

A full bibliography for this piece as well as several endnotes can be found here. Createquity would like to thank Plural (Mina Matlon, Ingrid van Haastrecht, and Kaitlyn Wittig Mengüç), Andrea Louie, and Marc Vogl for their invaluable feedback in the course of developing this article.

Black Lives Matter by flickr user Gerry Lauzon

As controversial political stands go, “black lives matter” should rank pretty well near the bottom of the list. In any reasonable world, it would be the sort of sentiment that is so obvious it doesn’t even need to be stated. And yet statements of support are exactly what Kickstarter and Creative Capital felt compelled to offer the world after yet another series of horrifying deaths of African Americans at the hands of police last month – one of whom was selling music and DVDs when the cops were called.

Long-simmering racial tensions in the United States have been spilling out into the open for at least the past several years, but until quite recently conversations about race in the arts have been largely limited to subjects like diversity on stage, on screen, and behind the scenes; cultural appropriation; and the distribution of funding to arts organizations that serve communities of color. But at a time when the American public seems to be simultaneously running out of both tolerance and patience, more basic and urgent concerns are rapidly coming to the fore. It’s hard to have a healthy arts ecosystem when people fear for their physical safety, which can start to happen when actresses receive death threats while performing in a Shakespeare festival or get drowned in racist taunts for taking part in a movie. The convergence is happening in the other direction as well. Just this week, the Black Lives Matter movement released its much-anticipated policy agenda, the Movement for Black Lives, and arts and culture are all over it. The “list of demands” includes items such as “an immediate end to the…dehumanization of Black youth across all areas of society including…media and pop culture,” “funding to support, build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites,” “programming and partnerships to support Black-owned and operated media organizations,” and “full access to technology including net neutrality and universal access to the internet.”

Pokémon Goes. July 2016 will forever be remembered–within some circles–as the month of Pokémon Go. The free-to-play, location-based augmented reality game was released in the United States on July 6. As of this writing, the app has topped 75 million downloads worldwide. There are currently 4,158,765 posts tagged #PokemonGo on Instagram. Daily usership has outpaced twitter and facebook and retail is cashing in. It’s getting people to exercise. It’s given rise to the Pokémon Sherpa. It is, by all accounts, a global phenomenon–but it’s not really just about the Pokémon. Augmented, or mixed, reality has the potential to be one of the most significant and potentially disruptive trends of our generation. (AR/VR investment hit $1.1 billion this year–in March.) The disruption piece is clear, and response has been swift. Saudi Arabia renewed the fatwa–originally from 2001–which explicitly bans the game (it’s allegedly pro-gambling and pro-Darwin). Other countries have also warned against is use, though for different reasons: Bosnia is concerned about users running onto land mines, Egypt is concerned posting photos poses a security threat. Its significance is yet to be fully realized, although the potential for augmented reality as it intersects with cultural organizations is already beginning to emerge. For one, it’s been a boon in the audience-quest. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas has encouraged Pokémon Go users to catch Pokémon at the museum, noting a significant correlation between the launch of the app and visitorship. (On the other hand, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC has asked Pokémon players to stay away, out of respect.) Will AR be the engagement silver bullet some organizations seek? Time will tell, and maybe quite quickly.

Books on tape are making a comeback. No longer just the stuff of road trips and bad jokes, audiobooks are the fastest-growing format in the book business today. Fueled by the ubiquitous smartphone, revenue from downloaded audiobooks in the U.S. grew 38% in 2015. (By comparison, hardcovers and paperbacks grew by 8% and 3%, respectively, and e-books revenue declined 11%.) Pretty much everyone is looking to get in on the action. Publishers are hiring high profile actors, and testing out original dramas; authors, such as Stephen King and Fred Armisen, are writing new work specifically for audio. Audiobooks may only represent 3% of the overall global trade book industry, but their flexible, shareable nature works well with millennials, and their future, for now, is bright and voluminous: Audible, the biggest producer and retailer of audiobooks, says its customers are on track to listen to 2 billion hours of programming this year. Curious? Here are the 20 best-selling audiobooks of 2016 so far.

Google (tries to) buy Europe’s love with $450 million. Google and Europe’s relationship is rocky at best. From three rounds of antitrust charges in one year to investigations into allegations of tax shortfalls and accusations that it does not fully protect European’s “right to be forgotten” online privacy rights, things are not going well. So the company (which rejects all aforementioned claims) is doing what many have done before it in such a situation: it’s throwing money at the problem. It has earmarked some $450 million for European projects from 2015-2017 in an unprecedented effort to fix its reputation among Europeans–and sway the opinion of policy makers who have the power to halt its progress on the continent. The money is largely concentrated on arts, culture and education–$75 million towards training Europeans in digital skills, half a million to test immersive journalistic videos, money for museums to digitize collections (as with the British Museum), and for co-working spaces to support tech hubs. Google is even cozying up to its fiercest opponents (publishers) with $167 million to help them adapt to the digital world. The money is sure to do some good, though whether it does good for Google is yet to be determined.

Bands and fans unite against UK ticket scalpers. This past May, in response to growing indignation against ticket resellers, the UK released a report acknowledging that secondary ticketing sites were “falling short” when it came complying with rules instated in May 2015 to protect consumers. The report called for further investigation, and lists nine recommendations, including stronger penalties and the possibility of court proceedings for platforms that continue to break the law. This month, a consortium of music industry folk–including the managers of One Direction, Ed Sheeran, Chvrches, Iron Maiden, Mumford & Sons, Arctic Monkeys and PJ Harvey–launched FanFair Alliance to lobby the government to do more to protect fans and artists, and thus reclaim a piece of the purported $1 billion in revenue it is estimated the secondary market nets in a given year. The Alliance is calling for better enforcement of the 2015 Consumer Rights Act, more transparency about where tickets came from, increased corporate responsibility, and control of supply. It’s not just the managers who are upset. Artists have spoken out against the reselling practice which keeps their ardent fans out of seats; One Direction even turned down a hefty sponsor opportunity when they found the sponsor was a reseller. The movement is young, if the rancor is not. All eyes now are on the industry’s biggest stars, and their fight for their fans.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Carla D. Hayden has been confirmed as the 14th librarian of Congress. She is the first woman and first African American to hold the position.
• Michelle Boone is stepping down as commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events after five years in the position; she will be replaced by Mark Kelly, the vice president for student success at Columbia College Chicago.
• The Mozilla Foundation seeks a Vice President, Advocacy. Posted July 8; no closing date.
• The Nile Project is hiring a tour manager for its 2017 US tour. Posted July 14; no closing date.
• Ideastream seeks an editorial manager to lead its Arts and Culture programs across multiple platforms. Posted July 16; no closing date.
• The Arts Education Partnership at Education Commission of the States is hiring a Policy Researcher. Closing date August 18.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The Foundation Center took a look at what the middlemen in philanthropy are doing, and published their findings in their newly launched Intermediaries Knowledge Center.
• A new brief from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies forecasts state arts council funding for FY17. Meanwhile, Arts Council England asked the arts and culture sector how it should invest its funding from 2018 onwards and published a report of the consultation findings, which outlines the agency plans to make as a result.
• Professor Ethan Mollick of The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School published a study on the broad impact of Kickstarter on the creative economy.
• A study by the European Economic and Social Committee released this month explores the role of culture for sustainable economic growth, its potential to reconvert cities, and its capacity to enhance social integration and to build shared a European identity.
• According to new figures out of the UK this month, the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic arts workers is up 60% since 2011.
• New research suggests that, while most people are biased against other races, some odd psychological interventions can help.
• An Ofcom review of public service broadcasting (PSB) has found that television watching among the 25-and-under has dropped 27% since 2010.
• A study commissioned by Ontario’s Ministry of Labour shows widespread problems with enforcing basic employment rights and leaving vulnerable workers exposed.
• California Lawyers for the Arts released a study exploring the feasibility of establishing a national network to support arts in corrections.
• And finally, new research out this month suggests investors should buy paintings only if they like looking at them–and not to make money.

Blue and Yellow Round Star Print Textile. Photo from Pexels.

Britain stunned the world last month when it voted to leave the European Union, some forty-three years after first joining the now 27-nation bloc. The move sent shock waves throughout the world, sending global markets plummeting (media stocks in particular fared poorly), spurring concerns about trade, immigration, alliances, and security, and raising questions about freedom and identity in our interconnected times (not to mention destroying many a political career in the aftermath). Though the details of the “divorce” will take time to settle, its impact on the arts is sure to be significant. Many artists are angry and dismayed, especially given how the arts were firmly in the Remain camp prior to the vote. In May, some 300 British cultural luminaries across several creative industries signed a letter of support to keep Britain in the European Union. Damien Hirst deployed his signature butterflies against Brexit on Instagram. A survey of artists and arts leaders by The Guardian found an overwhelming majority were against the UK leaving Europe. Another survey, conducted by the Creative Industries Federation, found that 96% of its members backed Remain. Now, these same artists and arts leaders are calling for their institutions to continue to nurture relationships with their European colleagues, as concerns grow over the potential loss of free movement of labor (due to increased restrictions on artist and travel visas), loss of access to EU arts funding (which is currently quite significant), the real possibility funding cuts should Britain face a recession (and related, the loss of wealthy art collectors, with this week’s art auctions already feeling the chill), and less tangible but just as important, the spirit of collaboration and collective identity that informs much work across borders. It’s all hands on deck: the British Council released a statement saying it will continue to work with its EU colleagues to “create opportunities, build connections and engender trust,” and the Creative Industries Federation and the National Campaign for the Arts have pledged to support and safeguard the arts sector as the UK negotiates its exit from the European Union.

Gun Violence Sweeps Up the Arts. Two singers were assassinated last month for their art. On June 11, Christina Grimmie, the 22-year-old finalist on “The Voice,” was fatally shot at close range while signing autographs after performing at a concert in Orlando. Police say the killer’s motive stemmed from fan obsession. Ten days later, Amjad Sabri, one of Pakistan’s most famous and respected musicians, was shot and killed by by Taliban gunmen in Karachi. Sabri was considered one of the leading performers of Qawwalis, a Sufi tradition dating back to the 13th century criticized by religious conservatives who shun all forms of music. A faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. And while the June 12 massacre that killed 49 and injured 53 at Pulse, a gay nightclub also in Orlando, might not immediately seem like an arts story, the victims had been at Pulse to dance together at its popular “Upscale Latin Saturdays” party. There have been other attacks in recent weeks–Baghdad, Istanbul, Bangladesh–all horrific. These three, however, coming on the heels of Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan, illustrate how the arts are increasingly becoming enmeshed in the broader debates about gun violence and terrorism around the world, with artists and audiences becoming explicit targets for killers.

The One Hundred Million Dollar Question. Last August, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s newly appointed president Julia Stasch announced a major overhaul of the foundation’s funding strategy, moving from small grants to “big bets” in an effort to better catalyze transformative change. This month, Stasch bet (really) big, announcing 100&Change, a competition for a single, $100 million dollar grant to a nonprofit or for-profit entity that offers the best idea for real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time. It’s a risky move for a foundation to invest so many resources into essentially an unknown quantity, and the strategy has spurred a hearty debate. Still, the two-year, three-stage application process is thoughtfully structured, and includes aid to ensure that nonprofits with big ideas but not enough resources to immediately absorb a $100 million grant can still participate. What’s more, the foundation is betting on others joining the charge: the application process will be transparent, in the hopes that proposals that do not win the MacArthur award might still attract backing or other forms of support.

Virtual Reality Gets Real. The arts have often turned to technology to enhance the experience of existing and new live performance (cue the Los Angeles Philharmonic virtual reality tour last October.) This month, London’s National Theatre upped the ante when it announced the launch of a new “Immersive Storytelling Studio” that will commission new work specifically to be experienced through virtual reality or 360 technologies. Its first project, HOME: AAMIR, tells the story of a refugee living at the Calais migrant camp and is set to premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest later this year. Commissioning is just the beginning: as part of the new initiative, the National Theatre will also partner with the National Film Board Canada, one of the world’s leading documentary, animation and interactive producers, on a research and development lab for non-fiction VR. Between new initiatives such as this, the New York Times experiments with Google Cardboard, and the buzz that VR experiences stole the show at Sundance this February, it’s looking more and more like virtual reality could radically change how stories are told, with significant implications for theater, Hollywood, journalism, and more.

Hamilton for a Hamilton. In February, the Rockefeller Foundation announced a $1.46 million grant to provide some 20,000 NYC public school 11th grade students with tickets to a certain award-winning Broadway musical for the price of a single Hamilton (ahem, $10), and to integrate the show into classroom studies. Last month, the foundation quadrupled this commitment, adding an addition $6 million to expand the program to LA, Chicago and other cities where the musical plans to tour. Rockefeller president Judith Rodin, who announced this month she will step down from her position once a replacement is identified, has called the Hamilton partnership “one of the foundation’s most impactful.” Unfortunately for the rest of us, however, our Hamilton-seeing prospects are looking slim. You’d need to add two zeros to that $10 price tag to get to the average price resellers have been able to command for tickets in recent months, even though creator Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the end of ticket bots, the musical’s producers have taken measures to limit resellers, and the New York State Assembly passed legislation to criminalize companies that use the illegal automated ticketing software known as “ticket bots.” Hamilton producers themselves have raised 2017 ticket prices to as much as $849 a pop (some argue they’d be better off employing dynamic pricing instead). Still, there’s hope: the online video service BroadwayHD, billed the Netflix of Broadway, is testing out the idea of live streaming a Broadway show–for $10 a view.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After nearly twelve years, Judith Rodin, the first female president of The Rockefeller Foundation, has announced her decision to depart the institution once a new president takes office.
• Robert Smith has been appointed chairman of Carnegie Hall. He is the first African-American to hold the position in the Hall’s history.
• The Alliance of Artists Communities has named Lisa Hoffman its next Executive Director. She succeeds former Caitlin Strokosch who led the Alliance for nearly a decade.
• Maurice Jones, Virginia’s commerce secretary & former HUD official, has been named president & CEO of LISC.
• Kyle Peterson has been appointed executive director of the Walton Family Foundation.
• Theresa Sweetland has been named executive director of Forecast Public Art.
• Jessica Solomon has assumed the role of Interim Director of Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District, Inc. in Downtown Baltimore.
• Two arts critics had their jobs eliminated this month: Timothy Mangan from the Orange County Register and Jeremy Gerard from Deadline.com.
• The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies is recruiting a Research Associate. No closing date, though it is recommended to apply by July 1.
• The Kresge Foundation is hiring a Senior Program Officer. Posted on June 15; closing date July 10.
• The Hauser Institute for Civil Society at the Harvard Kennedy School seeks a Program/Research Assistant, Global Philanthropy. Posted June 17; no closing date.
• The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is hiring a Cultural Plan Coordinator and a Special Projects Manager. Posted on June 1; closing date July 31.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Two studies from the UK this month looked to arts and accessibility. The first, on outdoor arts, finds that outdoor arts consistently attract an audience that is representative of the population as a whole. The second suggests that live cinema events can act as a gateway to arts performances with less populist appeal.
• Two reports this month looked at creativity. In the first, more than 800 individuals across eight countries were interviewed in an attempt to understand what creativity looks like across countries and cultures. The second, produced by a campaign group of 64 million artists with funding from Arts Council England, calls for the council to create a new small grants fund to ensure ‘everyday creativity’ is embedded across society. Related, a small scale study found that making art–even for just a few minutes each day–reduces stress levels.
• A report published by UK Music looks at the significant impact of live music and music tourism on the UK economy.
• A review of incoming college students in the UK finds a significant drop in those studying arts subjects, with design and technology the most affected.
• New research published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, suggests that art appreciation isn’t necessarily a matter of individual taste.
• A review of 686 institutional libraries across the world forecasts growth across the sector, with a particular increase in the use of electronic resources.
• A new paper looks at the role of the National Endowment for the Arts in shaping the arts and cultural sector.
• A report from Transparify finds that think tanks, advocacy groups, and foundations around the world are becoming more transparent about their funding sources.
• The US Department of Justice published a literature review this month of research on the impact of arts-based programs and arts therapies for at risk youth.
• The National Endowment for the Arts published a summary this month of their Arts Readiness and Resilience Convening.
• New research from the Luxembourg School of Finance of the University of Luxembourg finds returns of fine art have been significantly overestimated.
• Not just the 1%: research published this month by economist Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute finds that the upper middle class in the U.S. is larger and richer than it’s ever been.
• In a helpful move for further new research, ArtsWave launched Arts Atlas this month, an online tool that integrates data on arts organizations and their programming with community demographic data.
• And further afield, a report out of Morocco highlights the important role that the creative economy plays in that country.

The Office–by flickr user Rum Bucolic Ape

Income inequality, slow economic growth and wage stagnation have been hot button issues in recent years. Last month, the Obama administration did something significant about the latter, announcing an updated overtime rule that would make millions more eligible for overtime pay. Effective December 1, 2016, the new rule doubles the salary threshold—from $23,660 to $47,476 per year—under which most salaried workers are guaranteed overtime. The rule is expected to affect some 4.2 million workers, though whether it will benefit these workers (through increased wages) or possibly harm some of them (through lower base salaries and reduced benefits) remains to be seen. The implications for industry, however, are likely to be dramatic no matter what, especially for firms like publishing, fashion, media, consulting and yes, nonprofit arts organizations that have long relied on the willingness of young, ambitious employees to work long hours for little pay in exchange for a shot at the big time down the line. The shift might not be such a bad thing for the arts more generally, however. If nonprofits and businesses have less incentive to overwork low-paid employees, those employees will likely have more time for leisure activities, which could lead to a (further) boom in amateur arts participation and entrepreneurial arts ventures once this rule goes into effect.

Brazil Dumps, Then Reinstates its Cultural Ministry. Brazil has become a familiar character in the twenty-four hour news cycle in recent months, what with the impeachment trial of President Dilma Rousseff and a faltering economy, along with concerns about the zika virus in light of the upcoming Olympics (which is plagued with its own corruption and other scandals). The cultural sector had its fair share of drama this month after interim president Michel Temer, who replaced Rousseff in what many are calling a coup, announced a plan to subsume the Brazilian cultural ministry into the education ministry on May 12 as part of a broader effort to streamline the government. The plan immediately met with fierce opposition from Brazil’s cultural community. Artists staged occupations of government buildings across 11 cities and even music legends Erasmo Carlos and Caetano Veloso lent their support, giving a concert at a Rio de Janeiro protest on May 20. The pressure clearly worked; many credit artists with Temer’s reversal.

LISC Tries a New Model to Fight Gentrification. Adaptive reuse of abandoned spaces has long been a tried-and-true move in creative placemaking playbook, but concern has been growing about the gentrification effects of such policies in an era of increasing income inequality. The Local Initiatives Support Corp., a national nonprofit organization that has been investing in neighborhoods since 1982, has decided to try something different, committing $50 million to help prevent the gentrification many fear will be a byproduct of the redevelopment of Washington, DC’s 11th Street Bridge. The new park development along the Anacostia River–which has been likened to New York City’s High Line–is expected to increase adjacent property values, pricing out poorer residents who have long called the area home. LISC funding will support groups providing affordable housing, early childhood education, medical care, food support, arts education and other services near park site, in an attempt to preemptively ensure that poorer residents are able to remain in their communities. The park is slated to open in mid-2019, but LISC says it is committed to the project and to the price tag no matter the timeline.

Big Shifts in British Public Broadcasting. Last August, we reported on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC’s) financial struggles–compounded by a trend towards internet media consumption–and noted that the government had appointed a committee to review the BBC’s Royal Charter. That charter expires at the end of 2017, and all agree the 94-year old company finds itself at a critical juncture. Much has changed in the decade since its charter was last renewed, and the BBC–which receives an outsize £5 billion in licensing fees, commercial and other income–is under close scrutiny. This month, culture secretary John Whittingdal unveiled the government’s plans for the BBC in a white paper. The main takeaways? An emphasis on greater transparency and fiscal responsibility, and a new board with government appointees (which some critics worry compromises the BBC’s journalistic independence from the government). The white paper also notes that it “welcomes the BBC’s commitment to develop and test some form of additional subscription services,” giving the corporation the green light to launch a Netflix-like paid subscription service. The uncertainty facing the BBC comes as the UK’s state-owned, commercially funded broadcaster Channel 4 held off a threat to sell off the government’s stake to the highest bidder, which was called off after outcry from channel representatives and the wider public. In many ways the BBC and Channel 4 will serve as a harbinger of other government-sponsored news organizations’ fates in the digital economy.

Kresge Pairs Health and Art & Culture Programs for Neighborhood Revitalization. Food and culture have always been closely aligned; this month, the Kresge Foundation took that relationship a few daring steps further by pairing up its Arts & Culture and Health Programs to launch Fresh, Local & Equitable: Food as a Creative Platform for Neighborhood Revitalization, or, FreshLo. This unprecedented program, which aims to strengthen economic vitality, cultural expression and health in low-income communities, will distribute nearly $2 million in grant funding in support of neighborhood-scale projects demonstrating creative, cross-sector visions of food-oriented development. The foundation seems to be onto something with the food+art thing: more than 500 organizations applied for FreshLo funding, and Kresge ultimately decided to fund six more grants than initially planned. Though the Kresge Foundation has a long history of tackling food deserts, this is the first time a national funder has intentionally integrated food, art and community to drive neighborhood revitalization at this scale.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Melanca Clark has been named president and CEO of the Hudson-Webber Foundation.
• Loren Harris has been appointed Vice President of Programs at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
• Susan Delvalle has been named president and executive director of Creative Capital.
• Shannon Daut is the new Cultural Affairs Manager of the City of Santa Monica Community and Cultural Services Department.
• The Field Foundation of Illinois has appointed former Joyce Foundation culture director Angelique Power its new President.
• After a decade working with the Future of Music Coalition, CEO Casey Rae leaving to become SiriusXM’s director of music licensing.
• After seventeen years with The Association of Independent Music, Alison Denham is taking on a new, global role at Worldwide Independent Network.
• Artstor President James Schulman has joined the Mellon Foundation as a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Mellon Foundation.
• Acclaimed music and culture writer Sasha Frere-Jones has abruptly exited the L.A. Times after less than a year at the paper due to “ethical issues.”
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation seeks a Program Officer. Posted May 6; no closing date.
• Slover Linett Audience Research seeks a Vice President. Posted May 12; no closing date.
• Arts Consulting Group, Inc. seeks an Associate Vice President. Posted May 26; no closing date.
• Nina Simon’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History is hiring a Director of Development and Community Relations. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Out west, a survey commissioned by the Oregon Community Foundation and the Oregon Arts Commission provides a snapshot of the state of arts education in Oregon. In Boston, the Boston Public Schools Arts Expansion released a case study on the successes of its work. And across the pond, a UK study reveals deep concerns about the future of arts education among those in the theater industry.
• A report from Lifetime Arts looks at arts education for the aging in America’s libraries.
• Diversity continues to dominate conversation the field. The Americans for Arts and National Endowment for the Arts (following up on the former’s cultural equity statement) released the results of their 2015 Local Arts Agency Census, revealing that taken a whole, the field could do a much better job of diversifying board and staffs. The website CNTRST calculated the total percentage of ‘whiteness’ in mainstream films, and found that white men take up twice as much space on the silver screen than they do in real life. A study commissioned by the professional association Directors UK shows that women make up just 13.6% of film directors in the UK; a percentage that has barely changed in the past decade. In more encouraging news, a study released by Asian American Performers Action Coalition show gains for minority actors in New York City: in the 2014-15 season, 30% of theater roles in NYC went to black, Latino and Asian-Americans. Related, Richard Florida shared the results of his research on the racial divide within the already-advantaged creative class.
• A new evaluation assesses the successes and impact of the New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship over 25 years.
• Two interesting papers from Bridgespan this month. The first finds that funders’ reluctance to fully fund overhead costs prevents many nonprofits from maximizing their impact. The second argues that billion-dollar philanthropic investments in key areas could improve social mobility and revive “the American dream” for low-income families.
• A report on the first three years of the Taking Part survey’s longitudinal study (which has been conducting annual interviews about arts engagement with a group of 4,600 adults in England) reveals statistics on who attends the arts most often and why people stop engaging.
• A study commissioned by Intermedia Arts assesses the demand and availability of arts-based community development training and investigate how the benefits of Intermedia Arts’ Creative Community Leadership Institute could be made accessible for a broader range of communities.
• A report from the February 2016 Salzburg Global Seminar looks the role of the arts in advancing environmental sustainability.
• A study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that creative individuals share more personality traits with psychopaths than their less creative peers do.
• A report from the UK calls for stricter rules for primary ticket selling sites, rather than harsher punishments for secondary sites. And it turns out, according to a survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries, that Shakespeare is far more popular in Brazil, India, China, Mexico and Turkey than he is in the UK.

China – photo by flickr user Diego Aviles

China has a long history of censoring free speech and media content in an effort to control the information its citizens consume. In 2016, Reporters Without Borders ranked it 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, and that position is likely to keep sliding as China continues to fortify its virtual borders. (By comparison, Russia ranks at 148 on that same index.) This month, China went after Apple, which had long received somewhat preferential treatment in the country, shutting down its iBooks Store and iTunes Movies just six months after those services launched. That same day, it abruptly suspended a partnership between e-commerce giant Alibaba and Disney, struck in December 2015, which allowed Alibaba to license streaming Disney content. China also significantly tightened restrictions on foreign nonprofits under the guise of national defense, echoing Vladimir Putin’s policies in Russia. The month ended with a move against one of its own: China suspended Ren Zhiqiang, an outspoken property magnate, from the Communist party in retaliation for Ren’s publicly criticizing President Xi Jinping’s call for loyalty from the Chinese media. All signs seemingly point to the government of the world’s most populous country getting more and more repressive by the week.

Google Books scores a big win for fair use. A decade-long copyright battle has finally come to an end as the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming that Google’s scanning of books to make excerpts available on its search engine, without the authors’ permission, is a form of copyright infringement. Guild members believe Google is providing an illegal free substitute for their work, depriving authors and publishers of potential revenue. (An original 2005 settlement, later rejected by courts, would have required Google to pay authors.) The Supreme Court did not comment on its decision, but the crux of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals’s earlier ruling in Google’s favor was that despite scanning entire books, Google is only supplying “snippets” to the public. Since in most cases these snippets are vetted so as not to actually satisfy a reader’s need for the entire book, Google’s use of them can be considered “transformative” as permitted by the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law. The court also considers these excerpts primarily a source of information about the full texts, and individual authors have never been guaranteed “an exclusive right to supply information… about [their] works” under copyright law. ArsTechnica posits that “in the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.”

From robot-building to social innovation, Silicon Valley invests in artists: In mid-April, a group of artists, impact investors, philanthropic funders and social innovators launched Upstart Co-Lab. Led by Laura Callanan, who was briefly the NEA’s Senior Deputy Chairman under Jane Chu, the new collaborative aims to connect more artists with social entrepreneurship and impact investing opportunities, recognizing the importance of artists as catalysts for economic and social change in the private as well as public sector. With partners including the Ford Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Oberlin College on board, some of Co-lab’s more ambitious initial proposals include a new Creative Economy Index Fund (comprising U.S. public companies across the creative industries) that seeks to enable targeted impact investment in the arts for the first time. An “ArtPath” national initiative also promises to help artists develop career skills and plans to better make a living from their creative work. Meanwhile, according to a recent Washington Post report, one particular sub-sector of Silicon Valley is especially in need of creative professionals like writers who can “engineer the personalities” of virtual assistants, i.e. Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. An ambitious new crop of virtual assistant startups (garnering at least $35 million in investment over the past year) is developing bots that can engage in not just mundane office tasks but more “human” interactions, requiring the same types of colorful personalities and detailed backstories as Hollywood characters. Up for debate is just how lifelike to make these virtual assistants without causing psychological confusion. Yet giving these rookie robots enough “people skills” to handle all possible workplace situations (including avoiding being provoked by their “bosses” into publicly offensive behavior) seemingly requires the skills of true artists.

Music, art and the Panama Papers. The Panama Papers–a leak of 11.5 million files from the database of the world’s fourth-biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca–rocked the world when they were released this month by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The Papers–the largest leak in whistleblower history–reveal the myriad ways the rich have exploited tax havens to conceal their wealth, and have fascinated and horrified the public in equal measure with their scope and complexity. They implicate some 143 politicians, including twelve national leaders among its pages, with a $2 billion trail that leads all the way to Russian president Vladimir Putin. So what does this have to do wit the arts? For one thing, Putin’s apparent use of the St. Petersburg-based cellist Sergei Roldugin as his “bag man” has sparked the public’s imagination. More substantively, the art market, which this year has reached astronomical proportions, has had its underbelly exposed by the scandal. The papers reveal several instances of potentially shady dealings, raising troubling questions about the value of provenance and the legality of ownership.

Cinema returns to Gaza. The embattled Gaza Strip once enjoyed a vibrant cinema culture, with more than a dozen cinemas across the small territory showing films almost daily. In 1987, these cinemas burned during the first Palestinian uprising. They were repaired, only to be destroyed, definitively, in 1996. In January, Gaza Cinema, led by members of the production company Ain Media, quietly began a movie-going revival. They rented a small events space, and screened “Oversized Coat,” a 2013 film from the Jordan-based Palestinian director Nawras Abu Salehl. As word has spread, so has demand; this month the organizers added a second weekly show. Tickets are priced at an accessible $2.50, allowing many to participate their first-ever movie-going experience. For the moment, the organizers are focused on Palestinian films, though they plan to expand their content (with permission, of course).

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After twenty-five years with the McKnight Foundation, Neal Cuthbert has announced he will retire from his position of vice president of program at the end of this year.
• Robert L. Hughes has been named the new director of K-12 strategy at the Gates Foundation.
• Regina R. Smith has been appointed managing director of The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program.
• The Ford Foundation seeks a Program Associate. Posted on April 8; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Several recent reports provide insights into United States philanthropy and the arts. According to the the 2016 edition of the BNP Paribas Individual Philanthropy Index, the U.S. ranks first among four regions worldwide in terms of the commitment of its philanthropists, followed by Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet the Foundation Center’s snapshot of 2013 arts and culture giving demonstrates that arts funding did not keep pace with a general rise in U.S. foundation giving that year; the arts also received a lower share of overall giving than in the previous three decades.
• Two reports this month parsed film data. One shows strong evidence that movies featuring black actors not only keep up with films at the box office and among the critics, but blow away films with no black actors at all. A second analysis, published in Polygraph, breaks down the dialogue of some 2,000 films by cast member age and gender, revealing some stark realities about equity.
• How Cities Can Grow the Maker Movement, published this month by the National League of Cities, explores the emergence of the maker movement within a selection of major U.S. cities.
• How much TV do millennials watch a day? A new report out from Nielsen suggests not all millennials (that’s people 18-34) are the same.
• Americans for the Arts’s latest National Arts Index measuring the vitality of arts and culture in the United States shows American exported arts goods rising in value and new technologies as increasingly important in engaging arts audiences, among other findings. Meanwhile, SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR)’s second Annual Arts Vibrancy Index ranked Portland, Austin and Kansas City as some of most vibrant art cities in the U.S.; they join a “top 20” list that also includes New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
• This month, the Education Commission of the States and Arts Education Partnership published its 2016 “State of the States” comprehensive survey of state policies for arts education nationwide.
• ArtPlace America released two field scans this month focusing on housing and public safety, kicking off an ongoing effort to assess “how arts and cultural practitioners have and might be partners” in achieving a range of ArtPlace’s community development goals.
• A first-of-its-kind study commissioned by several major US museums shows that the effects of arts programs can last well into adulthood. In other news, US museums spent nearly $5 billion on expansions during the time of economic recession between 2007-2014, more than the other 37 countries examined put together, according to research by The Art Newspaper.
• The percentage of Americans who visited a library in the past year is down sharply, according to a Pew report on the Future of Libraries–and technology may not be the only reason.
• For the first time, UK higher education data experts QS have ranked universities by their performing arts capabilities, with two music and drama conservatories making it into the top ten this year.
• A recent Creative Capital survey of its artist grant recipients from 2000-2013 found that the awards have had significant impact on both artists’ visibility and income.
• The LA County Arts Commission released a literature review on how organizations have addressed issues of diversity and cultural equity, as a first step towards achieving the November 2015 resolution from the County Board of Supervisors to diversify local arts organizations. D5 also published an annual report on the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in philanthropy. Related, in a paper recently published in The Sociological Quarterly, sociologist Keith Leicht argues that the conversation about inequality in America revolves too much around disparities between groups and not enough on the disparities within them.
• Barry’s Blog’s recent survey on how nonprofit arts organizations use communications internally and externally revealed that while many report “information overload,” few have formal communications plans (or staff) to address this issue.
• Research from the Chicago School of Business found that setting a donation option as the default in a charitable appeal can sometimes increase revenue, but not always.
• New research commissioned by The Guardian into the 70 million comments left on its site since 2006 provides the first quantitative evidence that articles written by women and minorities are more often the victims of internet abuse and trolling. Also across the pond, The Stage published two reports on arts professionals in the UK, one finding that local arts graduates earn less than graduates of any other subject, and the other showing that women leaders at the country’s top subsidized theaters are paid £29,000 less on average than men. But here’s something to inspire “confidence” about making a living as a visual artist: inflating your ego might also inflate your prices! A new study from the European Journal of Finance suggests that the work of narcissistic artists earns more at auctions.
• An exploratory paper out of the UK found mental health benefits to participating in drum circles. Are we all in fact born with a beat? Recent insights from neuroscience (aided by small zoo’s worth of dancing animals) shed light on the biological origins of rhythm.

Men playing go – photo by flickr user J.A.G.A.

Computers have a long history of beating humans at complex games. This month, Google clinched the crown jewel a decade earlier than anticipated, when its program AlphaGo defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol in four out of five games of Go. Invented some 2,500 years ago in China, the game is deceptively simple: despite straightforward rules, there are more possible legal positions in the game than there are atoms in the observable universe (actually, than all the atoms in all universes if there were as many universes as there are atoms in our universe!). As such, it has long been an irresistible challenge to artificial intelligence researchers. Google’s DeepMind project team’s winning strategy was to abandon the traditional AI tactic of building search trees in favor of deep neural networks, training AlphaGo not only to learn from games past, but, importantly, to discover new strategies for itself. Why does this matter for the arts? Well, first of all, we just witnessed a computer mastering an art form: historically, Go was considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholar, the others being a musical instrument, calligraphy, and painting. And second, the implications of AlphaGo’s win for the future of artificial intelligence go far beyond this single match; the principles DeepMind uses in AlphaGo may have broader applications for artificial “general” intelligence, which could include creating artistic work. More controversially, the early completion of this milestone may signal a hastening of the moment when machines take over the world.

China cracks down on TV. Cultural censorship in China reached new levels this month when the the government released updated regulations for what’s shown on television. The guidelines make it illegal to depict “abnormal sexual relationships and behaviours” on screen. This means, effectively, no incest, extramarital affairs, one night stands, underage relationships–and no gay people. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, it still remains taboo, and the first show to be cut under the new rules was Addicted, about the lives of queer high schoolers, outraging the show’s many fans and angering LGBT activists. The measures are a challenge for everyone, not least of which for Chinese video websites, which have benefited from a lack of government regulation of online television: in 2015, Chinese video platforms produced some 805 online shows, compared with 200 shows in 2013. All eyes are on if and how the new regulations are circumvented or resisted. The increased censorship comes at a time of rising individualism in China, and on the heels of a recent tiff between President Xi Jinping and Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang which unexpectedly spurred journalists, scholars and party insiders to come forward in his defense. Will it be enough to force a wavering of the party line? Only time will tell.

Canada follows through with big arts funding increases. Just two months after committing to diversity at the grant level, Canada continues to lead the way in government arts funding with the announcement of Justin Trudeau’s budget plan. Fulfilling campaign promises, the cultural sector will receive a $1.87 billion boost over five years. $75 million was reinstated to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s budget this year, to be followed by $150 million a year until 2020-21. The Canada Council for the Arts also received welcome funding news, though a bit less than expected; it will see an additional $40 million this year, eventually rising to $180 million by 2020-21. Likewise, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada will each receive $3.5 million this year, and $8 million annually thereafter. (The NFB made its own news this month when it announced that it is committed to ensuring that, in the future, half of its films are directed by women and half of its production budgets are spent on films directed by women.) After years of budget slashes by the previous Conservative government, all are in agreement that the funding is a “game changer.” The package also includes capital funding for Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, which announced this month that it will launch a new Indigenous Theater department that will equal the NAC’s English and French Theater companies in importance.

ISIS is out of Palmyra. The Islamic State’s ongoing destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria has received lots of coverage from Createquity over the past year (see here, here, and here.) This month, ISIS was finally driven by Syrian government forces from the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the center of Syria. With ISIS gone, the work of restoring the ancient site can begin. Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s head of antiquities and museums, has said that “eighty percent of the ruins are in good shape,” and that the city will be fully restored in five years. Beyond Palmyra, significant efforts are underway to preserve antiquities under threat. The Italians, in conjunction with UNESCO, have created a task force dubbed Peacekeepers of Culture which is aimed at keeping ancient artworks, monuments, artifacts and archaeological sites in conflict areas out of the hands of extremists. In addition, several organizations have undertaken to document cultural heritage digitally, most recently the French 3D digitization agency Iconem. Finally, the International Criminal Court this month is considering whether to take to trial Malian jihadi leader Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi for destroying mausoleums and damaging a mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012. If the trial goes ahead, it will be the first time that war crimes against cultural heritage constitute the main charge of an ICC hearing.

Cultural policy is so hot right now in the UK. The UK’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, published a much anticipated White Paper this month, the first such statement since 1965. It comes at a critical juncture for the arts in Great Britain, as organizations across the country continue to recover from the recession-era austerity policies that forced a greater reliance on American-style private funding and government advocacy. The White Paper calls for a widening of access for the arts, announces a Cultural Protection Fund for heritage in global conflict zones to be launched this spring, and calls for a detailed reviews of museums, arts and heritage, due to be completed by summer 2017. (In advance of the paper’s release, Arts Council England announced earlier this month a major restructuring to its grant programs, which are in direct support of many of the tenets of Vaizey’s work.) Though some have criticized Vaizey for a lack of vision, many welcome the “vote of confidence” it places on the arts. Meanwhile, the Cultural Value Project, a two-year exploration of the value of culture beyond economic measures, concluded this month with the publication of a significant evidence review that perhaps controversially concludes that the value derived from arts and cultural activity arises primarily at the individual level.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Maurine Knighton, currently senior vice president at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, has been named new program director of the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, replacing Ben Cameron.
• Malcolm White returns to the helm of the Mississippi Arts Commission after three years as the state’s tourism chief.
• Pew Center for Arts & Heritage seeks a Center Specialist in the visual arts. No closing date.
• The League of American Orchestras is hiring a Director and a Manager for its Knowledge Center. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Americans for the Arts and Ipsos surveyed 3,020 adults in December 2015 on topics such as support for arts education and government arts funding, personal engagement in the arts, and the personal benefits and wellbeing that come from engaging in the arts. Here are the results.
• A report commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation looks closely at what arts leaders across generations “really need” while the Center for the Future of Museums’ TrendsWatch report looks at what museum audiences “really need.”
• Art of the Rural and the Rural Policy Research Institute launched Next Generation: The Future of Arts & Culture Placemaking in Rural America, a “digital learning commons” designed to address major challenges facing rural arts practitioners.
• A paper published in the Journal of Cultural Economics this month looks at the history of copyright in music and of music publishing.
• “Neighborhood Diversity, Economic Health, and the Role of the Arts” zeroes in on the relationship between arts organizations and economic and cultural diversity in New York City.
• Over the last three years, the Denver Public School system has invested $40 million into its arts education programs. This month, it released an analysis of the impact of this investment.
• Several reports this month look at the benefits of music making. A close look at choral singing published in Psychology of Music suggests that the “well-being benefits afforded by choral singing could be distinct in comparison with other leisure activities.” Another study, this one from WolfBrown and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, looks at the positive impact that making live music together has an families. A third builds on the Manchester Camerata Orchestra’s pioneering music projects with dementia patients.
• A paper published this month offers a systematic literature review of the applications of cultural impact assessment internationally.
• Besides the Cultural Value Project’s final report, several other studies have come out of the UK this month. One report looks into whether physical proximity to a museum or gallery affects whether or not you’ll visit. A survey by the Entertainment Retailers Association finds that the number of stores selling music and video has more than doubled since 2009, while another finds that London-based organizations receive almost twice as much arts funding as the rest of England combined. Finally, researchers from the London School of Economics and Goldsmiths College suggest that there is a “class ceiling” in British performing arts organizations.

Artist at Work – photo by flickr user Graeme Rattray

As part of its 50th anniversary, the National Endowment for the Arts has launched Creativity Connects, a threefold leadership initiative designed to show “how the arts contribute to the nation’s creative ecosystem, investigate the ways in which the support systems for the artists are changing, and explore how the arts can connect with other sectors that want and utilize creativity.”  As part of Creativity Connects, the Center for Cultural Innovation and Helicon Collaborative are working on an infrastructure report that will examine the changes artists have experienced in the last decade and how to strengthen the landscape of support. The initiative will also produce an interactive digital graphic that maps how the arts intersects with other industries. Finally, the NEA has set up a pilot grant program to support partnerships with organizations from outside the arts. Creativity Connects is likely to be the major contribution of Jane Chu’s term as Chairman as the nation prepares for a change of administrations next year. To get involved, join the conversation at creativz.us, a new online platform to house the initiative that is currently making a push to ask what artists in the United States need to sustain and strengthen their careers. (If you’re feeling in the survey-taking or -distributing mood, the Mellon Foundation also has a survey out seeking “a better understanding of the current health and well-being among artists living and working in the United States.”)

New directions for the Barr Foundation. In May 2014, Jim Canales, former president and CEO of The James Irvine Foundation in California, moved East to join Boston’s Barr Foundation as its first ever president. Canales was tasked with developing a new strategic direction of the foundation, which was established in 1987 by Amos and Barbara Hostetter and is the largest funder in Boston, having given out some $710 million to date. Earlier this year, the foundation announced its new strategy, which doesn’t look like much of a departure on the surface: Barr remains committed to its three core issue areas—education, arts, and climate change, and plans to continue its concentration on the Boston area. At the edges, however, the signs of a funder that has vastly increased the scope of its ambition are apparent. With a fast-growing endowment and staff, Barr plans to increase its regional funding presence throughout Massachusetts and even make targeted grants nationally. Under the leadership of San San Wong, the foundation’s renamed Arts & Creativity program has been given a sharper focus, that of “elevating the arts and enabling creative expression to engage and inspire a dynamic, thriving Commonwealth.“  The foundation plans to pursue this goal through three strategies: advancing the field’s capacity to adapt, take risks, and engage changing audiences in new ways; fostering opportunities to connect the arts to other disciplines and sectors; and activating public support for the arts. The Barr Foundation is at the forefront of an exciting period of growth for the arts in Boston, what with Mayor Walsh’s Boston Creates, the Barr Klarman Arts Capacity Building Initiative, ArtPlace America initiatives and a new artist-in-residence program announced this month which will embed local artists inside city departments to promote creative thinking about municipal government.

Cannes and Ford Foundation tackle inequity. The Cannes Film Market, the business counterpart of the Cannes Film Festival launched in 1959, and the Ford Foundation’s five-year old JustFilms, a film financing, social awareness and education program, announced a two-year partnership this month to boost the profile, market networking and distribution of social justice documentary features at Cannes. The partnership will play out in several ways. First, Cannes Film Market’s “Doc Corner” will be significantly scaled up for the upcoming May 2016 festival, and both parties will increase their efforts to bring docu filmmakers, especially those from the world’s global south, to Cannes. Second, for the first time ever, Cannes Film Festival marquee events will focus on the docu-feature sector. For Cannes, this partnership is yet another example of the festival’s diversifying its offerings. For Ford, which announced last year that it would direct all of its resources to curbing global inequity, the partnership is a significant step towards this goal, and a logical next step for JustFilms, which has already supported some 80 films since its inception.

A Bechdel Test for race? In the years since Alison Bechdel coined the Bechdel-Wallace test in a 1985 comic strip from her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, “The Test” has become a yardstick for measuring gender equality in a work of fiction. For a work to pass, it must 1) have at least two women in it, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something other than a man. (Some add that the female characters need be named.) Although some argue that the test is too simple to accurately assess gender parity, its widespread adoption is important. Having a quantitative metric for narrative diversity has proven useful, especially when so many works fail the test. This month, Manohla Dargis, chief film critic for The New York Times, took the Bechdel test one step further, proposing what she calls the “DuVernay test,” in honor of Ava DuVernay, the celebrated director of Selma. The racial analogue to the Bechdel test, the DuVernay test seeks to offer a simple, widely-applicable metric for examining the way we treat characters of color in film and media. While the proposal might need some further definition (Dargis’s metric of “fully realized lives” is quite a bit harder to implement in practice than Bechdel’s simple checklist), the idea has been well received, including by DuVernay herself. Though it has yet to be applied extensively, at least one channel is set up to pass with flying colors: the All Nations Network—a cable channel featuring TV programming created for and by native peoples–is set to launch soon in the United States.

And the nominee (for Librarian of Congress) is…President Obama nominated Carla Hayden to be the next  Librarian of Congress this month. If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Hayden would be the 14th Librarian of Congress in the institution’s 214-year history. She would also be the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position, milestones that Obama has called “long overdue.” Hayden, who has led the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore since 1993, would also be just the third professional librarian to serve in the position. Hayden would succeed James Billington, who was appointed by President Reagan and served as Librarian of Congress for nearly three decades. Billington stepped down from his post on January 1 of this year amid criticism of library mismanagement and “digital neglect”. In response, last year President Obama signed into a law a ten year term limit for Librarians of Congress–though there is the option for renewal. The next Librarian of Congress will assume some serious responsibility, such as modernizing the Library’s digital infrastructure, and in her position overseeing the Copyright Office, could significantly shift the copyright conversation.

MUSICAL  CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Channing Dungey has been named president of ABC Entertainment Group, becoming the first African American to lead a major broadcast network.
• Betsy Fader, a leader in the philanthropic and social enterprise sectors, has been named Vice President of Programs at the Surdna Foundation.
• Dan Cardinali, currently president of Communities in Schools, has been appointed CEO of Independent Sector, a coalition of charities and foundations.
• In a surprise cabinet reshuffle, Audrey Azoulay, currently President François Hollande’s cultural advisor, has replaced Fleur Pellerin as France’s culture minister.
• Kelly Lee has been appointed Philadelphia’s Chief Cultural Officer, joining an office that was re-established by Mayor Michael Nutter in 2008.
• After working at Creative Time for eight years, Katie Hollander has been promoted to Executive Director.
• Lisa Lucas has been named executive director of the National Book Foundation.
• Two long-serving vice presidents were promoted at Slover Linett this month. Sarah Lee has been named president, taking over from the firm’s founder, Cheryl Slover-Linett, and Chloe Chittick Patton has been named chief operating officer, a newly created position.
• Malcolm White, who was executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission from 2005-2012, will return as executive director this year after three years as the state’s tourism chief.
• Gimlet Media is hiring an Associate Producer, Family History Show. Posted February 16; no closing date.
• Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is hiring a Center Specialist in the visual arts. Posted February 24; no closing date.
• DataArts (formerly the Cultural Data Project) is hiring a Senior Research Advisor. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• In light of this month’s contested Academy Awards, two new studies shed some light on the issue of diversity in the film industry. While a review from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University found a significant rise in the number of women featured as protagonists in films in 2015, a wide-ranging study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism gave a failing diversity grade to every movie studio and most TV makers.
• Several reports out this month looked at philanthropic trends. One study looked at 24 countries and found there is no significant correlation between charitable giving, levels of taxation & government spending within a given country. Another report from the Atlas of Giving found that US charitable giving increased 4.6% in 2015, and is expected to grow 2.6% in 2016. A third suggested that US nonprofits missed out on some $6.5 billion due to mobile incompatibility in 2015. Related, a report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy finds that grantees think information about the substance of a foundation’s work is more important than disclosures about its finances or governance.
• “Art Under Threat,” released this month by Freemuse, shows that wordlwide attacks on artistic freedom almost doubled in 2015, and that most attacks were either politically or religiously motivated.
• Research out of Johns Hopkins University suggests that it’s not how much your practice, but how you practice that makes all the difference.
• The National Endowment for the Arts brought seventy experts together to talk about the role of the arts in healthy aging.
• The US and Britain released several studies looking at the economic impact of the arts. One study conducted a detailed empirical examination of the connection between arts organizations and key measures of neighborhood diversity and economic advantage or disadvantage in NYC. Britain commissioned a study of the arts’ contributions to the national GDP.  And looking ahead, beginning on 2016, the US Dept of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis will being to “produce statistics showing the role of arts and culture in the economies of all 50 states.” Related, a report out of Australia finds that producers struggle to find affordable venues as the Sydney’s expensive theaters remain underutilized, and a report from England found that London organizations receive almost twice as much arts funding as the rest of England combined, despite accounting for just a third of the country’s cultural offering.
• Researcher Orian Brook looked at the extent to which living near a cultural venue influences whether or not one attends, and found that indeed, proximity was very strongly positively associated with the likelihood of attendance.
• How happy is your state? A report released this month by the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index ranks wellbeing in the USA by state.

• Television is America’s national pastime. Adults spend an average of nearly three hours in front of the tube daily, outpacing the next most common leisure-time activity by a factor of four.
• There is surprisingly robust evidence suggesting TV watching may contribute to poor physical and cognitive health; when it comes to happiness and life satisfaction, however, the verdict is still out.
• Are people consciously choosing TV over other activities? There’s not a lot of evidence one way or another, but it doesn’t seem like most adults who watch large amounts of TV are doing so reluctantly.
• The arts are not the (obvious) antidote. People who attend exhibits and performances are no more likely to report being satisfied with their lives than those who don’t.
• We value adults’ freedom to make their own choices, so will need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing before committing to a case for change.

* * *

TV Slave – photo by flickr user Manuele Carra

In 2014, First Lady Michelle Obama broke the internet with “Turnip for What,” a vine promo for her Let’s Move! campaign. She’s appeared on the Biggest Loser. She has her own viral dance sensation–the #GimmeFive, performed to Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk. (You know it, right?) And she’s encouraging Americans to drink more water through fun social media stunts that appeal to our egos (hello, John Legend) and a line of chic accessories from the likes of J. Crew and Rebecca Minkoff. (Not to be outdone, POTUS and VPOTUS have been known to run around the White House and drink water, too.)

No, she’s not trying to be the next pop star. (Though we would totally buy her record.) She has a mission, and that’s to stem the obesity epidemic in the United States. The situation is, by all accounts, dire: 17% of children and almost 35% of adults are currently considered obese, and those numbers are worse among individuals with lower incomes and less education (so-called “low-SES” populations). Almost one in eleven adults has type 2 diabetes, and many more have prediabetes. Obesity is bad for our wallet: the US spends an estimated $147 billion in obesity-related healthcare expenses annually. It’s bad for the environment, too: cars are burning nearly a billion more gallons of gasoline a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960.

FLOTUS is but one character in the ongoing obesity saga. The Food and Drug Administration appeared in 2014 with new rules requiring establishments to post the calorie content of food on their menus. It went even further in 2015, when it required front-of-package labeling. Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg led a movement in New York to reduce soda consumption by limiting the sale of jumbo sugary drinks, which re-ignited the debate around the so-called sin tax. For more than a decade, public schools have battled youth junk food consumption with all sorts of methods: removing vending machines, imposing strict guidelines for school nutrition, and the Hail Mary move of banning birthday cupcakes.

Let’s Move Day – photo by flickr user Phil Roeder

The junk food hullabaloo raises interesting questions about choice, and whether individuals can or do make good choices for themselves. Here, the work of leading psychologists, economists and neuroscientists provides useful context: it is now widely accepted that most people make sense of the world by simplifying it, and the ways our brains are wired to simplify things can cause us to make judgments that are contrary to our best interests. There are a few reasons we might tend towards the simplify trap: hyperbolic discounting, which is our tendency to value immediate pleasure (or pain) over future consequences; loss aversion, or the fact that we dislike losing more than we like winning, which can make us risk-averse; or our tendency to focus only on what we know and what’s familiar. The combination of these factors makes low-risk, familiar propositions offering immediate satisfaction very hard to turn down. If we grew up with juice boxes and oreos as a school snack, and the closest grocer is a corner bodega stocked with chips and soda, and, well, sugar and salt and fat are so good, then of course we’d reach for cookies over carrots.

At this point, dear reader, you might be wondering why we have spent the first four paragraphs of an article about television and the arts talking about obesity. Well, as it turns out, TV (probably) makes you fat too.

TUNE IN, DROP OUT

Jamie K. is a 36-year-old from Fort Wayne, IN. She has a GED, and is unemployed. She likes to make jewelry and work on home improvement projects in her free time, which isn’t much, since she has three teenagers. She doesn’t go to arts events, because she doesn’t “have friends that are cultured, and it’s hard to go to things that [she] would find interesting by [herself].” She actively watches 10 hours of TV a day. Sonja B., a 57-year-old from Chicago, IL who is also unemployed, doesn’t attend arts events because they are usually in the evening, and she “wouldn’t want to go by [herself.]” She works out, and watches an average of 15 hours of TV, daily. Shantell T. is a 33-year-old administrative assistant from Washington DC. She watches 12 hours of TV on a typical day, and doesn’t consider herself to be a very “artsy” person.

In May of 2015, Createquity published Why Don’t They Come?, the first of many deep dives into the question of disparities of access to the benefits of the arts. The article looked closely at arts participation patterns among poor and less educated individuals, and considered obstacles to attendance including logistical reasons, such as cost and access to transportation or childcare, as well as other factors like feeling excluded and not having a friend to take along. (It is worth noting that many of the logistical reasons cited as obstacles to arts attendance are barriers to healthy eating as well. Cost and access in particular are blamed with the widening food gap between rich and poor.)

What we discovered in the course of our research surprised us. While the aforementioned obstacles were certainly barriers, a lack of explicit interest was far and away the dominant factor keeping low-SES populations away from arts events.

That’s What You Think – photo by flickr user Robert Couse-Baker

Of all these statistics, one in particular stood out to us. Virtually alone among the activities we studied, television attracted more participation from poor and less educated adults rather than less. And on top of that, our analysis of GSS data suggested that even within low-SES groups, adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than those who do. It seems possible that, whatever sustenance people are seeking from live arts attendance, the folks who don’t go are getting it (at least in part) from the small screen.

Given the tendency to be distrustful of television, we were curious: are people going to be worse off on average watching TV instead of engaging in other, potentially more enriching, activities? Should this be an area of concern for our work here at Createquity? Is there an opportunity here to improve wellbeing through the arts?

SMALL SCREEN, BIG CONSEQUENCES

“It’s kind of a waste,” admits one of our interviewees. “I’m not really doing anything when I’m sitting and watching TV.”

As it turns out, sitting and not really doing anything when you’re watching TV doesn’t bode well for your physical wellbeing. There is compelling evidence that increased hours spent watching television is associated with obesity, in part because of the sedentary lifestyle it promotes by crowding out time that could be spent on exercise. SA Bowman looked at data from the USDA’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII), and found that men and women across demographic groups, including race, income, and educational status, were more likely to be overweight as their average hours of television viewing per day increased. Women who watched more than two hours of TV per day were 41.4% more likely to be obese than women who watch less than one hour a day. For men, that figure was 90.29%. And it’s not just sitting that’s the problem: even among healthy Australian adults who exercise at least 2.5 hours per week, watching TV is straight up bad for the waistline, with more hours watching TV per day was associated with increased blood pressure, waistline, and cholesterol levels. (Note 2)

Research has indicated that TV affects physical health in other ways as well⏤even to the point of shortening your lifespan. One team’s analysis of the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index dataset reveals that each hour of TV watched per day is associated with a 4% increase in mortality risk, amounting to an overall reduction of 1.2 years in total life expectancy due to television viewing in the US. A 2010 paper found an increased likelihood of all causes of mortality with more than 2 hours of television watched per day. Yet a third paper finds that, compounding psychological factors aside, TV may lend itself to an increased likelihood of smoking (and we all know where the shoe drops there).

Watching Zoolander – photo by flickr user Vincent Diamante

Are you doing some math in your head? (Your Favorite TV Shows x Total Viewing Hours) / Hours Watched Daily = Life Expectancy Reduction and Loss of Cognition? We did some math too, because there’s more to the brain than cognition. We ran a regression analysis on television and wellbeing using data from the 2012 General Social Survey. After controlling for variables including health, income level, education level, gender, age, and the frequency with which people interact with their friends and relatives, we found that increased hours of watching television is negatively associated with overall life satisfaction for people in the top three income quartiles, albeit only by a little bit. (Interestingly, we did not an association between television viewing and happiness for people with household incomes less than $25,000 per year). With a small sample and effect size and no ability to infer the direction of causality, we have to be careful not to push these results too far. Still, this descriptive analysis doesn’t do the case for TV any favors.

Others have investigated the relationship between watching a lot of television and one’s overall satisfaction with life (sometimes framed or referred to by scientists as subjective wellbeing). In their analysis of individual responses to the World Values Survey, which includes data from 80 countries, researchers Luigino Bruni and Luca Stanca found that television “crowds out” other, more social, activities–such as volunteering or spending time with friends and family–that are associated with higher life satisfaction. In the same study, they also suggest that increased hours spent watching television causes people to want higher incomes, which in turn creates unhappiness and low life satisfaction. According to Bruni and Stanca, TV is a part of a “relational treadmill” that induces people to measure their increase in happiness against that of their neighbors, instead of against their own experiences. Television, they argue, makes people want to consume more, inspired by both advertising and program content; unfortunately, by this metric, individuals will never achieve a real increase in happiness that corresponds to their increase in buying power. Some take issue with the way Bruni and Stanca classified countries in their methodology (see here), and at least one set of researchers note that when considering heterogeneity within countries, people who watch television report higher levels of wellbeing than people who do not watch any television at all. Still, we likely can all point to an example of being sucked into the “relational treadmill” of consumption thanks to TV.

TV and your brain: Turin street art – photo by flickr user mermaid

THE TWIST

You would think with all this talk of obesity, mortality, and dissatisfaction with life, people would reach for the off button. The fact that they don’t suggests they must be getting something out of it.

Could it just be that people who watch large amounts of TV lack self-control? That could explain some of these findings; for example, there is research that indicates unhappy people in general tend to watch more TV, suggesting that depression might be the culprit in some cases. But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. There is an emerging body of research on television and addiction, but people are still trying to understand it, how many people are affected, and how it relates to other addictions that might be more disruptive to daily life. We have not found evidence tying television addiction to income level, even though people with lower incomes tend to watch more TV.

TV Man in the Autumn – photo by flickr user sualk61

Then there’s the fact that, for many, watching television is a meaningful social experience. Kawanda C. lives in New Orleans, where she doesn’t have a car. She’s 31 and didn’t finish high school. She works as a cashier, and spends a lot of time getting to and from work. She watches on average eight hours of TV a day, and loves to watch with her kids. Sonja B. also opts for companionship when taking in her favorite shows: “It’s always fun to watch TV with someone else because they might have a different perspective.” Indeed, in contrast to to Bruni and Stanca’s findings about television crowding out social activity, researcher Nele Simons’s interviews with TV watchers show that they socialize around the television they watch. She even suggests that people watching television at different times can create new opportunities for TV and socializing. In Simons’s telling, the classic mid-century meme of a traditional family unit gathered around to watch I Love Lucy or the Ed Sullivan Show continues, only today it’s football at your uncle’s place, or Game of Thrones at your corner dive bar.

Family watching television. Evert F. Baumgardner, ca. 1958 – from the National Archives and Records Administration.

It does seem that qualitative methodologies tend to paint a more positive picture of the effects of television. A set of interviews with Dutch adults aged 65-92 published last year explored the question of whether their television viewing habits are more often part of a selection strategy–that is, a conscious choice made to maximize wellbeing–or a compensation strategy, a choice that is made to fill time or otherwise compensate for some kind of loss or diminishment. While there were certainly examples of compensation strategies among their interviewees, the researchers more often found that people were watching TV with no regrets.

But the TV-is-good-for-you case is more than anecdotal; there’s a small but growing body of quantitative research that paints a more positive side to the medium as well. Recall that our aforementioned analysis of the General Social Survey found that among the lowest income quartile, which is also the segment that watches the most TV, more television is not associated with lower life satisfaction. One hypothesis to explain this comes from a paper by Bruno S. Frey et al. analyzing data from the European Social Survey. Frey et al. found that people with a lower opportunity cost of free time, like unemployed people or those with very fixed working hours, were less likely to report decreased life satisfaction as their TV hours increase, while the opposite was true of individuals with a high opportunity cost of their free time. If people with lower incomes tend to have a lower opportunity cost of their free time, this might explain why television at the bottom income quartile does not seem to harm life satisfaction.

While we haven’t encountered research showing positive effects of television content on adult viewers, there are some success stories for children and teens. In one study, researchers Kearney and Levine looked at the MTV franchise 16 and Pregnant–a series of reality TV shows including the Teen Mom sequels–and determined that the shows ultimately led to a 5.7% reduction in teen births in the 18 months following their introduction, which is about one third of the reduction in teen births during that period. In a follow-up, Kearney and Levine found that preschoolers who lived in areas where they could watch Sesame Street were 14% less likely to fall behind when they got to elementary school, and that this effect was much more pronounced for kids who grew up in areas with higher levels of economic disadvantage.

TV time – photo by flickr user Blake Danger Bentley

I WILL CHOOSE FREE WILL?

TV makes us fat. It dumbs us down. Too much TV makes us unhappy. Not enough TV makes us unhappy. TV makes us laugh. It keeps us informed. It keeps us from more social activities. It’s an opportunity for family time. It’s dangerous: for our feeling of self worth, for our capacity to understand right from wrong. At the end of the day, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that TV is both good and bad for us, depending on who we are, how we define good and bad, and how we go about asking and answering the question.

To be sure, not all of this evidence is created equal. If we were to pit the “TV is good” and “TV is bad” hypotheses against each other in a contest of methodologies, bad would probably win out. But how bad is bad? What exactly is the threshold of evidence of harm that would warrant taking the position that TV requires an intervention?

Here, the case of junk food provides us with a useful comparison. The impact of junk food consumption on public health has generated enough concern among reasonably-minded policy wonks to motivate multiple attempts at intervention by the state. And yet even for junk food, that movement to change behaviors has not come without controversy. The FDA, under intense pressure from Congress (and the National Restaurant Association) was forced to delay nation-wide implementation of menu labeling requirements until after the upcoming Presidential elections. (NYC implemented these same rules in 2006, and it took a full two years for them to become reality.) This past November, NYC passed a law requiring restaurants to indicate highly salted dishes; it was challenged immediately. Bloomberg’s famous soda ban was struck down, suffering from a backlash from the very people it was intended to help. Richmond, CA took a different approach, introducing a soda tax rather than a size limit, but it, too, failed.

What’s more, many of these well-meaning attempts to regulate the health of Americans don’t seem to be working: menu labeling has not been shown to change eating habits (and at least one study suggests it leads to greater caloric intake.) Kids denied in-school vending machines often end up consuming extra junk food. One year after Berkeley, CA became the first city in the US to successfully pass a soda tax, a study of its effectiveness reveals that, as the price increase has been largely assumed by distributors, the intended effect on consumers is negligible.

The no free-will bus campaign – photo by flickr user Travis Morgan

While there are certainly aspects of the effect of TV on physical, cognitive and subjective wellbeing that are concerning and deserve further exploration, given how dicey it is to seek to intervene in adults’ choices, our instinct is to exercise caution. For us to move forward in pursuing a case for change with respect to TV, we would need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing.

For us, the question of wellbeing ultimately comes down to opportunity and choice. Our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem draws inspiration from the “capability approach,” a widely adopted philosophical framework developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum that defines wellbeing in terms of freedoms. According to the capability approach, whether or not people take advantage of the opportunities they have, their capability to make decisions about how they pursue their lives is vital to wellbeing, and having the capability to achieve various states is more important than whether or not one chooses to exercise that capability.

Frances T. talks about the impact of TV on her life

It seems like a whole lot of people are making the choice to reach for the remote. For some, this undoubtedly isn’t the best choice they could make. For others, maybe it is. And it’s really hard for us, or anyone else, to tell the difference. Tempting as it might be to judge people who spend eight hours a day in front of the TV, many of us spend that much time or more each day in front of a different sort of small screen. We can only hope that everyone who does so is as enthusiastic about it as Frances T., who confidently declared when we asked her whether TV affects her wellbeing, “it is my own wellbeing to watch TV.”

Liked this article? Two things. First, we’ll be hosting a #CreatequityAsks Twitter chat to discuss the implications of this work on Wednesday, March 9 from 4-5pm Eastern time. Second, we’re conducting a reader poll to help us determine what we should investigate next. Please take 5 minutes to share your opinions! Thanks so much.