State Arts Funding Update

Any way you slice it, it’s been a rough year for state arts councils. According to the National Assembly of State Arts Associations (NASAA), states have reduced their funding for arts agencies an average of 7% (14% if you take out Minnesota, which recently enacted a kickass new arts tax that tripled the money available).Read More

Wanna have a phone chat with Kal Penn?

Well, you can, if you sign up to participate in Americans for the Arts’s conference call with Penn (who now goes by his birth name, Kalpen Modi) on the subject of President Obama’s United We Serve initiative. The call is tomorrow, Thursday, August 27 at 3pm Eastern time. Americans for the Arts has partnered withRead More

Around the horn: town hall edition

Barry Hessenius is out with his second annual list of the 25 most powerful and influential leaders in the nonprofit arts sector. Bob Lynch (president of Americans for the Arts), who took the top slot last year, has to share it this time with the Curb Center’s Bill Ivey, who has increased his clout thanksRead More

New Blogs!

Only three this time, but I didn’t want to hold them up until I found another. If you know of a great arts policy, philanthropy, or other blog that isn’t already in my blogroll, do tell me about it! Beth’s BlogOne of philanthropy’s most oft-cited bloggers, consultant Beth Kanter writes about the intersection between theRead More

Value generators II

For those of you just joining this discussion, I’ve been ruminating for the past couple of months on the nature of economic growth and its relationship to the (as it turns out, quite vague) concept we call “value.” You can read the first two essays on this topic here and here. In the first, IRead More

Around the horn: public option edition

I promise most of this post will not be about the NEA, but here are some loose ends to tie up: Rocco Landesman’s Peoria comments have not surprisingly rubbed some people the wrong way, and as predicted, Arlene Goldbard has arrived with an essay about it (though she’s more generous to him than I expected).Read More

Fun with data: arts organizations and grants in New Haven

A little while back, I posted a summary of my end-of-semester arts policy brief for the New Haven region. As part of that effort, I downloaded some Foundation Center and IRS data and played with it a bit to see what was there. Here were some of the more interesting findings: My quick-and-dirty search foundRead More

Around the horn: NEA edition

Fox News’s misleading attacks on the NEA, coming as they did just prior to the confirmation of a new Chairman for the organization, seem to be raising a lot of hackles in the arts world. Is the concern justified? Barry Hessenius thinks so, and warns that things might get a lot worse as conservatives gearRead More

New Blogs!

Enjoy! Flux Theatre EnsembleAugust (Gus) Schulenberg is the main writer for this blog on behalf of Flux Theatre Ensemble, a small company based in New York. Gus writes thoughtfully about a number of theater-related issues including some good arts policy stuff here and there. You can read his recent post about Arlene Goldbard’s talk atRead More

Landesman confirmed as NEA Chair

It’s official: Rocco Landesman will be the next Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was confirmed by voice vote by the Senate yesterday along with Jim Leach for the National Endowment for the Humanities and a host of other public officials. Sitting down for an interview with the Times‘s Robin Pogrebin, LandesmanRead More