Learning about programs like this, I had a hunch that partnerships between arts organizations and health organizations will be the next big thing for both groups. I thought with some research I would learn that the number of partnerships between an individual health organization and an individual arts organization has grown in the last five to ten years, and to an extent, that’s true. But some of the best, and even the fastest-growing, programs for the arts in healthcare have been around for decades. The commonality between most of these very robust programs, old and new, is they are not one partnership – they are many partnerships. Programs for the arts in healthcare appear to thrive when they are created and supported by a network of groups, each contributing their own specialty.

Background

I present as informed speculation the idea that programs for the arts in healthcare work best as networks, and suggest it as an area for further exploration. My analysis is based on a subjective impression of which programs are thriving, as demonstrated by the number of patients an organization has served or visitors to an organization’s public galleries, and by an organization’s reputation within the arts or the healthcare communities. Several of these programs have received accolades or positive appraisal from external organizations. For example, CosaCosa’s Healing Art Project has been featured in Designing the World’s Best Children’s Hospitals, a publication of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals, and both NYU and Audience Focus, Inc. have conducted evaluations of New York MoMA’s Meet Me at MoMA that demonstrate the program’s effectiveness.

As the number of arts and healthcare partnerships increases, so does the number of ways the arts and healthcare interact, including therapeutic initiatives, increasing accessibility to the arts (for people whose disabilities may be a barrier), and decreasing the stigma of a disease. The Global Alliance for Arts & Health (formerly the Society for Arts in Healthcare) defines five focus areas for arts and health: patient care, healing environments, caring for caregivers, community well-being, and education. While all of these are valuable, the programs discussed here primarily relate to the first two categories (patient care and healing environments), although many of them may have other benefits.

Art therapy as a field of study originated in the late nineteenth century, as psychologists began to study the connections between art and mental and emotional wellbeing. As early as the 1930’s, psychologists used art in “milieu therapy,” encouraging patients to enjoy and create art as a part of healthy self-expression. More recently, the practice expanded from mental health to physical health. Music therapy as a discipline has followed a similar trajectory, emerging between the First and Second World Wars and first used for war veterans. These fields provide a substantial foundation for programs that combine arts and healthcare, and many healthcare organizations hire art and music therapists directly or through partnerships.

Musicians Care by Sherman Hospital on Flickr

Some of the earliest programs uniting art and healthcare were simple introductions of visual art into healthcare spaces. The British organization Paintings in Hospitals was founded in 1959 by a hospital employee who saw the positive effect that bringing the visual arts into a healthcare environment had on patients’ health and wellbeing. This type of program is still popular today, and now, many art-in-hospitals programs have blossomed into extensive networks of artists, art organizations, and hospitals. National networks such as Paintings in Hospitals and Scotland’s Art in Healthcare are thriving, and many other programs exist on a smaller scale, such as Oakwood Arts for the Spirit in Michigan. These early programs focused on improving the healthcare environment rather than giving patients opportunities to create art themselves. In the next few decades, more participatory arts and healthcare programs were created in a variety of disciplines, such as Dance Exchange’s Metlife Foundation Healthy Living Initiative program, founded in 1978.

Beginning in the 1990s, arts and healthcare partnerships have become increasingly common. Notable organizations include Dance for PD, a partnership between the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinsons Group which has spread to over 100 communities, and Concerts in Care, which brings live music to residential care facilities across Canada. Over several decades, the concept of using the arts in healthcare has gained broad currency, as evidenced by numerous articles in mainstream medical journals and popular science periodicals (for example, this study showing that music can ease chronic pain and depression). It has also captured the attention of national policymakers.

The principle of network effects applies here; the more people who participate in a network, the more benefit users get from it. In the case of arts and healthcare partnerships it isn’t the number of people participating that makes the difference, but the number of organizations, and the people are still the ones benefiting. However, there is still a parallel. The more points of access there are for the users, with multiple healthcare organizations and multiple arts organizations participating, the more likely users are to find the program in the first place and find a part of the program that addresses their needs. Presumably, the network also creates opportunities for networking in the sense of making professional contacts, and new collaborations arising out of existing partnerships. The main drawback of having a network is that more people contributing ideas also means a more complex and often less efficient system of implementing them. For networks of organizational partnerships, having clarity and consensus around the group goals for working together as a whole can help to mitigate this drawback.

The Power of Networks

In our highly networked world, partnerships between three or more players have a lot going for them. A number of arts in healthcare programs consider their network of partnerships fundamental to what they do. For example, Shands Arts in Medicine, the hospital described in the introduction, says on its website, “An essential component of [our] mission is to create collaborations with other hospital departments, community arts organizations and hospitals around the world. These collaborations spark projects that move the message of art and wellness to a broader audience.”

A Network of Skills and Specialties

While many thriving arts in healthcare programs are organized as partnerships and networks, there is no set template that works best. In many cases, either a dedicated organization facilitates programming by reaching out to both health and arts organizations, or a healthcare organization brings in art by partnering with several different arts groups in their community. It is less common for one arts organization to partner with several health groups, but this approach seems just as effective.

Networks of program offerings, built on combining the strengths of multiple partners, allow arts organizations to leverage a set of related skills and expertise in multiple ways to target a variety of healthcare needs. For example, through a variety of partnerships the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts in Washington, DC offers different programs for cancer patients and survivors, military members and veterans, the general public, and health centers. This array of offerings and of recipients would likely be much smaller if the Smith Center limited itself to partnering with one hospital. Since the healthcare landscape is so multifaceted, the corresponding partnerships with the arts must also extend to many specialties.

Moreover, a network of partnerships can help an arts organization reach one particular audience more fully. For example, the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me at MoMA offers programs at the museum and on-site for organizations that work with individuals with Alzheimer’s. It also has a monthly interactive gallery program for individuals with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers to come independently. This combination of services, made possible by the museum’s connections to a variety of health care organizations, enables MoMA’s programming to reach people with Alzheimer’s in a variety of stages, at a variety of levels of independence, and in a variety of family and professional care situations.

Healing in the Community

The diversity networks provide helps organizations capture the best opportunities their community has to offer. For example, Snow City Arts in Chicago offers art classes to hospitalized children. While their teaching artist-in-residence program is the core of their offerings, the organization proclaims, “By working side-by-side with local arts organizations, performance groups, music ensembles, and prominent universities, we help ensure our children are learning from Chicago’s brightest artistic minds.” The program works with hospitals to bring this instruction to children who regularly miss school because of their health needs.

Artist Hein at Work by Virginia Lockett on Flickr

The advantage of networks goes in the other direction, too, helping arts and healing organizations play a more connected, more visible role in the community. In the case of COSACOSA’s Healing Art Project, this connection is intentional: “The Healing Art Project reaffirms the time-honored role of artists in sustaining the health of a community.” The project brings together children and youth of a variety of health experiences – healthy kids, kids with disabilities, and kids living in pediatric healthcare centers – to create collaborative artwork. The artwork is displayed in pediatric healthcare centers, and in some cases is an integral part of the design of these centers. Thus, the program is community-oriented both in the creation and the use of the art.

The visibility advantages of being in a network can also help a program expand and connect to the community of people it serves. For example, Dance for PD, which now has branches from Pasadena to Philadelphia to Pune, India, has been given the opportunity to participate in a number of high-profile events, such as the Parkinson’s Unity Walk in New York, which draws around 10,000 attendees.

Looking Ahead

The funding climate for this type of partnership appears to be growing friendlier as art therapy becomes more mainstream. There are several foundations and grant programs with a specific interest in bringing the arts into healthcare, such as the grants made by the Global Alliance for Arts & Health and the Metlife Foundation’s Healthy Aging grant program. Networks of partnerships have the opportunity to maximize their ability to seek support, since different funding avenues may be available to organizations on different sides of the partnership. However, networks also increase the number of variables involved, and any innovative program, especially one that is tangential to an organization’s mission or primary activities, may turn out to be a hard sell to grantmakers and donors if it appears on the surface to be riskier than traditional offerings. Organizations looking to enter partnerships should bear this in mind.

Arts organizations looking to get involved in an arts and healthcare partnership would do well to research the health and arts landscape in their area, to see whether there is an existing network they can join, and to learn what needs are not yet being met. There are a number of great resources put together by established organizations (see below); another benefit of networks is that they encourage a culture of freely sharing information. However, most of the literature out there on partnerships between the arts and healthcare is focused on providing practical guidance on what seems to work; little has been written on why it works. I am hoping to start the latter conversation with this piece, but the topic deserves more thorough attention than I am able to give it here. I envision studies that involve interviewing the leadership and staff of dozens of organizations across the country, including stand-alone projects, one-on-one partnerships, and networks. Such an effort would hopefully demonstrate whether networks are one successful model that has a lot of advantages and happens to be very popular right now, or whether they are truly the best model. The resulting lessons would equip many more organizations to unite healthcare and the arts.

Resources

• The University of Florida and UF&Shands Arts In Medicine have an online toolkit called AIM Together for organizations interested in the intersection of arts in medicine.
• The Global Alliance for Arts & Health has a basic toolkit for organizations which was created for a presentation at an event but has useful and in-depth information, and provides more resources in the members-only section of their website.
• The University of Florida also has an online toolkit specific to Arts in Healthcare for Rural Communities.
• New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me At MoMA program provides museum programs to Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. MoMA provides guides for museums, care organizations, and families on how to start or engage with this type of program.
• The National Endowment for the Arts has a page on the arts in healthcare on their website.

Ann Markusen and David King’s 2003 paper “The Artistic Dividend: The Arts’ Hidden Contributions to Regional Development” aims to reveal what economists typically miss when they measure the impact of the arts sector on regional economies.

Summary

Approach and Methodology

“The Artistic Dividend” presents the arts’ contribution to a regional economy through an occupational lens. Markusen and King conducted two focus groups with arts opinion-makers and interviewed 22 artists in the Twin Cities. Having determined using Census data that artists are differently distributed in different regions, the authors used the data from their interviews to probe what causes artists’ regional preferences.

Components of the Artistic Dividend

Markusen and King hypothesize that regional economies get an “artistic dividend” from a high artist population because artists:

• improve the design, production, and marketing of products and services in non-arts businesses when they do contract work for them, and by being active consumers
• help firms recruit employees by contributing to the quality of life in a region
• export their work out of their region
• purchase local supplies and services.

Artists’ Regional Preferences and How They Might Be Nurtured

“The Artistic Dividend” uses US Census data to show that artists concentrate in some regions more than others. Based on their interviews, Markusen and King posit that a region could increase its artistic dividend by supporting these factors:

• opportunities for education
• formal and informal mutual support networks among artists
• opportunities to connect their work to other industries
• artist live/work spaces
• arts philanthropy that supports individuals as well as institutions
• regional amenities such as affordability, good neighborhoods, and cultural life

Analysis

Overall, “The Artistic Dividend” makes an intriguing argument, but its conclusions are preliminary because of its modest scope and reliance on limited empirical evidence. One of the major issues with “The Artistic Dividend” is that it makes broadly generalizing recommendations based on its small sample size for data (22 interviewees, only four of whom are ever directly cited). It also assumes that artists’ economic actions have a substantial economic effect, but uses the presence of a concentration of artists in a region as a stand-in for the presence of the effect, without attempting to measure it. One way to test this effect would have been to interview non-arts business owners in the region as well as artists; another would have been to compare the artist population data with regional prosperity, as Richard Florida did. By claiming that they cannot measure the artistic dividend even though it is central to their arguments and recommendations, Markusen and King leave themselves open to the speculation that the artistic dividend is not large enough to justify their recommendation that regions invest in encouraging it.

The Artistic Dividend Revisited

Markusen’s 2004 paper “The Artistic Dividend Revisited,” co-authored with Greg Schrock and Martina Cameron, updates the census-based analysis of artists’ regional preferences from “The Artistic Dividend.” This version is deeper and more thorough on the regional data, but does not attempt to address the size or causes of the dividend.

Implications

“The Artistic Dividend” provides a good frame for the discussion of artists’ economic contributions, but because of its limitations in scope, it is inconclusive – the biggest implication is that more research is needed to test the following ideas:

• How and how much artists contribute to an economy through their contract work at non-arts firms and their entrepreneurship, and whether there is room for growth.
• The reasons artists choose particular cities.
• Similar research on sub-regional, neighborhood, and rural economies.
• Trade-offs between funding large institutions and funding on the artist level.

Since “The Artistic Dividend” was written before the 2008 recession, fundamentals such as affordable health care may now be more important to artist populations than regional amenities such as parks. Still, as many artists have focused more on freelancing and found new avenues of income in the last several years, looking at artists’ economic participation through an occupational lens remains relevant.

(For a shorter edition of this analysis, please read the condensed version.)

Ann Markusen and David King’s 2003 paper “The Artistic Dividend: The Arts’ Hidden Contributions to Regional Development” aims to reveal what economists typically miss when they measure the impact of the arts sector on regional economies. The authors describe the artistic dividend as the multifaceted economic benefits of the arts when seen through an occupational approach: a look at the ways artists, rather than institutions, feed regional economies. Using the Twin Cities region as a case study, they argue that artists create a dividend when they export their work out of the region and then spend their earnings locally, when they buy supplies and hire supporting staff, and even when they do projects for non-arts firms. Markusen and King demonstrate that artists have preferences about the regions where they live, and distill their conversations with artists into a set of recommendations for how a region can improve its attractiveness to artists. “The Artistic Dividend” is notable as the first publication of the Arts Economy Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Project on Regional and Industrial Economics. Though it was noncommissioned, conducted without external funding, and accordingly small in scale, it is arguably Ann Markusen’s best-known work on the arts economy.

Summary

Approach and Methodology

“The Artistic Dividend” presents the arts’ contribution to a regional economy through an occupational lens. Markusen and King used the Twin Cities as a case study to explore the ways artists contribute to a regional economy. They conducted two focus groups with arts “opinion-makers” and 22 interviews with people who make their living at their art to better understand artists’ behavior, preferences, and economic effects on their region. Interviewees were contacted through a web portal for Minnesota artists or the recommendation of other individuals; they were chosen to represent a wide range of types of art but were not intended to be a representative sample of artists in the region. To establish that artists choose some regions of the country over others, Markusen and King compared artist populations between regions using Census data on size and growth rates of artistic occupations and on artistic concentrations in selected metro areas. Having determined that artists are differently distributed in different regions, the authors used the data from their interviews to probe what causes artists’ regional preferences.

Components of the Artistic Dividend

Markusen and King argue that the arts’ contributions to a regional economy are much richer than conventional research methods, such as measuring the tourism draw of a large arts institution, make them appear. Conventional, institution-centric methods overlook the contributions of artists who primarily work independently or in small organizations, and focus on a narrow set of economic benefits, such as money spent by audiences at area restaurants. By using an occupational approach, Markusen and King highlight what they call the “artistic dividend”: the varied ways in which the arts contribute to a region’s economy. They hypothesize that a high population of artists in a region increases the productivity and earnings in the regional economy, and attribute this to the following causes:

• artists directly improve the design, production, and marketing of products and services in non-arts businesses when they do contract work for them
• artists motivate firms to create better products by their active input as consumers
• artists help firms recruit employees by contributing to the quality of life in a region
• artists generate income by exporting their work out of their region
• artists stimulate the local economy through their purchases of supplies and services.

The more obvious forms of the artistic dividend are artists’ purchases of materials and services, and sales of their work. Markusen and King list a plethora of ways the artists they interviewed patronize local businesses and employ local talent: for example, “many act like small businesses, hiring others” for support work, and “they patronize suppliers of materials, agents, teachers, and tutors.” Additionally, even in regions where the performing arts do not attract many non-local audience members, other types of artists, such as writers and visual artists, export their work from the region and contribute to their local economic base.

Markusen and King posit an additional economic impact when artists sell their services to non-arts businesses, using their writing, video, visual arts, or other skills to enhance productivity and profits, and when artists as consumers create demand for innovative products. “The presence of a large, diverse pool of artistic talent in a region enables businesses in the region to design their products better, enhance working conditions and employee morale, and market their output more successfully.” Several of the artists interviewed described successful relationships they have forged with non-arts firms.

Artists Have Regional Preferences

“The Artistic Dividend” shows artists concentrate in some regions more than others. Using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series based on the 1980 and 1990 US Census, Markusen and King compiled the size and growth rates of artistic occupations (using the categories for full-time artists, musicians, actors and directors, painters, photographers, and dancers) in eleven cities. They then compared artistic concentrations for those cities, using a location quotient for artists – the ratio of artists in a local economy to artists in the national economy.

This method revealed that the fastest growing or biggest cities do not necessarily have the biggest artist populations, and different types of artists are concentrated in different cities. Markusen and King theorize that smaller cities that have high populations of one type of artist attracted that population in part because of a major school or other institution. Based on their focus groups and interviews, they highlight factors such as opportunities for education, mutual support networks among artists, opportunities to connect their work to other industries, lower cost of living, and higher quality of life as important components of a region’s appeal to artists.

Nurturing the Artistic Dividend

“Artistic activity as a significant contributor to the regional economy needs nurturing,” Markusen and King write. “In comparison to the very modest amounts they devote to the arts, state and local governments pour hundreds of millions of dollars into downtown revitalizations, new plant attraction and even big box retail developments in the suburbs.” The paper argues that redirecting some money towards attracting, nurturing, and retaining artists would allow the artistic dividend in a region to flourish.

The authors recommend that arts funders, governments, businesses, and artists’ organizations focus on attracting and supporting artists as workers. This includes supporting dedicated artist live/work spaces, but also encouraging amenities that are not specific to artists, such as a region’s affordability, vibrant neighborhoods, and cultural life. Markusen and King call arts-supporting philanthropic organizations and arts establishments a “welcome mat” for a region, indicating to artists that they are likely to find a friendly environment there. They conclude from their interviews that a thriving network of formal and informal artist organizations is as important as big establishments to retaining artists, helping artists find venues to sell their work and hone their artistic and business skills, and providing other resources. Their recommendations are accompanied by anecdotes from their interviewees describing ways in which regional features have helped them succeed.

Art Sale by Jeff_Werner on Flickr

Analysis

Overall, “The Artistic Dividend” makes an intriguing argument that using an occupational approach to look at the arts’ role in regional development reveals many contributions that are invisible with methodologies that focus on the arts industry or arts establishments. Its conclusions about improving a region’s attractiveness to artists and thus its economic success are preliminary, however, because of its modest scope and reliance on limited empirical evidence. “The Artistic Dividend” is promising as a quantitative and descriptive look at artist concentrations in major American cities, as well as a small-scale exploration of artists’ lives, careers, and relationship to place within a single metropolitan region. It would also be provocative as an opinion piece on the value of using an occupational lens to measure artists’ contributions to a regional economy, but it is not presented as an opinion piece. Instead, the authors attempt to use the data from their interviews and focus groups and (by implication) the data on artist concentrations to demonstrate the value of an occupational lens for this purpose, and make policy recommendations on the assumption that the value has been demonstrated. In this area, the paper falls short, raising a lot of interesting questions without enough supporting evidence to justify its recommendations.

To a large extent, Markusen and King are upfront about “The Artistic Dividend”’s limitations. For example, the study excludes the effects of part-time and unpaid artists on the economy, two groups which make up a large portion of the total number of artists in a region. It focuses on metropolitan regions, and the Twin Cities in particular, to the exclusion of examining arts dividends in small towns.

However, there are several key weaknesses in the paper’s construction that go unacknowledged. The major quantitative source of information in “The Artistic Dividend,” the analysis of artist concentrations, cannot tell us anything about whether the artistic dividend exists or how big it is because the authors use those concentrations as evidence of the artistic dividend itself rather than as a lever for measuring its relationship to regional prosperity. This leaves the job of demonstrating the dividend to the nonscientific sample of 22 interviewees in a single region, which is a very small base of evidence from which to draw sweeping policy conclusions.

Similar leaps of logic occur in the authors’ analysis of the nature of the dividend. For example, profiled artist Vara Kamin has written audio and film scripts for a medical technology company, an example of the artistic dividend in action. The authors of the study assume an artist like Kamin produces more valuable results than a non-specialist from within the firm: “artists often sell their work or services to other firms and organizations in the region, helping to make them more productive by enhancing the quality and design of their products or enhancing the work and customer environments.” While such an outcome certainly seems possible, the claim is neither made explicit nor demonstrated or supported with evidence in the paper.

Markusen and King go on to suggest that we could see growth in artists like Vara Kamin selling their skills to non-arts firms, which makes sense if both artists and companies really embrace the creative possibilities in their collaborations. However, as countless artists’ rants and anecdotes published as blog posts or interviews reveal, many artists do not consider such gigs to be their “real” work. The authors note from their interviews that “some artists express disdain for commercial uses of their art… or fear this would damage their status as fine artists.” Yet they continue to express optimism that this is a part of the dividend which could blossom with some encouragement.

The seams between the opinion, census analysis, and anecdotal elements of “The Artistic Dividend” become particularly problematic when the paper makes far-reaching recommendations based on earlier generalizations. For example, the authors propose that a region can attract and retain artists to boost the artistic dividend. In the section analyzing census data on concentrations of artists by profession in various metro areas, the authors note, “each metro has stylized itself in some fashion as a nurturing ground for certain arts and as a destination for artists in that field.” The idea of a city styling itself for certain professions makes the actions sound deliberate on someone’s part. There is a big logical leap between the idea that artists cluster in certain regions and the idea that those regions are deliberately cultivating the presence of specific artistic professions over others. Markusen and King later recommend that cities deliberately cultivate artists, and this section implies it has been demonstrated to be possible.

The authors assert that “it is impossible to directly measure a region’s full artistic dividend.” While it is true that measuring the economy is an inexact science and a “full” accounting may be an unreasonable goal, the authors’ hypothesis that “the more diverse and sophisticated and sizable the pool of artists in a region, the higher the quality of [their] services with associated positive impacts on firms’ bottom lines” is certainly measurable. For example, comparing their data on regional artist populations to measures of regional prosperity, as Richard Florida did, could have provided a fuller picture of whether the artistic dividend has any noticeable effects. Alternatively, as mentioned in the study’s conclusion, including non-arts business owners who do and do not hire artists in the focus groups and interviews could have bolstered the case for the artistic dividend. Unfortunately, by declining to attempt a measurement of the artistic dividend, the meaningful existence of which is the crux of their arguments and recommendations, Markusen and King leave their argument open to the speculation that the dividend is not in fact large enough to justify their recommendation that regions invest in encouraging it.

Moreover, the paper leaves open the question of whether the artistic dividend is distinct from that of other fields when using an occupational approach. While the authors acknowledge in the conclusion that they did not compare the arts to other occupations, it is a surprising omission considering how central the arts’ net value to regional economies is to the paper’s argument, and even more so because Ann Markusen had not specialized in the arts until this study. The only other field explicitly mentioned by comparison is professional sports. The way in which the authors define artistic occupations is somewhat curious as well: they argue that exports of artistic products out of the region are a component of the dividend, but omit filmmakers; they use an artist’s successful venture selling fonts he designed as an example of artistic entrepreneurship even though they omit graphic designers on the grounds that they are more likely to be employed full-time. It is not clear why the lines are drawn where they are, and what unique economic contribution is made by the artists they do include relative to other occupations.

Ultimately, Markusen and King aim to demonstrate that an artistic dividend exists and that it is worth exploring in further research. Artists are indeed economic actors in that they buy supplies, hire services, and do arts work for non-arts firms. Through the results of their focus groups and interviews, the authors identify the building blocks they believe form an artistic dividend in their case study region, the Twin Cities. However, to persuasively argue that cities, philanthropists, and others should make changes to their practice in service of increasing the artistic dividend, the authors would need be able to measure the dividend itself and show that it has some significant effect on the regional economy.

The Artistic Dividend Revisited

Markusen’s 2004 paper “The Artistic Dividend Revisited,” co-authored with Greg Schrock and Martina Cameron, updates the Census-based analysis of artists’ regional preferences from “The Artistic Dividend,” adding a comparison with architects and designers, and examines the pull of employers on artistic concentrations using advertising as a case study. “Revisited” goes into more depth using 1980, 1990, and 2000 PUMS Census data. It does a better job contextualizing the claims about what makes a region appealing to artists within the landscape of existing research than “The Artistic Dividend” does. It does not make the implication that the artistic dividend is necessarily a large part of regional economies, which is where “The Artistic Dividend” began to overreach. Instead, Markusen, Schrock, and Cameron provide a deeper, more thorough version of the original paper’s strongest portion, arriving at many of the same conclusions: artists tend to be footloose, the concentration of artists in a city is not a function of the city’s size or growth, and cities tend to be associated with a few types of artist.

Implications

“The Artistic Dividend” provides a good frame for the discussion of artists’ economic contributions. However, the constraints on the scope of research result in limited evidence to support the paper’s claims about how exactly artists contribute to the economy, and what it takes to attract and nurture them. Not surprisingly, then, “The Artistic Dividend” concludes with a call for more research. The authors suggest documenting “the significance of and delivery mechanisms for the artistic dividend,” how and how much artistic entrepreneurship contributes to a region’s economic base, and the reasons artists choose to live in particular cities. They recommend similar research on the artistic dividend in sub-regional and neighborhood economies (I would add rural regions to this list). The authors see a pressing need for thorough evaluations of the trade-offs between funding large arts institutions and funding on the artist level, and between funding the arts and other economic development strategies.

In the past decade, discussion of the occupational approach to looking at the economy has become increasingly common, although there has yet to be a good comparison between the creative economy and other occupational economies using this lens. In “Crossover: How Artists Build Careers Across Commercial, Nonprofit, and Community Work,” (2006) Markusen et al. surveyed artists in Los Angeles and the Bay Area and found that a high number of working artists earn income from multiple sectors. However, since work for non-arts firms and direct sales of art to consumers are both counted in the commercial sector, the findings in “Crossover” do not help us understand how these two pieces operate as separate avenues for artists to participate in the economy, as they are treated in “The Artistic Dividend.” Markusen’s “Defining the Cultural Economy: Industry and Occupation Approaches” (2008) described the differences in definitions of the cultural economy, including whether to look at part-time workers and which professions make up the cultural sector. However, the literature on the creative economy that uses similar definitions and parameters to Markusen and King’s artistic dividend is still heavy on analyzing methodology and theory. It is light on gathering and analyzing data about how the artistic dividend compares to the economic effects of other occupations, how large existing regional artistic dividends are, and what really works to stimulate the artistic dividend within a region.

It is important to consider that “The Artistic Dividend” was written before the 2008 recession. The recession changed the game in some areas of regional development and older assumptions must be questioned, like the assumption that job growth lessens poverty and inequality in a region. These changes suggest that greater access to affordable health care and other fundamentals may now be more important to artist populations than regional amenities such as parks. Markusen has pointed out that artists don’t fit in either traditional micro-economist or macro-economist arguments about how government spending in recessions work, because they are likely to spend new money rapidly and in the local economy.

I would also be interested to learn about the effect of the crowdfunding movement on artists’ attachment to their regions and on their ability to export out of their regions. Projects funded on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and similar sites are allowing artists to tap into new markets (across the country and the world) and a greater ability to fund their work without relying on local institutional funding sources, but for the most part, the size of the impact remains to be analyzed.

While “The Artistic Dividend” was only a start, the broader question of the role the creative economy has in the larger economy is a valuable one. Changes such as the recession and crowdfunding have encouraged many artists to try to make it on their own, whether that means relying more heavily on freelancing or exploring unconventional avenues of funding. Looking at artists’ economic participation through an occupational approach, then, continues to be highly relevant.

Additional Reading:

• Daniel Silver and Diana Miller, Contextualizing the Artistic Dividend
• Sara Cruz and Aurora A.C. Teixeira, Methodological Approaches for Measuring the Creative Employment: A Critical Appraisal with Applications to Portugal
• Judy Hornbacher ,Anne Markusen’s Concept of the Artistic Dividend
• Vince Carducci, Anne Markusen on Creative Placemaking
• Christopher Farrell, Art for Art’s Sake? No, the Economy’s
• Ann Markusen, Urban development and the politics of a creative class: evidence from a study of artists (A response to Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class)

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. – photo by ehpien

During my time as a Createquity Writing Fellow I’ve written a lot about museums partly because I am a museum professional, and largely because, being already keyed into the museum world, I find that there is just so much to write about. Although I had been aware of Fractured Atlas’s work for a long time, I first heard about Createquity when a well-known museum blogger, Nina Simon, wrote about it on her blog Museum 2.0. Simon appreciates that Createquity provides “exposure to a broader arts world.” She’s correct in her assessment that the museum world can be an insular bubble – for all the work we do on engaging our audiences and our communities, we do most of it through a museum-specific lens.

Later in that same post, though, Simon writes, “the American ‘arts’ field is in as much of a bubble as the museum industry–perhaps even a smaller one.” She refers to the museum and arts bubbles as separate, even though many people would consider museums to be a part of the arts. In some ways they are, but in many ways they are not. I get the impression, for example, that large orchestras, small community-based dance troupes, and off-Broadway theaters speak the same language and spend time in the same bubble more than museums interact with any of them. This raises the question – what is a museum? Can we define museums as arts institutions, or do they fit better in another category?

The whole idea of museums as art institutions is based on an implicit assumption that art museums are typical of all museums. It’s true that the traditional mores of a museum atmosphere – quiet, solemn, reflective, reverent – are based in the heritage of art museums. However, museums are much more diverse than that. Of the museums that were accredited by the American Association (now Alliance) of Museums as of 2012 (which is a small sample of the museums in the US), 10% were general or multidisciplinary, and 8% were focused on natural history or anthropology. Science and technology museums, children’s museums, and many history, anthropology, and natural history museums define their goals very differently than a traditional art museum. For example, the Association of Science-Technology Centers says, “Science centers encourage the innate curiosity that resides in all of us, providing opportunities for education, awareness of social and global issues, even recreation.” Many museums are arts institutions, but the term “arts” is inadequate to describe the breadth of the museum field.

For this reason, museums are often described as cultural institutions, rather than arts institutions. This definition is useful because it is broad enough to capture many of the goals of many museums: culture can mean the body of concepts shared in a society (the sociological view), or it can mean the achievements a society has deemed to be most important (“high” culture).

Andrew Sayers, the director of the National Museum of Australia, believes museums fit better in the education category. Responding to a discussion paper on Australia’s National Cultural Policy, then in the process of being revised, Sayers wrote a piece for The Australian titled, “Redefine Museums as Educational Resources.” Sayers argues that museums’ contributions to both school education and the advancement of knowledge in society makes them distinct from arts organizations. While Sayers does see museums as a part of “cultural heritage,” a category in Australia’s National Cultural Policy, he fears viewing them solely through this lens makes them look like storage facilities. “We need to redefine museums as educational resources rather than as buildings where collections are held.” I couldn’t agree more. Holding collections will always be an important and unique function of museums, but their primary relevance to society is their capacity to educate and inspire. As Sayers says, “there is hardly a work of nonfiction or a documentary produced in this country that doesn’t make extensive use of the resources in our collecting institutions.”

Despite museums’ value as cultural and educational resources, key policymakers view museums as luxuries, a leisure activity for the wealthy. This attitude may stem from the idea that visiting museums is solely a leisure pastime for a narrow set of people who see themselves and their values reflected in the museum’s content and presentation, which has merit only in the fact that historically it has sometimes been true. However, this is increasingly inaccurate as museums strive to diversify and reflect their communities. While both the arts and museums would benefit from a reversal of this view, museums as a whole offer different benefits to society than other arts organizations do.

Indeed, the concept of museums as educational institutions challenges their association with luxury or leisure. As repositories for knowledge, expertise, and research, museums complement the educational function of universities and private centers. According to Sayers, “museums are an integral part of education across many areas of the curriculum and are immense resources for the understanding of history, society and science.” While countless studies in the last few decades have shown the educational benefits of music, dance, and visual arts, museums teach content across disciplines, and at their best can teach critical thinking skills beyond the arts.

In their 2011 article “Museums and the Future of Education,” Scott Kratz and Elizabeth Merritt provide several examples of ways museums do this, from collaboration with schools to independent learning in museum galleries. The National Building Museum has a curriculum for schools called “Bridge Basics,” which teaches students to identify problems, experiment with solutions, and evaluate results as well as math and engineering concepts. Kratz and Merritt predict museum learning will become more vital as educational models change. “The future of education may well be one characterized by self-directed, passion-based learning. In this future, museums can play a crucial role in helping learners discover their passion, providing resources and opportunities to pursue this passion and training educators in the skills of experiential learning.” They argue the current trend towards standardization in schools is rapidly becoming outmoded – the Mark Twain quote “never let schooling get in the way of your education” comes to mind – and museums are already good at promoting a broader way of teaching.

At the Waterfront Museum in Wales, by Tyron Francis on Flickr

While defining museums as educational institutions captures a lot of what a wide variety of museums do, the fact is, many adults don’t or won’t go to museums for their own education, seeing them as stuffy and school-like, child-like, or unnecessary. There are two ways museums can respond: show adults that education doesn’t have to be stuffy, or avoid branding themselves as educational.

In truth, people use museums for different things, and these uses coexist. The growing body of museum audience research suggests that people visit museums for a variety of reasons, different visitors may seek diverse experiences from the same museum, and one visitor may even seek diverse experiences in different visits to the same museum. John Falk has devoted his research to describing museum visitors by the identity they take on: from facilitators, who enjoy a museum through introducing their child or guests to it, to explorers, who are looking for whatever grabs them. In their book Life Stages of the Museum Visitor, Susie Wilkening and James Chung of Reach Advisors, Inc. discuss similarities and differences across generations in what visitors look to get out of a museum experience. The work of Falk, Wilkening, Chung, and others shows that museums can and do fill a variety of needs, and this multiplicity is a strength that allows them to better reach their audiences.

The definition that may best capture all museums is that they are inspirational institutions. Branding museums as inspirational emphasizes the joyous side of learning. While a few may consider inspiration a luxury, there is definitely an argument, one grounded in psychology, that inspiration is a part of education and other elements of personal and cognitive growth.

At the Dali Museum in Florida, by IZOD IndyCar Series on Flickr.

Alain de Botton, a radio host and columnist for the BBC, suggests museums have the potential to be more inspiring if they move away from canonical standards (in art, for example) and instead challenge people to think and feel more. He suggests that if museums do this, they have the potential to be our culture’s greatest inspirational institutions, filling the role churches have had in the past. I think de Botton is on to something, but he takes a narrow view and considers the most static, old-fashioned museums to be representative of them all. It isn’t canonical standards themselves that are the problem, it’s pushing them top-down on visitors instead of using them as a starting point for discussion. Museums are all inspirational in character and intent, even if not all of them reach their full potential to inspire. There are already plenty of visitors (Falk calls them “rechargers”) who find themselves awestruck by an object in a very traditional museum, and may seek out museums for this experience. In the last few decades, as the museum field has grown more serious about independent learning, deep audience engagement, and participation, museums have been able to bring that inspirational experience to more of their visitors.

A wide variety of museums share the ability to inspire visitors by the process of discovery, as exhibits demonstrate what a wide world it is or how deep a concept can go. To use some personal examples, my first exposure to cultures very different from my own was when I became fascinated by a seventh century statue of the Chinese Buddhist figure Guan-Yin in a university art museum. As an adult, I fell in love with the Mathematica exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science, which explores a variety of topics in math. An equally diverse group of museums moves visitors to be inspired by human achievements, whether an accomplishment of art or craftsmanship, ingenuity, or the triumph of the spirit in the face of adversity. I felt similarly struck by what my fellow humans can do when surrounded by Monet paintings at the Musee de L’Orangerie and when drawn through the story of the founding of the Red Cross at a museum devoted to its history. Last but not least, museums on any subject can inspire visitors to question their assumptions and examine what’s in front of them from many points of view. I had that experience myself as a young child playing at different careers at a children’s museum, and any time I learn more about prehistoric ocean life I think long and hard about my place in the universe. This common ability to inspire, more than art, culture or even education, defines what a museum is.

Visible Storage, Sculpture. Photo by Jenny Spadafora

One of eleven extant copies of the Bay Psalm Book, among the first books printed in British North America, will soon be up for sale. Experts estimate it will go for $10 to $20 million. Did a private book collector die or decide to prune their collection? No, this particular volume is being sold by the Old South Church, a congregation in Boston. Opponents of the decision have expressed concerns that the book would be sold to a private collector. This despite the fact that the Old South Church owns two copies of the book and is only selling one.

Controversies like the one over the sale of the Bay Psalm Book have become increasingly common since the mid-twentieth century. Many museums and other institutions that hold cultural objects no longer believe they must hold such objects in the public trust in perpetuity. Much of the museum community has agreed on best practices for deciding whether to give up an object, yet those practices, and specific museums’ adherence to them, are still hotly contested.

On one extreme, some critics feel deaccessioning, which refers to when an institution formally decides an item is no longer a part of its collection, is fundamentally in conflict with the idea that museum objects should be held in the public trust. On the other, a minority of museums consider deaccessioning to be a part of regular housekeeping, discarding items not only to correct past errors, but even taking in new items with the attitude that they may well be deaccessioned in a generation. Representatives of major institutions have voiced both ideas in the past decade. The more moderate pro-deaccessioning camp (most vocally Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer specializing in fine art) argues deaccessioning can be done without restrictions when it’s to save a museum from the threat of closing or other great danger.

The largest camp is made up of those who feel deaccessioning can be a part of healthy museum operations but only when following guidelines regarding who makes the decisions and how. The American Alliance of Museums advises, but does not require, that proceeds from deaccessions be used for future accession purchases only. The Association of Art Museum Directors considers this a hard and fast rule, and publicly and harshly censured the National Academy Museum, an institution that receives all of its collection by donation rather than purchase, for breaking it in 2008.

National Academy Museum by vitarlenology on Flickr

The casual museum-goer is unlikely to pay attention to whether each decision a museum makes is appropriate. However, many people inside and outside of the museum community share a belief that that museum objects should be accessible to the public, because museum objects are public objects, and museums are their caretakers. The values that underlie the interest in keeping museum objects public inform most discussions of deaccessioning, yet are rarely used as a metric to determine whether deaccessioning is appropriate. I propose a simple rule: the public should sit up and take notice when an institution is unwilling to take the steps necessary to ensure, or at least prioritize, keeping an object in public hands.

Whose Objects?

The word “deaccessioning” is not a household term. From the outrage over a large-scale deaccessioning project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 to the outcry over Brandeis University’s plan to close the Rose Art Museum in early 2009, deaccessioning can seem like a non-issue until it becomes a huge issue. In the former, a New York Times article and other responses sparked concern that museum executives and curators were discarding art according to their own standards rather than relying on the wisdom of generations. In the latter, students who had never been to the Rose Art museum realized what they might be losing, and spread protest signs with the Rose logo and “ATM Inside” across campus. Alumni and donors argued that closing the art museum went against the university’s public service mission. I was a student at Brandeis at the time myself, and it was clear that the threat of losing this art, especially to private collectors, was inspiring high emotion.

These emotional discussions reveal two widely held values. First is the belief that certain cultural objects should be accessible to everyone. Second, museum property is public property; a museum is responsible for the longevity of artifacts but they belong to everyone. These values undergird oft-voiced concerns about the practice of deaccessioning, and each can be addressed by placing objects in other public-serving institutions’ care. If a museum deaccessions without respecting these values, it calls into question whether serving the public is truly the museum’s highest priority.

Cultural Property Should be Accessible to Everyone

A common defense of deaccessioning is that objects are not significantly more accessible in museums than they are in private hands. Most of a museum’s items just sit in storage gathering dust, the argument goes, and why does it matter if something unseen is sold? Elliot Bostwick Davis of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts told the New York Times that most American museums show between two and four percent of their collection at a time. The British Museum shows only one percent of its collection, while smaller museums in Britain frequently exhibit 5-10%. Moreover, not all museums are truly accessible to the whole public, because they fail to make accommodations for visitors with physical or financial limitations.

Visible Storage, Sculpture by jspad on Flickr

The logic that deaccessioning can be done freely because things aren’t accessible anyway is flimsy. Few private collectors are going to open up their homes to anyone and everyone who wants a close look at their stuff, but something that is unseen in a museum today may be on display tomorrow. For one thing, most museums rotate even their “permanent” exhibits. For another, methods of making more of the collection available have been slowly gaining popularity for decades. “Visible storage” is a system where objects that are not part of curated displays are stored in cases in rooms that are open to the public. Museums that have visible or “open” storage often have 15, 50, even 80 percent of their collection on display at one time.

Responsible transfers from one museum to another can improve accessibility by taking an item out of storage and putting them back on view to the public. It’s meaningfully different than when a museum sells to a private collector, and proponents of uninhibited deaccessioning are often incorrect when they argue that the items sold by one museum would not be of interest to another museum. For example, the director of the Irvine Museum in California told the LA Times she was “stunned” when another museum sold several important Impressionist works in secret to a private collector. The Irvine was one of several museums that said they would have been interested in the paintings had they been offered the chance to buy them. In this case, a transfer or inter-museum sale would have given the public another opportunity to enjoy these works.

Responsible transfers can also improve physical accessibility: if your historic house museum owns a collection of nineteenth-century leg braces, but can only display them in a room that’s up two narrow flights of stairs, perhaps they could be given to an institution with elevators so that twenty-first century museum visitors who wear leg braces themselves can see them. In the article “Guilt-Free Deaccessioning” (published in A Deaccession Reader, edited by Steven Weil, 1997), Steven H. Miller gives several examples of large general museums donating to small specialized or regional museums, an arrangement that improved the opportunities for the public to view those items.

People believe museum objects should stay accessible to everyone. Because this value is so widely held, it is important for any institution that holds cultural objects to make authentic accessibility a priority and to consider accessibility when planning for deaccessioning and disposal. Deaccessioning can be a great tool to improve accessibility, but if this value isn’t being taken into account at all, that is cause for concern.

Museum Property is Public Property

The loudest voices calling for cultural objects to stay in public hands are firm in their belief in museums’ responsibility to be a public repository for objects. In response to a 2005 Soethby’s sale of 42 impressionist paintings recently deaccessioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, culture journalist Lee Rosenbaum wrote, “These sales are the latest sign that we can no longer depend on our cultural institutions to protect and preserve the public patrimony.”

Los Angeles County Museum of Art by eclipse_etc on Flickr

Rosenbaum, who blogs as CultureGrrl at ArtsJournal, argues for very stringent decision-making processes on the part of museums who might choose to deaccession. In the same opinion piece, she calls for government action “when museums cross too many lines.” She also writes, “Museums’ permanent collections belong to all of us. The public has, in most instances, paid for these works through the tax deductions given to private donors.” The idea that museum property is public because of tax deductions to donors is used frequently in American deaccessioning debates. It’s also a stretch, since the value of an item donated is generally much greater than the tax revenue forgone through deductions. However, even Rosenbaum does not condemn all deaccessioning, and in the same piece she advocates trades or transfers of objects to other museums rather than putting these objects up for sale.

It’s important to note that museums (and some libraries) are generally the best custodians of cultural objects from the standpoint of preservation. Museum staff and contractors have the specialized knowledge to care for a precious work of art or historical artifact over the long term. Museums benefit from economies of scale in that the investment they make in regulating their environment protects many objects. While private collectors have an incentive to keep their possessions in good condition for their own enjoyment and for resale value, they don’t necessarily have a reason or the means to ensure the object will be in good condition beyond their lifetime. Museums’ role in preserving the lifespan of cultural objects is one very good reason certain objects should stay in museums, but that does not mean objects can never change hands within the museum community.

In fact, one of the reasons many institutions deaccession objects is that they feel burdened by gifts of the past that take resources away from their mission in the present. Many museums, especially older ones, accepted any and all donations of objects in the first years they were open, and later, after developing a clearer mission and a collecting policy, find themselves with objects that just aren’t a good fit. Institutions such as churches and schools can be in the same predicament. The expenses associated with proper object care provide a strong incentive for museums to limit the size of their collection.

Donn Zaretsky takes issue with the idea that anything should be permanently considered public or museum-worthy. On The Art Law Blog, he argues that museums should be free to deaccession whenever it makes sense for them, without having to consider unspoken donor intent. He feels that the public benefits of deaccessioning, such as saving a museum from closure, are too often ignored. This side of the argument is why selling items to the highest bidder is a cause for concern, but not proof that the decision is being mishandled. Institutions strive never to be in the dire situations Zaretsky references. However, those that try to sell their deaccessioned objects for the highest possible price, ostensibly to care for the needs of the institution and prevent getting into dire straits, are making a values decision to seek money to serve their mission rather than address their public-serving mission directly. It’s a delicate balance.

Even if a gift was legally unrestricted and the donor has long since passed, though, some observers still place moral responsibilities on museums. Many opponents of the Bay Psalm Book’s sale point to the fact that the book was given to the church as a gift. One told WBUR that to sell donated objects “is to break faith with these donors from the past.” In his article “Selling Items from Museum Collections,” another selection from A Deaccession Reader, Steven H. Miller writes, “The giving and receiving of an item, or the money to purchase it, is an act of faith in and by a museum. When accepting such offers a museum is establishing a relationship which it should be bound to honor.” However, considering that gifts can be a burden as well, if institutions are proxies for the public, one good proxy should be as good as another.

How Can Cultural Objects Stay as Accessible as Possible?

Cultural institutions wishing to avoid letting their deaccessioned objects fall into private hands have many options. The American Alliance of Museums runs an online forum, the Collections Exchange Center,where its member museums can list objects they want to sell, trade, or donate to another museum. The National Park Service runs a similar service primarily for its own sites, although it does not list objects for sale. Some museums use regional networks for the same purpose, and informal networks can also be useful, especially to non-museum institutions looking to find a new home for an object.

There is plenty of precedent for museums to sell or donate objects to other museums. Trades may be less common, but they too have been done. For example, in 1982, the Museum of Modern Art in New York reunited the four paintings in Kandinsky’s Four Seasons suite by trading paintings by Picasso and Matisse for two Kandinskys owned by the Guggenheim. For special cases in which an institution still has a use for a work of art, but finds that it can reach wider audiences elsewhere, joint ownership can present a useful alternative. Last year, Fisk University in Tennessee sold a 50 percent share in its Alfred Stieglitz art collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. The collection of 101 American Modernist paintings will now spend two years at the museum followed by two years at the university.

A somewhat hairier alternative is to give public institutions special privileges at an auction that’s open to all. In 1994, the New York State attorney general ordered a special set of rules for an upcoming Soethby’s auction of items deaccessioned by the New York Historical Society. Public-serving institutions watched the auction and, before it closed, were permitted to pre-empt any sales, paying the highest bid minus a discount. This option is tricky because it doesn’t guarantee a museum will be able to take the object, but it’s available for organizations seeking a compromise between profit and public.

The Big Picture

While the museum field has mostly agreed upon best practices around the decision to remove an object from a collection, controversies over big deaccessions still arise year after year, partly because many institutions take liberties with standard practices or ignore them altogether. The general public can’t – and doesn’t need to – concern themselves with every deaccession. These controversies are not always easy to follow, but the best litmus test is whether an institution makes a priority of keeping objects in public hands, reflecting the values that museum property should be accessible to all and preserved for the future because it is public property.

Undoubtedly, some institutions would be appalled at giving or trading a valuable object away, or selling it for less than market rate, as may be necessary to ensure that object’s continued public accessibility. Boards of directors and museum leaders oversee an organization’s financial sustainability, and may worry that failing to seek the best price runs counter to that obligation. However, they are also charged with upholding the mission of the organization. How many institutions have language in their mission statements about benefiting the public, serving the community, or promoting a greater appreciation of the topic the museum’s content reflects? All this can be served by making responsible efforts to keep objects in public hands.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

•  At the end of April, the City of Philadelphia unveiled a free online tool called CultureBlocks for “research, planning, exploration and investment” in creative placemaking. Gary Steuer, the Chief Cultural Officer of the City of Philadelphia, gives an inside look at the tool, and the Philadelphia Inquirer has more on how it can be used.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art is returning two statues to Cambodia, where they were determined to have been looted from. Tess Davis, a researcher on Cambodian antiquities, told the New York Times, “The Met Could have treated Cambodia’s request as an obstacle. Instead, the museum recognized it as an opportunity to set the moral standard for the art world.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jeremy Nowak, the co-founder and former CEO of  The Reinvestment Fund in Philadelphia, was named the interim Director of ArtPlace, a collaboration of organizations focused on creative placemaking.
• Tim Mikulski, the current editor of ARTSblog, is leaving Americans for the Arts, and posted a warm farewell. (ARTSBlog really flourished under Tim’s leadership, and he’ll be missed. -IDM)
• The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council’s new Research and Policy Director David Pankratz, who came to the organization and the city at the beginning of this year, offers his thoughts on Pittsburgh as a dream city for the arts policy enthusiast. Read David’s guest post for Createquity on creative placemaking here.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has announced its 2013 Doris Duke Class of Artists. The Doris Duke grant includes up to $25,000 for audience development and up to $25,000 for personal reserves or creative exploration during retirement.
• New Music USA has announced changes to its grantmaking strategy, uniting five  programs into one flexible fund targeting a wide range of music projects.
• You may have noticed that a new model of TV programming has emerged in the last ten years — dark, gritty shows — but shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are the product of a new model behind the scenes, as well, one that pay networks are better positioned to use, according to a New York Times article last week. YouTube just announced that it is piloting a system in which 30 channels will offer paid subscription access to additional content. I wonder whether these channels will find the same advantage pay networks on TV have, or whether paid YouTube will fizzle as a latecomer competitor to Netflix and Hulu Plus.

IN THE FIELD

• After a 191-day lockout, the musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra finally ratified a three-year contract. However, the Minnesota Orchestra’s season has been canceled, following an ongoing labor dispute.
• Finding ways around traditional funding and production models is also one of the goals motivating a growing movement of a very different kind — public libraries as performance venues. By bringing in artist talks, concerts, and comedy acts in the evening, libraries become more of a community hub, while the performers get a place to share their most expressive works, away from the pressure to bring in big ticket sales that they find at many venues.
• The 9/11 museum has decided to charge a mandatory admission fee when the museum opens next year, citing high security costs and questioning whether a donation-only model would support them after the first year. Not directly in response, but on-topic, Jim Undercofler wonders aloud why contributed revenue is considered less stable or predictable than earned revenue.
• The Rio Theater, a beloved mom-and-pop cinema in Monte Rio, California, recently raised $63,993 in a Kickstarter campaign to switch to digital projection and stay open in the face of rapid technological change.
• “How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target?” asks Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History director and Museum 2.0 blogger Nina Simon. She’s referring to museum marketing and mission, but it can apply to any organization striving for community relevance. Her answer is “social bridging,” deliberately creating programs that appeal to and “matchmake” unlikely segments of the population.
• The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York recently surpassed 500 members, many of whom are young metropolites. The New York Times provides a style-section type look at who these people are and what goes on at their gatherings.
• A growing number of business colleges and schools are using art as a teaching and learning tool, and some are amassing important collections of modern and contemporary art. Meanwhile, MIT is teaching young people computer programming as a thinking tool, with some artistic results.
• Dayton, Ohio may soon be the home of two separate museums dedicated to funk, leading some to speculate whether it can support two of them.

BIG IDEAS

• In an interview Laura Zabel, director of Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul, talks about the new CSA (Community Supported Art!) supporting health care for artists rather than health insurance for artists, and other projects. She says, “In the work we’ve done in the Central Corridor we have seen that artists can see the opportunity in a challenge… and have nuts-and-bolts skills that can draw people, attention, and dollars to a place.”
• In a new book, Jaron Lanier asks, “Who Owns the Future?” and presents a manifesto for an economy in which the middle class is supported by micropayments for all data we create online, from tweets to purchasing decisions. For a summary, see Evgeny Morozov’s skeptical review in the Washington Post.
• How can foundations become leaders in their communities? The Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society has just published an essay on how the one group has done it,  Changing the Game: Civic Leadership at The Boston Foundation, 2001-2012, authored by the president of The Boston Foundation.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• In New York on May 23, and in Berkeley on June 2, Author Arlene Goldbard will give book talks to launch her two new books: The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, a collection of short essays on the potential for positive social outcomes through art and creativity, and The Wave, a novel set in a future in which the hopes and predictions of The Culture of Possibility have come true. Goldbard presents both books on her blog, and last week, Barry Hessenius interviewed her on his blog (parts I, II).

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s experiments with a tool called Strategy Landscape have drawn to a close (at least for now; they are considering re-releasing it open-source) and Kevin Bolduc shared some lessons learned from the project on their blog.
• The National Center for Arts Research has a short summary of the implications of the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2013 State of the Nonprofit Sector survey.
• The Centre for Economics and Business Research has released a report demonstrating the economic benefits of the arts and culture on the UK.
• The European Expert Network on Culture has released a report on strategies for export and internationalization of cultural and creative industries in the European Union. Find a brief summary here, and the report here.
• Pacific Standard Magazine reports on two studies that suggest musicians — or at least men holding guitars — are more attractive to women than non-musicians. I’d like to see more scientific (and less heteronormative) studies, but it’s an interesting theory.

On Tuesday this week, Boston reawakened, with locals and visitors standing in support of one another after the tragic events at the Boston Marathon. Many beautiful things happened on Monday and Tuesday – people opened their homes to strangers who needed a place to stay, rushed to donate blood to Mass General Hospital, and joined forces to make sure everyone could contact their loved ones. Professional rescuers of all kinds did their jobs splendidly. People and businesses did their best to bring people together and offer them reassurance. I know of one bakery that handed out free cupcakes.

Both the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art opened free to the public on Tuesday. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which is not open on Tuesdays, was free on Wednesday. Each of them released a statement expressing sympathy for all those impacted by Monday’s events, but the MFA put it most succinctly: “MFA admission will be free today. We hope the Museum will be a place of respite for our community.” Interestingly, all three museums made more of an announcement on social media than their websites, and appear to have taken down the announcement on their websites at the day’s end. Their Facebook and Twitter followers responded with very appreciative comments, affirming the idea that people do seek solace in museums. One commenter said, “thank you for giving us a sanctuary.”

ICA by Vanderlin on Flickr

I don’t want to take advantage of a bad situation to make a point. If you are not comfortable reading about the administrative side of the response to the tragedy, here are some articles you may prefer: USA Today’s sampling of the kind things people did, a comedian’s serious response to what happened, and Boston.com’s list of ways to help.

For those still reading, I wanted to share one thing on my mind: making a museum free for a day is not free for the museum. While only about seven percent of the MFA’s revenue comes from admissions, adult tickets to the MFA are $25 per person, and that adds up. On average, the institution brings in $18,880 in ticket sales per day ($6,79700 in admissions revenue for 2013 /360 open days per year – data from their 2012 annual report). While museum visitation tends to vary highly by season, April is likely to be the midpoint, so an “average” day is probably more or less representative of what they would have made on April 16 if they had charged admission. The MFA essentially made a $19k donation to the city of Boston and to the community visiting for the marathon. Comparable data is not available for the ICA or the Gardner, because they report their ticket and program income together, but adult tickets are $15 at each institution, and that adds up too.

To me, the fact that these institutions opened their doors for free is a powerful argument that running nonprofits well cannot be done on a shoestring, break-even budget. While skeptics, and some funders, feel that lean budgets ensure that nonprofits are responsible with their money, nonprofits are actually more able to be responsible members of their communities when they have a robust budget. The institutions that offered free admission, with no way to have planned for Monday’s events, must have enough wiggle room in their budgets to withstand an unexpected loss in revenues, either permanently or until a donor or several respond with their own generosity. They may find that the goodwill they built was a good economic investment, or it may always be a loss on the balance sheet, but they did it anyway. The money may have come from risk capital or from building extra room in their budgets for seasonal ups and downs. Regardless of the mechanism, an institution constrained by a “lean” budget that constantly watching the bottom line would not have been able to afford to offer a spontaneous free day without its leaders wondering if it would jeopardize their ability to make payroll at some point down the road.

Whatever else you may say about how nonprofits run their finances, what the MFA, ICA, and Gardner did was commendable. They participated in a community effort to support everyone affected by the events, directly and indirectly, and gave people a place to go be with their neighbors and reflect on the beauty in the world.