We promised to “us[e] these final months to make connections across the threads of different investigations we’ve done and articles we’ve written over the years, tie up loose ends, and, as much as we can, tease out what it all means for practice.” Here’s how we delivered on that promise:

• We published four issue briefs summarizing our research, lessons learned, and open questions on arts participation, cultural equity, arts careers, and the benefits of the arts.
• We offered a final, holistic set of recommendations for arts philanthropists and advice to arts researchers, building on all of our work to date.
• As a special bonus, we did a roundup of the Top 10 Arts Stories of the Decade since we’ve been covering the field.
• We’ve updated our Higher Education Resource Guide with these and other materials published since it was originally released last summer. We’ve also made it easier to access – no need to fill out a form before you get a link to the PDF.
• We just updated our research process page and included links to some of the training materials we’ve used to get our editorial team and contributing associates up to speed on capsule review writing, rapid research screening, and more. And if you’re interested in getting even deeper under the hood, just ask.

In addition, you might find the following of interest:

• The estimable Barry Hessenius interviewed me for his blog shortly after the news of our sunset went live. In it, I go into greater detail on the reasoning behind the decision and what I think it means for our sector.
• The forthcoming winter issue of the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader has an article by yours truly about why arts research is broken and what we can do to fix it. No direct link yet, but it will be available here by early March.
• For those of you missing our monthly Newsroom roundups, we offer a whole page that has links to the primary sources we drew from to generate that piece every month. But if you’re pressed for time, here is what I suggest: subscribe to ArtsJournal, GIA News, and (if your work involves arts research in any capacity) the Cultural Research Network. If you can check off those three you’ll be doing pretty well in the staying informed department.

Although Createquity’s journey has come to a close, I’m far from done writing, and I have several interesting projects in the hopper that will involve exploring the challenges and opportunities of effective strategy, learning, and decision-making across the social sector (not limited to the arts). The materials and tools I’m developing as part of that exploration will be relevant to anyone trying to make a difference in the world, whether you’re an individual donor, foundation, government agency, or investor. If you’d like to keep posted on this work, feel free to sign up here and I will make sure you are added to any forthcoming email lists.

Before I sign off, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my deepest thanks to everyone who has helped make this possible, from that scary moment when I sent an email to my contacts telling them to look out for the launch of a new website (for which I had yet to write any content) on October 26, 2007. Thank you to Nancy Livingston, who as my second-year advisor in business school encouraged me to get over my anxieties about starting a blog and suggested the commitment device that led to me getting Createquity off the ground. Thank you to Jonathan Koppell, who let me use original blog posts for Createquity as graded assignments for the independent study we did on arts policy at the Yale School of Management, greatly enhancing the richness of the content offered there. Thank you to Thomas Cott and Doug McLennan, who each provided syndication support that was instrumental in Createquity’s audience growth in the early years – and a special extra thank you to Doug for providing such an invaluable resource in ArtsJournal all these years and for donating classified advertising to our cause. Thank you to Tommer Peterson, who invited me to be the first-ever official conference blogger for Grantmakers in the Arts after encountering my writing at Createquity, first exposing both me and my writing to that community in a relationship that would continue to blossom over the decade to follow. Thank you to Adam Huttler, who has followed along from the very beginning and, after inviting me to join the team at Fractured Atlas, gave me the autonomy I needed to pursue my vision for Createquity without interference from my day job. Thank you to Rob Weinert-Kendt for giving us the best pull quote ever, which we still use to this day (“so amazingly good it’s almost in its own category of resource”). Thank you to Barry Hessenius and Nina Simon for using your own considerable bully pulpits in support of Createquity at crucial moments. Thank you to Sunil Iyengar at the National Endowment for the Arts for inviting Createquity to be the first entity to formally respond to drafted plans for the agency’s new 5-year research agenda in 2016. Thank you to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Fractured Atlas, the Howard Gilman Foundation, CultureLab/Alan Brown, Mailchimp, and everyone who donated to our crowdfunding campaign or subsequent appeals for providing crucial financial support. Finally, thank you to everyone who was part of the sausage-making process: our current and former editorial team members, particularly Talia Gibas and Daniel Reid who were the first to take the plunge with me and my thought partners in designing the new Createquity some four years ago, along with John Carnwath, Katy Coy, Jack Crager, Michael Feldman, Louise Geraghty, Katherine Gressel, Jackie Hasa, Katie Ingersoll, Shawn Lent, Carlyn Madden, Ruth Mercado-Zizzo, Fari Nzinga, Rebecca Ratzkin, Clara Inés Schuhmacher, Devon Smith, Salem Tsegaye, Lauren Warnecke, and Benzamin Yi; our advisory council members, Norman Bradburn, Harris Cooper, Marian Godfrey, Maria Rosario Jackson, Carlos Manjarrez, John Paxson, and Angelique Power; our contributing associates and other volunteers, Andrew Anzel, Daniel Arnow, Caitlin Butler, Ben Coy, Ally Duffy, Sarah Frankland, Shelly Hsieh, Teresa Koberstein, Miguelina Nuñez, Ron Ragin, Michael Rushton, Michael Spicher, Michael Wilkerson, Stephanie Wykstra, Sacha Wynne, and Guy Yedwab; and our Createquity Fellows, Alicia Akins, Aaron Anderson, Lindsey Cosgrove, Kelly Dylla, Crystal Wallis Graves, Tegan Kehoe, Jennifer Kessler, Jena Lee, Hayley Roberts, Jacquelyn Strycker, and Dan Thompson (in addition to Jackie, Katherine, and Talia mentioned above). Whew! Apologies if I left anyone out. Most of all, thank you – yes, you, on the other end of that screen – not only for welcoming us into your life, but for staying with us to the end.

With that, it really is time to say goodbye, with best wishes for a productive, fulfilling, and safe 2018 to all. It has truly been a pleasure and a privilege.

“The Blue Marble,” by flickr user Chris Jupin

Every December since 2009, Createquity has compiled the Top Ten Arts Policy Stories of the Year, ranking the impact of key issues from a global perspective. With the end of this year coinciding with the last rays of Createquity’s sunset, we didn’t want to leave our loyal readers hanging – and so we’ve decided to do our traditional roundup looking back not just on 2017, but on the whole ten years that Createquity has been around!

It turns out that a lot can change in a decade. While selecting which stories are “most important” inherently involves some editorial guesswork, we have tried to use some semblance of a formal methodology, incorporating criteria like how many people were affected by a given story, how deeply, for how long, and how much of that impact was specific to the arts? Below is our selection of the Top Ten Arts Stories of the Decade, compiled by members of our editorial team with individual authorship indicated at the end of each item.

1. New tech and media swallow the world whole

When Apple founder Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he touted three key innovations: its blending of an iPod media player with a smartphone; its widescreen, multi-touch interface; and its internet friendliness. All three proved pivotal in the subsequent decade’s tech revolution. Apple’s iOS quickly stoked competition from Google’s Android OS to put the “internet in every pocket” of global citizens (now in 2 billion+ and counting), in turn catalyzing the hothouse growth of industries including audiobooks and podcasts and electronic games (while helping kill off others such as compact cameras). The proliferation of social media platforms – including Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Tumblr, and Instagram – transformed networking and distribution patterns for creative professionals and their audiences, dramatically reshaping how we access and filter information in our daily lives.

All the while, internet service providers have been keeping pace with phone and app makers in their quest to continually increase broadband speed and access. The result? A media-streaming revolution that has sparked its own race for consumer dollars between corporate giants including Netflix, Apple, Disney, 21st Century Fox, AT&T (via Amazon – wait – make that Time Warner) and Sony, each trying to outmaneuver each other in both content creation and consumer distribution. Depending on your view, the Peak TV phenomenon is a boon for watchers, an ominous power-grab, or a societal antidote to the arts themselves. But then, television is so 20th century. Enter the new tech art forms: virtual reality and augmented reality are competing among global users to enhance everything from ballet performances to gaming on the go.

All the above innovations are underscored by the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence itself. As machines show creative capabilities to rival those of humans, AI projects are demonstrating mastery of tasks ranging from besting champs at complex games to self-driving cars; from creating lip-syncing videos to teaching salsa lessons. Advances in AI now enable Google’s Translate service to crank out translations in literature that are almost indistinguishable from those of humans. The excitement of these developments is tempered by growing fears of rampant automation and machines displacing artists, even taking over the world.

Regardless of how it turns out, the ubiquity and scope of Silicon Valley’s wonders qualify as the single most impactful arts story of the past decade. Discourse on the intersection between technology and the arts has often tended toward the trite (remember how QR codes were supposed to revolutionize…something?), but we see the relationship as something far deeper and more fundamental to the human experience every day. For good or ill, the disruptions of New Tech – and the mysteries of where they are headed – remain on a path of constant acceleration. –Jack Crager

2. China rises as a global power in arts and entertainment  

In 2006, the Asia Times Online published an article lamenting that China, despite its ballooning economy, lacked influence in the cultural sphere. Today – thanks to that ballooning – the story is quite different: in fine art, film, gaming and even music, China has arrived. The country holds steady at third place worldwide in the global art market (behind the United States and the United Kingdom) with an 18% share. The surge in art collecting by mainland Chinese was first noted in 2011, and now that China has eclipsed the United States in its number of billionaires, the trend will surely continue upward, especially as younger collectors begin to take on the (art) world. In July 2016, the Taikang life insurance company (run by the founder of Guardian, China’s first government-run auction house) became Sotheby’s largest shareholder, augmenting China’s influence in this sphere. We’re not just talking the realm of the super-rich: Beijing’s National Museum was ranked the world’s most-visited museum in 2016. In fine art, trends have tacked toward consumption of imported works, but elsewhere China shows major gains in production of original content. On the silver screen, Ernst & Young’s 2012 predictions that China would be the world’s biggest film industry by 2020 seem to be manifesting ahead of schedule. In November, Chinese box office revenue surpassed $7.5 billion, and a nationalist, homegrown film – not a Hollywood export – fueled it: Wolf Warrior 2 is the second-highest grossing movie of all time in a single market (behind 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and we can expect to see more of the same, given China’s plans for a new $2 billion film studio in Chongqing and its recent history of buying up big players such as Dick Clark Productions and Legendary Entertainment. On smaller screens, in 2017 China overtook the U.S. as “gamer capital of the world,” with global revenues hitting $100 billion, thanks largely to smartphones. Especially notable is that 93% of all money spent by Chinese gamers go to titles developed by Chinese-based companies. Even China’s music market, which historically has been small, is showing robust growth in the world of streaming, and Western labels are looking to China as a new potential market. The Cultural Development Action Plan for 2016-2020, part of the Belt and Road initiative announced in 2013, was released earlier this year, providing further direction to these increased cultural opportunities.

So far China and the Trump administration have not been fast friends. Yet for U.S. companies, the allure of a untapped market is hard to resist: Nintendo, Google, Apple and Hollywood each have already made concessions to Chinese interests as they vie for a piece of the pie. Some in Congress are concerned, and for good reason: China ranks 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, and its airtight Great Firewall includes bans on most social media networks and news sites that reflect a negative image of the country. (Createquity has previously covered China’s repressive tactics including virtual borders, film regulations, and cultural censorship of television and the arts.) China is a country of 1.4 billion people – more than four times the population of the U.S. and twice that of Europe – and, yes, there is (a lot of) money to be made. But at what cost?

The implications of China’s growth will be felt first by China itself – we can expect a type of lost generation as it all comes to a head, especially considering that 40% of this socialist society currently lives on $5.50 a day. The implications for the rest of us will follow: the impact of China as a global force in entertainment will affect business models, jobs, language, tolerance for human rights – even creativity itself – in ways we cannot yet imagine. –Clara Inés Schuhmacher

3. Democracies around the world curb freedom of expression

Events of the last decade have demonstrated that free expression for artists and media is a critical indicator of the strength (and struggles) of a country’s democracy. In recent years we’ve seen an upward trend in the suppression of artistic freedom of expression throughout the world, with ostensibly democratic governments headed by authoritarian leaders attempting to exert tighter control of the media and use their roles as financial supporters of the arts to control the creation and content of various art forms, all as part of a broader strategy to consolidate and maintain power. Under the increasingly iron-fisted rule of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has forged a track record of suppressing free expression, including targeting cultural dissidents through state-run television. These trends will likely continue should Putin “win” his election as president for a fourth term extending to 2024, as is widely expected. Meanwhile in Turkey, a failed coup resulted in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shutting down 29 publishing houses and ramping up his jailing of journalists who are critical of the government. Erdoğan’s reaction to the coup continues an alarming trend toward authoritarian rule since his rise to national power in 2003 – further amplified last spring by his (contested) narrow victory in a national referendum granting the president new, sweeping powers.

Although Russia and Turkey are the clearest examples of democracies going down the drain over the past ten years, several other countries are veering gradually or rapidly in the same direction. In Hungary, the government has continued to place tighter restrictions on the media since right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s election in 2010. The Hungarian Academy of Art (MMA) became a state institution in 2011, exerting control over governmental support of the arts and other state-run cultural institutions. In 2016, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed new media laws giving his government the authority to appoint the heads of public television and radio (which has been met with various forms of resistance); the government has also tried to control the dominant narrative around historical events through its support of museums. Venezuela’s political and economic unrest has resulted in President Nicolas Maduro canceling a government-sponsored tour of the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gustavo Dudamel, a native Venezuelan musician trained through the country’s renowned El Sistema program. Dudamel had recently become more critical of the government’s repressive tactics, including the shooting of young Venezuelan violist Armando Cañizales. In Israel, Miri Regev continues to use her role as the Minister of Culture and Sports to support artists who demonstrate loyalty to her nationalist message (though she’s discovering the limits to the power of her office). Even in the U.S., the election of Donald Trump has triggered concerns that the president would use the office to intimidate political opponents, including artists and journalists, just after the previous two administrations amassed unprecedented powers to spy on American citizens. The lesson? Democracy is more fragile than we thought, and the voices of creators are crucial to keeping it intact. –Ruth Mercado-Zizzo

4. Artists and audiences get caught up in terrorism’s wake

During the past decade the global impact of terrorism by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or Dae’esh ‘داعش’) – as well as other groups including Boko Haram, TAK, Ansar Dine, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda, plus numerous far-right and lone-wolf actors – reverberated throughout the arts community, which has endured attacks on tangible cultural heritage, on free speech, and on artists and their fans. The destruction of antiquities has been particularly extensive and in many cases absolute, with 2015 being an especially tragic year for heritage crimes from Mosul Museum to Sabratha, Nimrud, Hatra, Palmyra, and beyond. The problem is complex and it extends beyond destruction: a 2015 report found that ISIS was taking 20% or more of the revenue (that’s hundreds of millions in USD) from the systematic resale of blood antiquities on the black market in the Western art trade (although some believe this is an overestimation.) The impact on Syria recalls similar attacks on cultural heritage in Iraq, Yemen, and Mali; in the later, a perpetrator pled guilty and was for the first time ever sentenced by the International Criminal Court for war crimes against cultural heritage. ISIS has even incorporated Hollywood-style screenwriting and cinematographic techniques to augment its recruitment tools. In response, it turns out that the world cares very much about its shared heritage: archaeologists are racing to digitize the Middle East’s historical sites before they are destroyed, and in 2016, France and the United Arab Emirates announced a $100 million Cultural Heritage protection fund. Most recently, CBS ordered the television series “Blood and Treasure” on the subject for summer 2019.

But terrorists’ crusades against free speech have extended well beyond archeological sites, directly targeting the lives of creators and their audiences. Aggressions have included the assassination of a Somalian comedian in 2012, the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in February 2015, and the 2016 murder of Amjad Sabri, one of Pakistan’s most famous and respected musicians. But it is the attacks on large groups people – enjoying themselves in cultural spaces – that have most shattered our sense of reality. The past few years have seen cultural venues joining sports stadiums, churches and mosques, open-air markets and transportation hubs as regular targets for terrorist attacks and other mass shootings around the world. Years of seemingly relentless attacks have taken place at the Shingar Cinema in India, a British cultural council in Afghanistan, the Century Aurora movie theater in Colorado, La Bataclan music hall in Paris, National Bardo Museum in Tunis, Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival in Las Vegas, and sadly more.

The world has responded in a couple of ways. One reaction has been to hunker down: train staff in crisis response, step up police presence at major museums, purchase Terrorism Risk Insurance, and hold international conferences on culture and terrorism. The alternative has been to open up. Following the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon, several local museums opened free as places of respite for the community. The Tunis museum reopened to the public just 12 days after the attack there and some of the looted museums in Yemen became shelters for displaced residents. Amidst and despite these acts of terror, artists and their institutions continue to gather and to create work – supporting the United Nations’ 2015 Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, and each of us. –Shawn Lent

5. The Great Recession wreaks havoc on the global economy

Though many of its most acute effects have now waned, the Great Recession cast a gloomy backdrop behind the other key news stories of the first half of the decade. Driven by fevered investment in questionable assets such as subprime mortgage loans, the money-making party stopped with the failure of financial giants such as Lehman Brothers, AIG, and others in the fall of 2008. The fallout slammed an abrupt correction on private investment and dampened funding for arts organizations in both nonprofit and for-profit sectors. During the downturn arts council funding in many states took a nosedive, and those in Kansas and South Carolina, among others, survived near-death experiences. To their credit, the arts and nonprofit sectors responded with a series of creative solutions and financial adaptations. And in many ways the recession is now past-tense, given the continuing U.S. economic recovery, the soaring stock market, downward-ticking unemployment, and the stabilizing effect of reforms. Yet other remnants of the downturn – such as the permalance labor market, the stagnation of wages, and ongoing fiscal battles – simply represent a “new normal.” Some experts point out that the recovery has been historically weak and sluggish and that recent unemployment figures actually reflect growing cultural disparity. Others warn that prevailing U.S. political priorities – namely the recently enacted Republican tax bill – portend reduced charity giving and cuts to housing for artists, while the specter of a ballooning deficit threatens the ability of the government to respond to the next economic downturn. Amid all the economic and political hoopla, one thing is clear: given the cyclic nature of history, there is no reason to believe that the Great Recession couldn’t happen again. –JC

6. Racial equity becomes a rallying cry for arts policy and philanthropy

The past ten years have produced a flurry of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the arts, prompted by the efforts of artists of color and the communities that support them. These efforts have gained significant ground thanks to grantmakers restructuring their criteria to address long-standing inequities in the arts ecosystem. Foundations and national agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Council England adopted new policies, resulting in organizations attempting to diversify their staffs and promote wider representation in race, cultural background, gender, and sexual orientation – onstage, backstage, and on screen. The results of these efforts can be hard to gauge: for example, despite Hollywood waking up to its “diversity problem” and an #oscarssowhite movement that contributed to the 2017 Academy Awards honoring the most diverse pool of contenders to date, there’s little evidence yet that it’s more than just a blip on the radar, and 2018 is predicted to be #oscarsstillsowhite. And it’s not just about the film industry: funding gaps continue to be a problem in rural areas and among communities of color across the arts sector. The increased interest in racial equity and social justice takes place against a backdrop of larger cultural shifts in the United States and worldwide: the past decade has witnessed both the election of first African-American president and a sharp increase in racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiment. In the U.S., the Black Lives Matter movement has strongly influenced conversations about racial equity, while in Canada and Australia that issue centers more on reconciliation with Indigenous populations – particularly prominent this year during a series of controversies surrounding cultural appropriation in publishing and journalism.

There’s still a long way to go, especially considering how growing nationalism impacts equity in the arts, and divergent views remain about what constitutes cultural equity based on the art produced or funded by any given organization or agency. But many artists, organizations, and policymakers seem to be ready to disrupt the status quo in ways that they did not ten years ago, with debates on equity in the blogosphere and funding policies for equity and inclusion marking a shift toward de-centering whiteness and acknowledging the schools of thought and traditions of culturally diverse arts practitioners. –Lauren Warnecke and Fari Nzinga

7. Asian governments make huge investments in cultural infrastructure

The past decade has seen substantial fluctuation in governmental arts funding around the world with developing countries, particularly throughout Asia, spending big on modern-day cultural palaces and sweeping public initiatives. New initiatives include a $27 billion mixed-use development in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; a $2.3 billion development of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong; the building of a $2 billion film studio in Chongqing, China; and a state-funded Artist Welfare program in South Korea, which insured nearly 24,000 resident artists. (Some of China’s other investments are discussed in item #2 above.) This largesse occurred against a backdrop of Great-Recession-induced cuts in arts funding in traditionally generous Western Europe; in particular, state arts appropriations in Holland and England were cut by 25% and 22% respectively, with other European countries following close behind. To the south, Australia cut 70% of grants to individual artists as part of a stressful period of upheaval in that country’s arts funding structure, and Brazil got rid of its Ministry of Culture altogether, albeit briefly. One contrasting bright spot is Canada, which saw a doubling of its Arts Council funding to $1.9 billion from 2016 to 2021 under the administration of Justin Trudeau.

Many governments have turned to unique funding initiatives to ensure that their tightened purses are being spent appropriately (see Italy and Brazil’s voucher programs and the United Kingdom’s much-debated Quality Metrics program). It should also be noted that declaring winners and losers based on national arts funding alone tells an incomplete story, as some of the new heavy hitters have been accused of inhumane labor practices and harsh government crackdowns while some of the countries that have scaled back have seen increases in private sponsorship. –Andrew Anzel

8. The never-ending battle over net neutrality continues to not end

When Net Neutrality first landed on Createquity’s Top Ten Stories of 2010, the angle was “this is a story that is still being told.” We’re still in the telling. This contentious debate has polarized the tech-policy world since the term “network neutrality” was coined by Tim Wu in 2003, and it shows no signs of letting up, especially after the Federal Communications Commission’s recent repeal of regulations put in place by the Obama administration that were supposed to have laid the issue to rest once and for all.

Here’s how the battle lines are drawn: the pro-net neutrality camp calls for a free, fast and fair internet, where everyone gets equal access to everything. This side argues the internet is a basic human right and a critical tool for social movements, small businesses and start-ups. (Content providers from Netflix to Etsy and Kickstarter tend to be in this camp.) Opponents (usually broadband providers, like AT&T and Verizon) argue the internet should be left to free-market forces. The story begins in 2005, when Bush-era FCC Chairman Michael Powell first articulated a policy of network neutrality. This policy was tested the following year, when the FCC ordered Telco to stop blocking VoIP, and light-ish regulation followed, with the FCC going after AT&T and Apple, MetroPCS, and Verizon, among other efforts. In 2008, the White House switched hands, and the Obama-era FCC delivered major wins for the pro camp: in 2010, it introduced the Open Internet Order (with new guidelines prohibiting discrimination on “wired” services) and in 2015, following a lost lawsuit to Verizon, it voted along party lines in favor of classifying broadband Internet as a public utility. This was vote hailed as historic by advocates of a fair, fast and open Internet and many considered the battle won. (Createquity’s coverage of Obama-era net neutrality stories ranges from victories for proponents to appeals-court reversals to debates within the administration over policy.)

Then, of course, came the election of Donald Trump. Just days past his confirmation in early 2017, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai began rolling back the Obama-era regulations, and in November, Pai released a plan to repeal the 2015 ruling classifying broadband as a public utility. On December 14, despite fake comments and calls to delay (from its own Commissioners, Senators, and the City of New York), the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 rules. As before, the vote was along party lines – and hailed as historic, this time by advocates of deregulation.

So what now? In the short term, expect a slew of lawsuits and Congressional action. But here’s the thing: this is 2017, not 2003. Today we’re in a Google-Amazon-Facebook oligopoly world, and Big Tech has been conspicuously quiet this time around, suggesting they may be rich enough not to care. Some, like award-winning jazz musician Maria Schneider, say net neutrality be damned: we’ve already lost big to Google, and companies had already been denying us content access even under the Obama-era guidelines. And let’s not ignore the regulatory gap created by the AT&T vs. the Federal Trade Commission case, which rules that the FTC is banned from regulating a company if they are, even in a small way, regulated by the FCC. If there’s one thing that both sides can agree on, it’s that the internet is increasingly central to our lives – and the more it matters, and the more money there is to be made, the more we’ll fight about it. –CIS

9. The (near-)death of arts journalism

“It’s not that the book critic goes before the city hall reporter. It’s that the book critic goes before the guy who covers high school hockey,” wrote Jed Gottlieb in a comprehensive review on the state of arts criticism last January. Buzz about the impending demise of arts journalism started gaining steam around 2008 (though troubling signs were in evidence well before that). A flurry of publications – ranging from newspapers like the San Jose Mercury News and the Houston Chronicle to magazines like Time and Newsweek – have slashed A&E sections due to declining subscriptions, free-falling ad revenues, and questions about the relevance of arts criticism in the age of social media, when seemingly everyone is a critic. Even stolid institutions like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have not been immune to cuts to arts and entertainment coverage. In the aftermath, arts critics are opting for buyouts, shifting (by choice or not) to freelance positions or other beats, or exiting the field altogether. News outlets have answered declining readership by pushing writers to create generalized content (read: puff pieces) that arts patrons and hockey dads alike will click on their e-readers, keeping dwindling ad revenue rolling in (for now). Yet critical arts writing has seen a resurgence in alternative venues, with foundations and arts service organizations committing dollars and programs toward initiatives driving innovation in arts criticism and nonprofit journalism, including the emergence of artist-critics who both make and comment on art. To some, however, these shifts can create questionable conflicts of interest. Debate continues – mainly among writers, some employed, and some not – over whether the loss of the independent arts critic’s subjective, evaluative voice will prove a bigger blow than artists would like to admit. –LW

10. Obamacare passes and survives…so far

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, topped our annual review of Arts Policy Stories back when it became law in 2010. Over the years we watched Obamacare have a rocky start, overcome two challenges in the Supreme Court, and battle against increased premiums. Still, we believe Obamacare has been the piece of federal legislation that has most deeply affected the arts ecosystem in the United States in the past ten years. We think this for three reasons. First, by increasing affordable healthcare options for freelance and low-income folks, Obamacare reduces the financial risk often associated with careers in the arts and may allow more individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to enter the field. Second, lower out-of-pocket healthcare expenses (after taking subsidies into account) for previously uninsured artists may allow artists to spend less time working non-artistic “day jobs” and more time in their artistic medium. Finally, by reducing out-of-pocket expenses for newly insured folks (although not the promised $2,500 annually), Obamacare affords individuals more disposable income to participate in the arts. While several attempts by the Trump administration and current Congress to dismantle Obamacare have failed, the recently signed tax legislation could dramatically elevate costs by repealing the insurance mandate. Congress has acknowledged that such increases could also be used to justify cutting $1.3 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid, both of which enroll artists. Even so, Obamacare, or something like it, is likely to exist for at least a little while longer, to the continued benefit of the arts ecosystem. –AA

Honorable mentions

• Corporate media consolidation
• The rise of Kickstarter and equity crowdfunding
• The 2016 U.S. presidential election
• Culture and its place in global Sustainable Development Goals
• Detroit Institute of Arts rescues/is rescued by Detroit
• The rise and (partial) fall of creative placemaking
• The rise of effective altruism and tech philanthropy

Photo by João Silas on Unsplash

A Collective Approach to Building Knowledge

One of the most basic concepts in economics is that of a “public good” – a product or service that does not get “used up” as more and more people use it. Knowledge, by this definition, is pretty much the epitome of a public good – in fact, the more people that use it, the more valuable it arguably becomes.

Sadly, the incentives facing arts researchers push them to operate in silos, sacrificing the efficiency and potential that a more intentional, shared approach would bring. If you’re a researcher who wants to earn a living and you’re not in academia, you’re basically at the mercy of a fragmented market of funder and arts organization clients, most of whom have very parochial concerns and who rarely coordinate with one other on their research goals. In our experience, many of those in a position to commission research at these organizations have limited if any research training themselves, constricting their ability to exercise independent judgment on the best methods and designs for the job in the context of a rapidly evolving profession. Consultants and nonprofits who conduct such research seldom retain much control over the process and deliverable requirements of such efforts, making a centralized and consistent strategy for building knowledge quite difficult to execute. In addition, research contracted as work for hire often carries an implicit or explicit presumption of confidentiality, meaning that some of the most interesting work to understand the field is never made public at all.

College- and university-based researchers may have more autonomy over their portfolios, but face a separate challenge of visibility for their work. In all my years of following and participating in national arts conversations, I have never encountered a single arts funder or non-academic organization leader who makes a practice of reading arts-related research published in academic journals. (This is by no means an arts-specific phenomenon, by the way; a 2007 study estimated that half of all journal articles are only ever read by their authors, editors, and peer reviewers.) And if faculty members want to access funding beyond their internal department or university resources in order to take on larger-scale projects, they are subject to the same warped funding dynamics discussed above and in our previous recommendations piece.

All of these circumstances add up to an intense tragedy of the commons scenario in arts research. Even though research on neglected topics would provide benefits to a widely dispersed audience, it doesn’t happen because no single player is willing to take on the cost and risk of investing in it on their own. As a result, people pay a lot of good money for bad research, and don’t pay money for good research that could be happening instead.

This is not a problem that’s going to be solved overnight, but a clear step in the right direction would be for more convening, collaboration, and coordination between arts researchers, practitioners, and funding bodies. Createquity is not the first to call for such a change, but we see a different path forward than the one past efforts have tried to hew. Historically, the little convening that has taken place among arts researchers has tended toward light-touch facilitation, with no real goal (and thus, no outcome) other than to provide a space to share and learn from one another’s work. While better than nothing, this type of convening is ill suited toward the much more critical (and useful) task of developing a shared research agenda and coordinating a division of labor for the field.

During its life, Createquity offered a demonstration of how one might go about pursuing this latter goal, and we consider that to be one of our organization’s most valuable legacies as we prepare to sunset at the end of this year.

To Get Answers that Mean Something, Ask Questions that Matter

Since Createquity’s relaunch three years ago, the overarching research question driving all of our work has been this one: “what are the most important issues in the arts, and what can we do about them?”

In order to actually answer this, we needed to decide what “importance” means from the perspective of the arts ecosystem. We started off by defining what a healthy arts ecosystem actually looks like, and continued by drawing an equivalence between the cross-disciplinary, holistic concept of wellbeing (or quality of life) and ecosystem health. Doing so enabled us to connect the arts to broader conversations across the social sector about human progress, and create a framework that would make it possible to compare priority areas within the arts against each other. Thus, by 2016, we were describing a healthy arts ecosystem as one in which “the maximum possible collective wellbeing is generated through the arts.” [Note that the use of a term like “maximum possible” is aspirational in the sense that Createquity must make judgments in an environment of significant uncertainty. We aimed with our work to create a fuzzy but fundamentally accurate picture of (a) the world that is and (b) the world that could be with the benefit of different choices.]

With those definitions in hand, we were able to operationalize our tagline as follows:

• “What are the most important issues in the arts?” ➤ “What are the biggest gaps between current conditions and the maximum collective wellbeing that could be generated through the arts?”
• “What can we do about them?” ➤ “For any given gap, what is the most promising strategy or set of strategies available to close it, after taking cost and risk into account?”

Our research approach placed these questions in the context of a three-phase process, ultimately leading to an advocacy campaign for some kind of concrete change in the sector (what we called a “case for change”):

Phase I, the Discovery Phase, involved examining a wide range of potential problems or opportunities in the arts in order to determine which ones were most pressing from the standpoint of increasing overall quality of life. Each of these gaps between present-day reality and the world that could be was conceived as a separate research investigation. So, many of the big feature articles that you may have read on Createquity, such as Why Don’t They Come?, were the direct result of a Discovery Phase investigation – in that particular case, an exploration of the extent to which socioeconomic disadvantage was interfering with adults’ ability to experience arts and culture as consumers.

We identified potential investigations through two routes: our own intuitions and experiences, and external input. The latter involved assessing the results of our reader polls, as well as feedback from our advisory council members. By blending these two methods, we could have some assurance that we were investigating issues that our audience cared about, while at the same time not ignoring neglected topics that might not be receiving the attention they deserve.

Each of these investigations involved a thorough review of the evidence in order to estimate as precisely as possible how many people are affected by each issue, by how much, and in what ways. The plan was to then move the most consequential of these issues into the second phase, where we would consider strategies to close the gap between the status quo and the better future that may be possible. Finally, where we’d identified both a significant gap and at least one promising strategy to address it, we’d develop a case for change that translates all of the learning we have undergone into concrete recommendations and calls to action.

In 2014, Createquity buckled down and went to work on the Discovery Phase, hoping to complete our work with a flexible and nimble structure of quasi-volunteers. Unfortunately, this structure proved ill equipped for the significant expenditure of time and mental bandwidth that a systematic evidence review requires, and as a result we were only able to complete a small fraction of our overall Discovery Phase research agenda in the time we had. If funding had been available, we would have pursued the rest of the work using an innovative model called the Synthesis Project.

Borrowing from regranting arrangements often used by foundations and public granting agencies to reach smaller organizations, artists, and communities that they don’t have the capacity to reach directly, the Synthesis Project was a strategy to dramatically scale up Createquity’s Discovery Phase work over a two-year period. In this model, funding and management of research is funneled through one organization which in turn subcontracts individual projects out at market rates to teams of consultants. Instead of one to two research investigations a year, there might then be eight to ten. And instead of multiple agencies managing different timelines and approaches, there would be one centralized agency (in this case, Createquity) coordinating and overseeing all research projects.

The goal of fast-tracking myriad research projects is to build and share knowledge fast enough so that it can be acted upon. This means we aren’t continually stuck in Discovery mode, and instead can move into Strategy and Advocacy phases with a smart prioritization of the relative levels of urgency associated with a wide range of problems and opportunities facing the arts sector. At different key moments, the collective review and reflection on myriad investigations could be used to prioritize areas for further field-wide research and advocacy.

Although Createquity was ultimately unable to transition the Synthesis Project from concept to reality, we still think it’s a great idea, and welcome efforts by others to adapt it in the future. The industry is rich with research that can and should be mined for the gems that will help us to determine where the greatest opportunities lie to advocate for and build a healthier arts ecosystem, and what questions still remain to be answered in order to help us get further along the path toward a case for change.

Specific Gaps in the Literature that We Already Know About

Although we only got through a small portion of our research agenda in the end, it was still enough to identify some glaring gaps in the literature that it would behoove the field to fill as soon as possible:

Arts Participation
From a series of Createquity investigations, we know that many people get their primary cultural fix from things like listening to the music soundtracks of popular TV shows or attending their child’s band rehearsal – activities that do not involve the nonprofit sector at all. The big unanswered question hanging over that observation is this: would nonprofit arts organizations offer a better or more varied type of experience for the people who aren’t currently being reached by them? In other words, does watching a popular television program foster the same benefit to those audience members that attending a live stage play does? And if it does, what is the policy justification for subsidizing the cost of providing the latter, but not the former?

Arts Careers
Much of the evidence currently available on the topic of socioeconomic status and access to arts careers is indirect and based on incomplete data. The vast majority of research on artists’ livelihoods only examines artists’ current socioeconomic status, not their status at the time when they were deciding what career to pursue (and earlier). We thus don’t know much about, for example, the extent to which having rich parents or not affects people’s ability to contemplate pursuing an arts career at all. In addition, we don’t know how the level of intrinsic interest people have in pursuing arts careers might vary across socioeconomic background and other demographic categories, regardless of the reasons.

Cultural Equity
The question mentioned above – how does the level of exposure to and/or interest in arts careers and arts administration jobs differ across race and other demographics (e.g. income, education) – has significant implications for cultural equity advocacy as well. In addition, we don’t know as much as we should about the ingredients of a cultural experience that people find valuable, and whether those ingredients are 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? 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? Finally, are arts activities designed to combat racism and other forms of oppression effective in that goal, and how do they compare to other anti-oppression strategies?

Benefits of the Arts
Research on the wellbeing effects of the arts could benefit from more longitudinal studies and more experimental and quasi-experimental designs, especially as regards the social and economic impacts of the arts. Even the very best work in this area (e.g., Mark Stern and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project) still traffics primarily in correlations rather than directly measuring causality. A good example of a study design that takes advantage of a natural experiment is Stephen Sheppard’s analysis of the economic impacts of the opening of MASS MoCA. More generally, it is likely that there is quite a bit of variation in wellbeing effects between disciplines, between different modes of artistic participation (e.g., passive, active, solitary, communal), and between categories of participants. Research syntheses and comparative studies looking specifically at these kinds of differences are generally few and far between.

Organizational Culture
In preparation for awarding of the inaugural Createquity Arts Research Prize, Createquity team members analyzed more than 500 arts research publications released in 2016; a similar process was underway for 2017 research before we made the decision to sunset the operation. An analysis of these publications confirms that very little publicly available research examines one of the most important open questions about the arts ecosystem: what motivates the decisions of donors, funders, and organizations supporting the arts. In particular, to what extent do wealthy individuals disproportionately shape ecosystem outcomes? And how can organizations and donors be incentivized to act in a more ecosystem-serving and wellbeing-maximizing way? We’ve seen a lot of theoretical literature and commentary on this, but very little empirical research, which is a major reason why the 2016 Createquity Arts Research Prize went to Mirae Kim for her work exploring these themes.

Other Observations

In the literature on the benefits of the arts, we very rarely see the impact of grantmakers analyzed as distinct from the impact of programs. When commissioned by grantmakers, such evaluations tend to imply that 100% of the credit for any success can be attributed to the grantmaker’s actions. Yet the truth is that some programs would have happened even without support from that particular grantmaker, and by choosing to spend money on that program the grantmaker is opting not to put that money somewhere else. We’d love to see more sophisticated approaches to determining the real impact of grantmaking decisions, not just the impact of the programs those decisions support.

There are a constellation of suboptimal funding practices in the realm of research and evaluation that deserve close scrutiny. For one thing, the field could benefit from more rationalization between the costs of research (broadly conceived) and the potential value of research. Funders rarely if ever seem to conduct explicit cost-benefit analysis when it comes to arts research. There is actually a methodology to do this that is not that hard to implement in its simplest form. We also strongly recommend against the practice of requiring grantees to demonstrate the impact of the grants they receive without offering to pay the full cost of generating that knowledge. Not only is such a posture unfair to the grantee, it sets up extremely warped incentives if the grantee’s continued funding is contingent upon a good evaluation and the grantee is also responsible for overseeing the evaluation. This would all be made much easier if funders were more willing to make use of existing research on the relevant category of intervention in their strategy design, and evaluate a representative sample of funded projects in the context of judging an overall portfolio rather than assuming an evaluation is needed for each and every investment.

Finally, it would be great to see more international collaboration on arts research. Some of the very best work these days is coming out of the UK, which seems to benefit from a far stronger knowledge infrastructure featuring the likes of NESTA, What Works Wellbeing, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been contacted in the past couple of years by Canadians eager to learn from their colleagues south of the border. And there are plenty of interesting arts research projects happening all over the world every day.

A Call for Leadership

The arts research field desperately needs a champion to provide leadership and make progress on the issues described above. Although the problems are serious, existing infrastructure like the Cultural Research Network could be leveraged to make progress on shared field goals, like developing a common research agenda, establishing and improving data standards, and co-funding valuable research projects that would be difficult to find a single champion for.

Who might be that champion? Almost anyone could step up to the plate, but in the United States, Grantmakers in the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts are probably the most obvious candidates. Alternatively, this could be a good role for a university entity like Vanderbilt’s Curb Center, SMU’s National Center for Arts Research, or Virginia Commonwealth University’s Arts Research Institute. We know that in Canada, an organization called Mass Culture is attempting to play this role, and additional policy and research efforts are underway at the Banff Centre.

Research can help us do our jobs better and make the world a more exciting, loving, and equitable place, but only if we give it the time and resources it needs. The infrastructure for building and spreading knowledge in the arts sector has long been under strain, if not entirely broken. But another world is indeed possible, and here we’ve tried to lay out the first steps toward making it a reality. The good people who work day in and day out to create experiences to cherish for a lifetime, and those who ultimately benefit from that programming, deserve nothing less.

Thanks to Rebecca Ratzkin for her contributions to this article.

Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

This article summarizes lessons learned, as well as recommendations going forward for foundations, government agencies, individual philanthropists, and others providing resources to support the arts. A subsequently published piece contains further recommendations aimed at people who commission and/or conduct arts research.

For the past three years and change, Createquity’s mission has been to research “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.” During that time, in networking meetings with potential donors or friends of the organization, I would often get questions along the lines of, “so what are the most important issues in the arts?” Or people might ask for advice on where a donor should give if she were interested in making the most impact in the field. For a long time, I resisted answering these kinds of questions directly, because Createquity’s approach involved deeply investigating a wide range of potential issues before coming to firm conclusions about which ones might be most deserving of our attention, or what kinds of actions we might want to advocate for. Now, however, with Createquity having announced its intention to cease operations at the end of 2017, the time has come to share what we do know – even if there are still significant gaps in that knowledge – and what we think it means for those trying to improve people’s lives through the arts.

Please note: the analysis that follows is a hybrid of formal evidence review, informed opinion based on our collective firsthand experiences working in the field, and logical inference. While we have tried to make it as clear as possible throughout, we welcome questions about what is (and isn’t) backing up specific assertions, and will respond to them in the comments as they come in.

Consider Your Funding from an Ecosystem Perspective

From the very beginning, Createquity has advocated for an ecosystem-level view in arts funding. We’ve actually gone so far as to write out a detailed definition of what a healthy arts ecosystem looks like in practice.

Okay, that sounds nice, but what does it actually mean? Think about it like this. An ecosystem is kind of like a big theatrical production. There are a bunch of different roles to be played, and effective casting in those roles is crucial to giving the audience a good show. Right?

So, the huge difference between a theatrical production and the arts ecosystem is that there is no director making those casting decisions. A bunch of people just walk up to the stage, pick a part they want to play, and go to it. Some of those people might be better suited to playing a different role than the one they chose. In some cases there are two (or more) people duplicating the same part, and constantly stepping on each other’s toes. Another actor might play a role brilliantly, but disappear for the second half, or refuse to share the stage with anyone else. It’s all just a big uncoordinated mess.

Our only hope of bringing some order to this chaos is to recognize that, whenever we design strategy for a new program or redesign an old program, we’re casting ourselves in one of these roles. And it might seem obvious to say, but I’ll say it anyway since it’s so important: when designing the role we want to play, we must ask ourselves, who else is in the cast? What are the roles that aren’t currently being covered? And which of those roles am I or my organization best suited for?

I want to specifically call out that, in my experience, the highest-leverage decision points are often the ones least likely to receive this level of scrutiny. Sure, you may have set up a committee or commissioned an external consultant to decide how to refine and move forward on some specific program that you piloted last year. But how much due diligence went into deciding why your organization exists at all? Its geographic focus and target population? The originating logic behind its flagship initiatives?

People are fond of calling for more leadership in the arts sector. But the thing about an ecosystem is that it is fundamentally leaderless. Which means that we all have to be leaders if any leadership is going to happen. And to me, in the context of grantmaking, that means all of us taking the time to thoroughly understand the arts funding landscape before deciding what role is most appropriate for us to play.

A good rule of thumb is to start with the premise that every other funder is not doing this – in other words, that every other funder is less strategic than you. That flies in the face of the philosophy of humble servant leadership that we’re taught to model in philanthropy. Even so, I would argue that it is a useful working assumption, because if you believe it, then you must believe that it is your responsibility to be the actor in the ecosystem who fills the gaps, who does what needs to be done and what no one else is willing to do. It is up to you to find out what what is needed and neglected, and prioritize that over what might get the best press or the fanciest gala tickets.

And the reality is that my assertion above is likely to be more true than not for anybody reading this. The majority of philanthropic contributions to the arts comes from individual donors, most of whom have a very transactional relationship with specific charities they support and who are notoriously difficult to organize as a constituency. A landmark study of donor motivations commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation concluded that only 16% of individual major donors are motivated by impact, and only 4% consider the effectiveness of an organization the “key driver” of a gift; I would guess that these numbers are even lower for arts donors. Another fifth or so of arts philanthropy comes from corporations, many of which are motivated less by the mission outcomes achieved by grantees and sponsorship recipients than by the benefits those relationships can offer to the brand.

The overarching lesson to take from all of this is that it’s crucial to conceive of arts philanthropy broadly. Resist the temptation to overspecify the solution before you truly understand the problem. We see a lot of programs, especially at organizations that give out smaller-sized grants, that have tons of restrictions on what can be funded, for how long, how the money must be spent, etc. While there may be reasons (like internal capacity constraints) that justify these decisions from the perspective of the granting organization, at a system-wide level this practice results in intractable gaps in the funding landscape and strongly distorts incentives for prospective grantees. Wherever possible, we recommend pushing for the maximum level of flexibility that your donor or ultimate stakeholder is comfortable with – and if the donor/stakeholder is you, pushing yourself to be as clear as possible about the outcomes you’re interested in while being as open-minded as possible about the pathways to accomplishing them.

Regardless of the more specific advice below, this is the most important. Take the time to understand how your work fits into the overall landscape of needs and opportunities in the sector. An eager audience is depending on you to do it.

Don’t Put Your Name on That Fancy Building

Several years ago, the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer made a splash in the arts community by writing a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Good Charity, Bad Charity,” which compared the merits of donating to help construct a new museum wing and donating to an organization fighting a disease that can cause blindness in the developing world. Whipping together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis, Singer wrote, “a donation to prevent trachoma offers at least 10 times the value of giving to the museum,” adding, “the answer is clear enough.”

Predictably, the arts blogosphere kind of freaked out, writing response after response defending or deflecting the practice of giving to the arts while characterizing Singer’s argument as “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” It turns out that Singer’s piece was part of a broader outreach effort on behalf of a movement called effective altruism, which is devoted to the idea of figuring out how to do the most good with the money and resources available to you. Effective altruists believe that answering such questions involves hard tradeoffs, and necessitates a discipline called “cause prioritization” at the very highest strategic level. Not surprisingly, the arts often serve as a convenient example for effective altruists of the sort of “bad” philanthropy to be avoided in favor of higher-potential giving opportunities.

Our instincts may tell us to get upset about this, but the reality is that museum wings are easy targets for effective altruists for a reason. There is an argument to be made that capital investments in fancy buildings are the single worst category of arts philanthropy there is, and may be among the most wasteful uses of (non-fraudulent) philanthropy in general.

How so? First of all, capital projects are enormously expensive. According to “Set in Stone: Building America’s New Generation of Arts Facilities, 1994-2008,” the most comprehensive review of the data on capital construction in the arts that we know of, the average cost of a building constructed by or for a nonprofit arts organization around the turn of the millennium was at least $21 million in 2005 dollars (equivalent to $26 million in 2017). At the extremes, a single project can cost as much as hundreds of millions of dollars, more than the entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Each year, arts organizations spend upwards of $1 billion on such campaigns, with most of that money coming from private philanthropy. Foundations devoted at least 10% and possibly as much as 38% of their arts budgets to capital projects in 2014, according to figures from the Foundation Center.

One major problem with capital projects sucking up so much donor interest is that they disproportionately benefit wealthy, established organizations presenting European art forms, often smack in the middle of places with very large populations of color. Moreover, artists rarely see a penny of this money; the most immediate beneficiaries of these expenditures are construction companies and their suppliers. Beyond equity concerns, however, capital projects frequently turn out to be bad investments even on their own terms: “Set in Stone” documents numerous cases of projects that failed to meet visitation benchmarks, exceeded expectations for ongoing maintenance costs, and/or ran over budget (by an average of 82% in the case of performing arts centers). The authors “found compelling evidence that the supply of cultural facilities exceeded demand during the years of the building boom … especially when coupled with the number of organizations [they] studied that experienced financial difficulties after completing a building project.”

This is not to say, of course, that every capital investment is a bad idea, or that arts organizations should never build new buildings. But given that buildings often come with ample opportunities to lure individual donors to the table (via naming rights, gala invitations, etc.), it’s even harder to defend institutional grantmakers’ investment in capital projects when there are so many more neglected priorities in the sector.

Where to Put That Money Instead

I’m admittedly biased on this one, but I believe strongly that our field has badly underinvested in knowledge. Annually, according to the Foundation Center figures cited above, just 2% of foundation arts grant dollars and 0.7% of grants go to research and evaluation. If my experience over the past decade is any guide, individual donors add virtually nothing to this total.

Even more concerning than the overall level of spending is the distribution of those resources. Existing research initiatives are heavily weighted toward primary data collection and analysis for specific, one-off projects, and most are limited in scope to a single geographic area, arts discipline, or both. As part of Createquity’s business planning process in 2016, we put together an exploratory graph of arts research initiatives, plotting them by breadth of geographic scope and where they sit on the spectrum between isolated data-gathering and more holistic efforts at building knowledge. You’ll see that, prior to its demise, Createquity stood virtually alone in the sector in focusing on the cumulative construction of knowledge through synthesis and interpretation of existing research – and yet even Createquity’s paltry annual operating budget for this work proved impossible to sustain.

This is a tremendously neglected area of arts funding, and that neglect has real consequences for how we all do our work. There is ample evidence that arts leaders are increasingly overloaded with information and need help making sense of it all. Because our field has not invested in the resources to make it possible to do so, it is likely that every day we are missing out on opportunities to shape the arts ecosystem for the better because we do not understand the evidence that’s already right in front of us. Indeed, the choices we are making may even be causing active harm.

As Createquity’s experience demonstrates, filling this gap and others related to our field’s knowledge infrastructure will require a new will to invest in field-building more generally. One of the persistent structural factors holding back such efforts is the difficulty of engaging individual donors in field-building conversations. Despite their importance to the arts ecosystem generally, in 15 years of working in this field I have yet to encounter a single effective strategy for organizing and communicating to individual donors about field leadership issues. Overall, individual donors represent a tremendous untapped opportunity to increase the arts field’s leadership capacity and overall potential for impact.

Moving on to more programmatic issues, there is a strong case to make that a worthy focus of arts philanthropy is advocacy to restore arts education cuts, especially for underprivileged youth at all age levels. Our judgment on this issue derives from several related observations. First, there is a lot of baseline evidence that arts education is beneficial for children, especially for those who have not yet entered formal schooling. Second, we know that in the United States, arts education cuts have disproportionately fallen on low-income families and black and Latino children. Finally, we have some glimmers of evidence that disadvantaged children benefit disproportionately from exposure to arts education. These factors, combined with the incredibly broad reach of arts education as compared with other types of arts interventions, suggest that evidence-based arts funders will find arts education of great interest. With that said, we should add the caveat that it is an arena already receiving a lot of attention, which may mean that much more work is necessary to create the political conditions for donor impact.

Speaking of evidence, Createquity’s review of the literature on the wellbeing benefits of the arts found that some of the strongest available research indicates that older adults and adults in clinical settings can benefit disproportionately from the arts. Participatory activities like singing, in particular, help to reduce anxiety and depression, improve subjective wellbeing, and even fend off the onset of dementia. And when it comes to attendance, according to the NEA’s research, nearly a quarter of adults aged 55 and older in persistent poor health were interested in going to an exhibit or performance in the past year but were not able to, which is a greater percentage than any other demographic examined in the report. This appears to be a highly neglected focus area; I am not aware of arts programs at any foundations in the United States with more than $1 billion in assets that have older adults or people in hospitals as the primary target audience.

Finally, on a more speculative note, it seems likely that the health of the arts ecosystem in the United States and beyond is more generally tied up with the health of the social safety net in those places. Many of the problems in the arts are reflections of larger issues that affect wide swaths of society. While the details of how they play out in the arts may be unique to the field, we can’t hope to solve them by focusing solely on our sector. When Createquity began developing a formal research agenda three years ago, I assured my colleagues on the editorial team that if our inquiry were to reveal that the most important issue in the arts is not an arts issue at all, they could count on me to make that case. Sure enough, after a decade of closely observing trends and shifts in arts policy, I’m more confident than ever that we are wasting our time if we are not taking society-wide issues like health care, wealth inequality, rapid technological progress, and structural racism into account when we develop arts and culture policy. We would do well to shift our working assumptions such that we believe an issue affecting the arts is not specific to the arts until proven otherwise, and therefore the solution to the issue is likely to live outside the arts as well. How can we work more effectively across issue-area and industry silos to make unified progress on these challenges that affect us all so deeply?

Suggestions for Individual Donors This Holiday Season

Createquity has always focused on the broad strokes of arts policy and philanthropy, and we’ve never positioned ourselves as a source of recommendations for individual charities to support. Still, every once in awhile I get requests to make those recommendations, particularly from people who don’t know the arts field very well and do not have strong existing commitments to specific organizations.

Although our recommendations are not as strongly rooted in evidence as those of, say, GiveWell, we do have a few ideas for donors whose primary area of concern is the United States:

• If you are interested in knowledge-building and field leadership issues in the arts, we recommend supporting Grantmakers in the Arts. GIA is the only entity deeply engaging grantmakers across disciplines, geographies, and sector boundaries, and is therefore best positioned to make strides organizing this constituency for greater impact. GIA has an existing knowledge-building function that we would like to see become significantly more robust. We’ve been pleased to see that the organization has begun engaging more foundation trustees in recent years, as well as more arts grantmakers outside the United States. In addition, it might be a good thing for the field if more individual donors, especially high-net-worth donors, were part of GIA’s revenue base and governing constituency.
• If you are interested in supporting arts education nationally, a donation to the Kennedy Center for the national Turnaround Arts program may not be a bad idea. An evaluation of Turnaround Arts from several years ago offered reasonably promising evidence for the effectiveness of its ambitious model (which uses arts integration as a holistic strategy to “turn around” failing schools), and the program has since expanded considerably. GIA and Americans for the Arts have national arts education advocacy initiatives, though we are not in a position to judge their effectiveness. Arts Education Partnership is a national arts education leadership organization that also has a research database called ArtsEdSearch.
• If you are interested in supporting arts opportunities for older adults or in clinical settings, several organizations in the US and UK have programs with solid evidence behind them, including TimeSlips, Elders Share the Arts, and Sing for Your Life’s Silver Song Clubs.
• If you are interested in supporting organizations in your local area, consider that smaller, grassroots arts organizations, particularly those rooted in communities of color, are more likely to be under-resourced relative to the benefit they are capable of providing. If you are not from the community that leads the organization you’re interested in supporting, however, do your homework first to confirm that your help is wanted before you offer it. Many local communities also have well-regarded arts education initiatives, such as Big Thought in Dallas and Ingenuity, Inc. in Chicago.
• Finally, while not a donation, we strongly suggest supporting ArtsJournal by purchasing a premium email subscription ($28/year) or classified advertising. ArtsJournal is a crucial news aggregation resource that has been the source of more than half the links offered in Createquity’s Twitter feed and monthly Newsroom articles over the past several years. Its content is generated from following hundreds of both mainstream and niche media publications and methodically curating the most relevant and thought-provoking content, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. Information resources like these are notoriously fragile in the digital era, and ArtsJournal is no exception: founder Doug McLennan has seemingly not taken a vacation from it in the ten years that Createquity has existed. Supporting ArtsJournal is a great option in particular for small-dollar donors who are not itemizing their deductions.

As much as we wish we could, we are unfortunately not in a position to make recommendations regarding charities outside of the United States at this time. We would love to see someone else take on that challenge, however!

Parting Thoughts

To be a philanthropist, whether the money is yours or simply has been entrusted to you, is a remarkable privilege in every sense of the word. The world is probably never going to see the day when literally everyone seeking to make the world a better place through the arts does so strategically and wholly without regard to self-interest. But the more we can nudge individuals, organizations, and actions in that direction, the more meaningful all of our work will become.

The magic of knowledge is that it is highly leveragable. What you have just read is a summary of a decade of inquiry into the inner workings and external context of the arts ecosystem. If the insights from that exercise ultimately guide even a mere handful of important decisions by well-placed individuals, it will all have been worth it in the end.

Until then, in this season of holiday generosity, and for many more on the horizon, we wish you happy giving and many happy (impact-adjusted) returns.

Hands, from Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam,” at Italianrenaissance.org

In Createquity’s view, a healthy arts ecosystem maximizes the arts’ capacity to improve the lives of human beings in concrete and meaningful ways. As such, we have sought to better understand the various means by which one measures such improvements, the current state of research across areas of impact, and where there’s room to grow.

Why We Care

Since the evidence base for the benefits of the arts is continually developing and evolving, our investigations in this area have been fairly expansive. We began by grounding our work in the concept of wellbeing – an emerging, interdisciplinary field of study in the social sciences centering on a holistic definition of individual and societal health – to look at the impact of the arts across multiple dimensions of human life. We wanted to better understand how other sectors define and measure wellbeing and quality of life, and how arts and culture might fit into these existing frameworks. This foundational investigation led to a subsequent inquiry into the following questions:

• What are particular claims to the benefits of arts participation?
• Does the majority of available evidence support each claim?
• How strong is the quality of evidence?

What We Know

Grounding our research in the concept of wellbeing helped to shape our definition of meaningful benefits as a result of arts participation. We learned that although most wellbeing frameworks do not explicitly include arts and culture, some do. The one most closely matching Createquity’s worldview is the capability approach originally proposed by economist Amartya Sen, which frames wellbeing in the context of human beings’ freedom to make choices about how to live their lives. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s elaboration of the capability approach embraces the arts’ influence on overall wellbeing both directly and indirectly via the capabilities of “senses, imagination, and thought” and “play,”  which may include active arts participation and creation, as well as observation, reflection, absorption and enjoyment of arts experiences.

Our subsequent review of research into arts and wellbeing – focusing on the benefits of the arts on a range of different wellbeing impact areas – fits into four broad areas of impact: physical and mental health, education and personal development, economic vitality, and social cohesion. Following is a list of benefits claimed for arts participation across these areas, categorized based on the strength of the evidence backing those claims.

We are highly confident that:

• Participatory arts activities help to maintain the health and quality of life of older adults.  There is evidence that singing improves mental health and subjective wellbeing; taking dance classes bolsters cognition and motor skills; dancing and playing a musical instrument reduce the risk of dementia; and visual arts generate increases in self-esteem, psychological health, and social engagement.
• Arts therapies contribute to positive clinical outcomes, such as reduction in anxiety, stress, and pain for patients. Music interventions tend to dominate studies in this area, mostly characterized by passive forms of participation (e.g., listening to music).
• Arts participation in early childhood promotes social and emotional development. For example, teachers report fewer instances of shy, aggressive, and anxious behavior among preschoolers taking dance classes, and toddlers receiving music instruction demonstrate increased social cooperation with other children.
• Student participation in structured arts activities enhances cognitive abilities and social skills that support learning, such as memory, problem-solving, and communication. (While arts participation may improve academic attainment as well, any effects are fairly small. Traditional scholastic measures such as standardized tests and grades have produced mixed evidence.)

We are moderately confident that:

• Community arts activities probably contribute to healthy living habits and improved understandings of health. A few mixed-methods studies have found among participants increases in healthy eating, physical activity, positive feelings, and other areas of personal development. However, it is difficult to know if these habits were sustained over time. Even in the case of sustained arts engagement, there is mixed evidence that it reduces mortality risk in adults.
• Arts and cultural participation probably improves subjective wellbeing (self-reported happiness or life satisfaction). Studies among large population samples cite both passive and active forms of art participation as important determinants of psychological wellbeing.
• Low-income students probably benefit disproportionately from access to arts education. Benefits such as improved cognitive abilities from music participation, or improved measures of tolerance for museum attendees, tend to be higher for students from low-SES households.

We have lower levels of confidence in the arts’ contributions to social cohesion and economic vitality, based on research we reviewed. For example,  participation in the arts may promote pro-social or civic behaviors like voting and volunteering, but the direction of the relationship is unclear – i.e., do pro-civic behaviors engender arts participation or vice versa, or is there is an underlying hidden value driving both behaviors? Evidence suggests that cultural participation may also contribute to economic growth through promotion of innovative workforce, and urban regeneration, but economic impact research is complicated by various confounding factors (e.g., planning policy, availability of jobs, general health of economy), making it difficult to really isolate the specific relationship and intensity of benefits.

What We Don’t Know

• In the absence of longitudinal studies, it is difficult to know the longer-term effects of arts participation. This is most true in the areas of health and early childhood education.
• The potential to make the case for the benefits of the arts suffers from a paucity of experimental and quasi-experimental designs, particularly in the areas of economic vitality and social cohesion.
• Generally, measuring effects at a community level is difficult to do when there are confounding factors. However, greater understanding of how the arts promote quality of life at the community or regional level could help to illuminate potential strategies or interventions that might work at scale to support a healthy ecosystem.
• Createquity’s investigations on the benefits of the arts have focused broadly on general effects on a general population. It is likely that there is quite a bit of variation between disciplines, between different modes of artistic participation (e.g., passive, active, solitary, communal), and between participants (comparing demographic and other differences). Research syntheses and comparative studies looking across these differences are generally lacking.

How to Use this Information

A few action items to consider:

For funders:

• The potential of the arts to improve lives for older adults and those in clinical settings seems under-invested in relative to the strength of the evidence. Consider how age and health fit into your strategy for improving lives through the arts.
• Similarly, consider what proportion of your arts funding portfolio reaches very young children (pre-K and younger), as some of the strongest available evidence indicates benefits for that population.
• Invest in longitudinal studies into benefits of the arts, especially those that involve diverse population samples, varying geographies, and embrace multiple disciplines.
• Consider funding more meta-analyses that take stock of the current spate of literature already in existence. British researchers have published a few of these, but there is much more to be done, and research coming out all the time that could be added to the mix.

For researchers:

• Conduct studies looking at the impact of the arts in comparison to other leisure-time activities, to make effect sizes in the arts more intelligible.
• Seek ways to assess impacts of arts participation across longer time frames, and embrace more experimental study designs if possible.
• There is currently very little research on the benefits of subsidizing the arts, as opposed to the benefits of arts participation. In other words, what proportion of the benefit realized from arts programming can be specifically attributed to grants or donations with that purpose in mind?
• Be transparent in discussing methods and limitations of arts participation, to allow others to learn directly from the research experience (in other words, don’t give undue credit to the arts if there isn’t enough supporting evidence).
• Further explore hierarchies of evidence in arts research, including examples of rigorous qualitative designs.

For arts organizations:

• Foster partnerships with other sectors that might benefit from your arts organization’s work (e.g., community and civic engagement, public health, social justice), and work together to further the arts’ contributions for community-wide benefit.
• Use the evidence that is available to help guide your programming to be as impactful as possible in providing benefits to individuals in your communities.

Resource List

Everything We Know about Whether and How the Arts Improve Lives (2016)
The research could still use an upgrade in many areas. But what we know so far should cheer any arts advocate.
A summary of the benefits of various arts endeavors including participatory activities, arts therapies, and arts engagement by young children and students.

(Eng)Aging with the Arts Has its Benefits  (2016)
In fact, the best evidence we have of the arts’ impact is that they make older adults feel better.
Recent studies indicate that  the most compelling evidence of the value of the arts revolves around improving the lives of older adults.

Are the Arts the Answer to Our TV Obsession? (2016)
Television can wreak havoc on the brain and the body. But people who watch it the most don’t seem to mind.
This article explores how, from obesity to apathy, the side effects of America’s national pastime (watching the tube) are taking their toll. What else to do?

Part of Your World: On the Arts and Wellbeing (2015)
A concept that’s been making the rounds in other fields for decades provides fresh ideas about how to think about the benefits of the arts.
This piece explains how the relationship between the arts and wellbeing could earn the former a proper seat at the table in conversations about human progress.

Capsule Review: The Impacts of Culture and Sport (2017)
What are the relationships between cultural engagement, sports participation, and social wellbeing? A recent study sheds light.
A British study examines the impact of sports and cultural participation on outcomes including measurements of health, education, civic participation, and personal wellbeing.

Capsule Review: Music, Singing, and Wellbeing (2017)
Three reports explore the effects of music on quality of life.
The UK’s What Works Centre for Wellbeing recently commissioned one of the most thorough research syntheses we’ve seen on the benefits of the arts.

A New Way to Think about Intrinsic vs. Instrumental Benefits of the Arts (2015)
Which matters more, art for art’s sake or art for people’s sake? Neither, according to a recent report.
A Philadelphia-based study reveals patterns between cultural participation, economic and geographic factors, and wellbeing among citizens.

Warhol Dollar, by Incase via flickr

We believe that a healthy arts ecosystem should provide opportunities for everyone to participate in the arts at their own individual level of skill and interest. This includes allowing more “scarce” opportunities – like making art for a living – to be available to those people for whom it matters most (i.e., making art is most meaningful) and whose work in the arts offers the greatest benefit to others – by connecting to a large audience, winning acclaim from experts, adding something unique to the cultural diet of humanity, or improving people’s lives in other meaningful ways.

Why We Care

We suspect that economically disadvantaged individuals in particular face a variety of obstacles when seeking to actively pursue careers in the arts, including:

• costs of making/producing art (e.g., materials, rehearsal space)
• indirect costs (e.g., transportation, child care)
• lack of time (due to the need to earn a living)
• inability to take needed financial or social risks (such as student debt for an arts degree, moving to an urban area)
• societal pressure (from social and/or professional environments that treat participation in the arts as a diversion from more economically productive activities)

Then there is the question of tangential income sources – such as a family help or inherited wealth – enjoyed by many who pursue arts careers. If an arts occupation is attractive but probably low-paying, and there are socioeconomic inequalities in the road to becoming a professional, logically that line of work will beckon more people from affluent backgrounds.

So do all the people who have the most to contribute really have the opportunity to pursue a career as an artist? And socioeconomics aside, to what extent are barriers to arts careers shaped by other societal factors – such as race/ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, and/or geographic variables (e.g., urban vs. rural residencies)?

What We Know

… about economic realities and secondary income:

It is difficult to support oneself on making art alone. To make ends meet, many artists have one or more rotating “day jobs” or an alternate plan. Research indicates:

• The day-job phenomenon is especially true for artists who support single-income households. For example, Australian artists who don’t rely on the income from a partner spend more time on non-arts work.
• Others develop a backup plan. Nearly half of artists in the U.S., according to BFAMFAPhD’s “Artists Report Back,” hedge their career bets by majoring in another subject, and arts students pick up more minors and teaching certificates as part of their backup planning.
• The career path of an artist is fraught with economic risk. There is a  long gestation period with high opportunity costs and greater variability in earnings than those working in other fields, and so a greater degree of uncertainty and instability. Artists are also five times more likely to be self-employed.
• Even after establishing a successful career, artists experience the biggest drop between income during childhood and income during adulthood among the 31 careers in a national longitudinal survey.
• Socioeconomic backgrounds play a major role: professionals in “arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations” were about 60% more likely than average to have a father who attended at least some college (55.9% vs. 34.5%), and 70% more likely to have a mother who attended college (55.9% vs. 32.6%).
• Governmental interventions to support artists can be effective, but also come with some strings attached, such as being subject to censorship, systemic perpetuation of cultural inequality, and diluting diversity of cultural expression and creativity.

… about formal education for arts professionals:

Are artist careers mediated by access to higher education? Research indicates that the need for a formal arts degree in order to make a living as an artist is debatable, and the benefits are variable:

• The “Artists Report Back” study claims that 84% of working artists in the United States don’t have a degree in the arts, and about two-fifths don’t have degrees at all.
• Although not necessary to become a successful professional,  an arts degree could help an artist reach a higher level of industry success or make a full-time living as an artist.
• A Danish study indicates that a formal education does reduce the rate of attrition (i.e., abandoning an arts career) for musicians, actors and writers, but not necessarily at the same rate for visual artists and dancers.

What We Don’t Know

Unfortunately, much of the evidence currently available on the topic of socioeconomic status and access to arts careers is indirect and based on incomplete data. The vast majority of research on artists’ livelihoods only examines artists’ current socioeconomic status, not their status at the time when they were deciding what career to pursue (and earlier). We thus don’t know much about how socioeconomic status at different life stages might affect people’s decisions about pursuing an arts career. In addition, while the evidence is consistent with the idea that the high risk of pursuing an arts career deters people from lower education and income backgrounds, we don’t know the extent to which risk really does play a role in the selection of majors, or for that matter whether the level of interest in pursuing arts careers varies across socioeconomic background and other demographic categories. The data and analyses that we do have point to socioeconomic status as one factor, but not necessarily the most important one, in determining whether or not someone will earn a living wage as an artist.

Other key questions we have include:

• What differences exist across artistic disciplines in relation to different career trajectories, opportunities, and potential financial successes?
• How does secondary income (such as spousal or other family  support) affect the opportunities and careers of individual artists?
• How does the availability of a social safety net – such as access or lack of access to affordable health care – affect the distribution and uptake of opportunities to earn a living as an artist?
• To what extent do disparities of opportunities and support for artists from different racial, gender and orientation backgrounds currently exist? And what, if anything, has helped to reduce these disparities?
• What are the differences in access between “very scarce” arts career opportunities – i.e., making a living from the arts – and merely “scarce” opportunities for artists who have more than one income source or who present work in public but not necessarily for money?

How to Use this Information

A few action items to consider:

For researchers

• Synthesize existing research on disparities of opportunities in arts careers by gender, sexual orientation, and race/ethnicity.
• Seek a better understanding of professional opportunities by arts discipline – and also why any differences may exist.

For funders and artist residencies

• Commission current research on the questions referenced above to support more strategic thinking and supportive programs in the sector.
• Be cautious about assuming that supporting artists is the same as supporting socioeconomically disadvantaged populations in other sectors. Although artists may earn significantly lower incomes than professionals in other fields, they may come from or have familial access to wealth, which provides a security net not available to others.
• Consider how funders (and advocacy agencies) can play in a role in protecting artists from censorship risk in the face of variable government support – especially in places like Poland or Hungary where democratic institutions exist but are fragile and under threat.

Resource List

Who Can Afford To Be A Starving Artist? (2016)
The key to success might be risk tolerance, not talent.
This article explores the economic realities involving who can actually take up an arts career – those who deserve it, those who really want it, or those who can afford it?

The BFA’s Dance With Inequality (2016)
Most arts majors come from money. Most artists didn’t major in the arts. What does that say about the sector?
A BFAMFAPhD study raises questions as to whether higher education is an arts incubator or a waste of precious prime time.

When Artistic Education Matters  (2017)
Arts degrees don’t seem to have much impact on income from the arts. But do they affect how long people stay in the field?
A Danish study demonstrates how formal education can reduce attrition rates for artists in some disciplines (music, theater, literature) more than others (dance and visual arts).

The State: A Friend Indeed to Artists in Need? (2016)
Internationally, governments can play an important role creating occupational equity for the arts – but there’s a catch.
This article explores the different results of state-aided arts programs in global locales ranging from Scandinavia to the former Soviet Union to North America.

TEDx Talk (2011)
“Never Heard of ‘Em”: Why Citizen Curators (not Daddy’s Money) Should Decide Who Gets to Be an Artist
A transcript of a speech by Createquity founder Ian David Moss, who argues that a hypercompetitive marketplace ultimately limits opportunity for economically disadvantaged artists.

Artists Are Not Alone in Steep Climb to the Top (2013)
It’s an old story: when they’re not creating, many artists spend their time at another job that brings in a steady income.
This article outlines the many ways creative artists navigate the ever-changing economy.

Supply is Not Going to Decrease (So It’s Time to Think About Curating) (2011)
Providing stewardship for a world in which supply of creative content is exploding and will never shrink.
Why institutions and funders should focus their resources on producers and artists who can actually make a difference.

The hall is filled for the concert of the Netherlands, by flickr user Alessandro Grussu

One of Createquity’s primary areas of investigation centers on disparities of access to the benefits of the arts: we believe that large numbers of people face barriers to participating in the arts in the ways they may want to. Not only are those people unfairly missing out on opportunities for a higher quality of life, but the quality and diversity of the cultural products and experiences available to the rest of us – and to our descendants – suffer as well.

Why We Care

In our view, a healthy arts ecosystem maximizes the arts’ capacity to improve the lives of human beings in concrete and meaningful ways. While the evidence base for the benefits of the arts is continually developing and evolving, we feel that participation in the arts offers value to a large majority of human beings, and that arts participation (especially more active forms of participation such as creation or performance) can be deeply consequential, even life-changing. While we do not assume that everyone will or needs to benefit from having the arts in their lives, we do believe that the only way to determine who can gain the most is through widespread and varied exposure to the arts. Thus our model of a healthy arts ecosystem envisions a basic level of access to the arts for everyone.

Furthermore, we believe that opportunities requiring an investment on the part of society – like preparation toward being a professional artist – should be distributed as fairly as possible, by prioritizing those who would create the most value for others through their participation. Thus, when we speak of “access,” we do not just mean opportunities to experience art as an audience member; we also include access to artistic training and related resources.

Below we outline what arts research has shown us about the broad frame of arts participation, encompassing who participates, their motivations and barriers – and what we can do to identify disparities of access and close the gaps.

What We Know

… about the role of economic disadvantage in mediating access to the arts:

Research data paints a consistent portrait of lower participation by people with lower incomes and less education (low-SES) in a wide range of artistic activities – including not just attending classical music concerts and plays but also less “elitist” forms of engagement like going to the movies or dancing socially. (Indeed, surveys show that education is the strongest factor in determining arts engagement rates – more so than income, race/ethnicity, geography, or other demographic variables.) This is despite the fact that low-SES adults, on average, have more free time at their disposal. While cost is a sometimes a barrier to participation, it isn’t the only one: if we could somehow make it so that low-SES adults were no more likely to decide not to attend an arts event because of cost than their more affluent peers, it would likely not greatly change the socioeconomic composition of audiences.

With that in mind, free admission is not a silver bullet to reducing barriers to participation and increasing access. In the museum world, available research suggests free admission doesn’t do much to engage underserved audiences, and communication strategies play a more crucial role than price itself driving attendance patterns.

What about active arts participation (i.e., performing or making art as opposed to passive audience engagement as a spectator)? Research shows that active arts participation is also strongly correlated with education: in other words, while less-educated adults are more likely to sing to themselves or dance with friends than see the opera, the same is true of people with college degrees and well-paying jobs. The evidence for a relationship with income is less clear – data we’ve uncovered from United States indicates that so-called “informal” arts activities do not see proportionally more participation from low-income adults, but research from the UK shows lower-income adults actually engage more when you isolate art-making.

A major contrast to this dynamic is television. The for-profit commercial TV industry is far more effective than subsidized nonprofit arts organizations at engaging economically vulnerable members of our society. Not only do low-SES adults watch more TV, low-SES adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than low-SES adults who do.

… about motivations and barriers to arts participation:

Motivations to participate in the arts vary greatly between different people for different types of cultural experiences. In one survey, more than half of attendees of performances such as music concerts say they went to see a specific artist; less than a tenth of attendees of art exhibits said the same, instead citing a desire to learn something new.

For “interested non-attendees” at arts events, barriers for participation include time, cost, transportation, and social support. Nearly half blamed a lack of time as a reason, almost 40% cited cost, 37% indicated difficulty in getting to the venue, and 22% didn’t have anyone to go with.

Despite a strong interest in arts participation, many retirees, empty nesters and older adults in poor health are disproportionately missing out. Among the chief factors keeping them home: transportation issues (difficulties in getting access to the venue) and social isolation (not having someone to go with). Meanwhile, the opportunity to socialize is paramount among motivators for participation among seniors. These findings are of particular concern given that there is a healthy body of evidence expounding on the benefits of arts participation for older adults.

… about how to measure engagement:

There are many ways to define arts participation, and broadening the definition can be revelatory. Providing an open-ended query about interviewees’ creative activities opened up the playing field about what could and should be considered in a study on “The Cultural Lives of Californians,” which helped to reflect a much broader range of arts participation than even the national Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

Different results between these similar surveys might be explained by a range of other factors, including data collection methodology and sampling. The SPPA was part of a larger survey led by the U.S. Census Bureau – the Current Population Survey (CPS) – and respondents agreed to participate without knowing they would be asked about their arts engagement habits. By contrast, “The Cultural Lives of Californians” synthesizes lessons from a statewide telephone survey that transparently communicated its interest in people’s cultural lives, so people who engage more in cultural activity may have been more likely to respond.

What We Don’t Know

Using the broadest definitions, we can confidently say that most people do participate in arts and culture – it’s just that not everybody participates in the range of activities that intersect with the work of nonprofit arts organizations. Many people get their primary cultural fix from things like listening to the music soundtracks of popular TV shows or attending their child’s band rehearsal – activities that do not involve the nonprofit sector at all. The big unanswered question: would nonprofit arts organizations offer a better or more varied type of experience for the people who aren’t currently being reached by them? Does watching a popular television program like Empire foster the same benefit to those audience members that attending a live stage play does? And if it does, what is the policy justification for subsidizing the cost of providing the latter, but not the former?

Our research has revealed several other “known unknowns,” including:

• Are arts organizations that are relatively free of commercial considerations – i.e., having to constantly fundraise, trying to sell tickets, aiming for a blockbuster – able to take more artistic risks? Do they create and offer a greater variety of programs that provide more value for more people?
• What strategies have been most effective in attracting “interested non-attendees,” and why? Are any of these scalable solutions that could ultimately serve a greater proportion of the population?
• What is the real value of infrastructure – i.e., funding, formal organizations, etc. – in contexts and locations that have historically flourished without it? What strategies are most appropriate to support arts participation in settings that are infrastructure-poor, but culturally rich? Who is best positioned to carry out those strategies?

What You Can Do With This Information

Questions to consider and actions to contemplate:

For arts administrators and artists

• How can you connect to leisure activities that people already engage in, particularly near-universal ones like watching television? Although you might view the couch as competition, it is also a potential connection point.
• How can you ramp up the social component of the experience, either through communications and marketing, or through adjusting programming or setting?
• What are ways you might address barriers such as transportation for audience segments that may not have easy access to their own?
• If your goal is to make your work more relevant and accessible to a socioeconomically diverse audience, consider that a blanket free admission policy may not yield the results you’re looking for.

For funders

• How might you support an ecosystem that recognizes a broader range of activities in its definition of arts and cultural participation? Are you unintentionally privileging certain modes, venues, genres, and cultural traditions in your current programming?
• Commission research to promote greater understanding of the benefits to audiences of different types of arts participation (particularly broken down by sectoral context – i.e., for-profit vs. nonprofit), and the distribution of those benefits across different populations and places.
• Be wary of supporting audience engagement programs that rely on free or reduced prices as the primary strategy for expanding access.

For researchers

• Ask questions about arts participation broadly, avoiding the term “arts” if possible, and encourage open-ended responses to get the fullest picture. “The Cultural Lives of Californians” shows how being expansive in defining arts activities, even letting the respondent lead the conversation, allows for a richer and more nuanced picture of participation.
• Engage in research about the benefits of different kinds of arts participation, especially as it relates to nonprofit arts organizations as providers.

Resource List

Why Don’t They Come (2015)
It’s not just the price of admission that’s keeping poor and less-educated adults away from arts events.
This article explores arts participation rates of people with lower incomes and less education; motivations and barriers among participants; the realities of television engagement; and where we can go from here.

One Size Fits All Does Not Fit “The Arts” (2015)
An NEA report looks at motivations for and barriers to arts attendance.
In probing the motivations of “interested non-attendees” – people who expressed participatory interest in arts events but did not follow through – this report reveals barriers including cost, convenience, and time; it also reveals cultural patterns across artistic disciplines.

Learning from “The Cultural Lives of Californians” (2015)
A survey of Golden State residents reveals lessons in arts participation and how we measure it.
With its broad scope in defining arts activities and use of open-ended prompts, this survey shows the range of ways Californians engage with culture and the significant effect of age on art-making (as distinct from attendance of arts events).

Taking Art Into Their Own Hands (2016)
Audiences who won’t visit your museum may be enthusiastic amateur artists in their spare time.
This article indicates that arts participation is strongly correlated with education, but not with social class or social status – and active participation in art-making is actually inversely associated with income.

Capsule Review: Taking Charge at Museums (2017)
A research study on the effects of charging or not charging for admission on attendance, visitor experience, and funding among UK museums.
This study explores the differences between museums that charge and those that don’t, and emphasizes the importance of effectively communicating changes in charging policies.

Arts Policy Library: Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions (2012)
A survey of rural and suburban populations exposes participation in a broad range of cultural activities.
Among other things, this study shows that while the home is a hugely important setting for arts engagement, funders and nonprofits have virtually ignored it as an arts space.

Arts Policy Library: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (2012)
A summary, history, and analysis of the influential NEA survey.
This article traces how the SPPA survey tracked various kinds of arts participation for both audience members and creators.

Arts Policy Library: Gifts of the Muse (2009)
A close look at the implications of a far-ranging report on the benefits of the arts.
Gifts of the Muse laid out one of the first frameworks for understanding the effects of arts participation, as well as the evidence supporting that theory.

The Myth of the Transformative Arts Experience (2010)
If we are searching for a life-transforming experience at an arts event, we may have come to the wrong place.
This essay explores the idea that we often place overly high expectations on the effects of the average encounter with art.

Negro Ensemble Company National Tour, 1968, by Philip Mallory Jones

In Createquity’s vision of a healthy arts ecosystem, each human being today and in the future has an opportunity to participate in the arts at a level suited to that person’s interest and skill. Accordingly, it’s important for us to understand the ways in which the current arts ecosystem falls short of this ideal, in particular by failing to include everyone equally or give everyone a fair shot at the opportunities they deserve.

Why We Care

In the United States, a long history of cultural equity activism has drawn attention to ways in which the essential infrastructure of the arts sector – in particular, the nonprofit arts funding system – was originally shaped by and for wealthy, white patrons. The lingering effects of this history are evident today in the disproportionate incidence of organizations celebrating European art forms among the largest-budget institutions in most metropolitan areas.

Createquity’s informed hypothesis is that wealthy donors, who are disproportionately white, continue to influence the art that organizations produce/present, prompting those organizations to cater to donors’ personal preferences and tastes rather than those of the broader community. These patrons also influence the decisions of numerous public and private funders, resulting in ongoing disproportionate subsidies to large institutions founded by people of European descent. The cascading effects of this imbalance are many, potentially decreasing access to meaningful arts experiences and opportunities to make living as an artist for people of color and other marginalized groups.

What We Know

In the United States, a wealth of data supports the notion that the nonprofit arts sector suffers from a lack of racial and other forms of diversity, particularly among larger-budget institutions working in European art forms. Approximately 84% of curatorial, educational, and leadership jobs at art museums are occupied by white people, while 92% of board members at orchestras are white. According to the Foundation Center’s 2015 Foundation Giving Forecast Survey, more than 92% of arts foundation presidents and 87% of arts foundation board members are white. This lack of diversity extends to top leadership in commercial arts industries as well, and acting, directing, and other opportunities in Hollywood disproportionately favor white men.

Meanwhile, giving to nonprofit arts organizations appears to be highly stratified, with just 2% of arts organizations in the United States receiving more than half of total contributed income. In addition, there are clear signs that current funding patterns disfavor people of color, rural communities, and low-income neighborhoods.

From “Not Just Money” by Helicon Collaborative

Knowledge of this nature can establish the existence of a problem, but in order to use research and evidence to help our sector move forward, we must have a clear, and shared, understanding of what cultural equity 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.

• Diversity: The one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called “mainstream” institutions 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. Conversations about diversity have tended to focus first on audiences, then on programming, and finally on leadership.
• Prosperity: 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, with an eye toward long-term sustainability. 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.
• Redistribution: Redistribution favors a larger pool of recipients for contributed income, focusing on the full ecosystem of individuals and institutions that comprise a community; by contrast, the Diversity and Prosperity both embrace an institution-centric frame and the standard market dynamics of the nonprofit arts sector, in which a small number of high-profile institutions dominate.
• Self-Determination: The Self-Determination theory of cultural equity is the most radical departure from the status quo. It calls for full participation in and expression of cultural life for marginalized communities through models that are organic to those communities, and that look beyond established nonprofit arts funding and advocacy tactics.

What We Don’t Know

The existing research leaves several key questions unexplored, the answers to which would help the field direct future efforts to advance cultural equity more strategically.

• How does the level of exposure to and/or interest in arts careers and arts administration jobs differ across race and other demographics (e.g. income, education)?
• 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?
• 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?
• 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? What is the role of the arts in helping oppressed peoples cope, survive, and thrive?

What You Can Do With This Information

We hope this information can be helpful to organizations and agencies of all sizes seeking to define, measure, and achieve equity goals. Honest conversations about cultural equity are critical for all arts organizations, but particularly those that serve a leadership function in the sector – e.g., local arts councils, government agencies, foundations, etc. – who work with a cohort of organizations that may have varying ideas about what equity means in practice. We recommend discussing with your board/stakeholders and colleagues your collective vision of cultural equity going forward; which archetype best fits your goals, organizational structure, and institutional identity?

The four visions of cultural equity that Createquity outlined are not mutually exclusive, nor are their advocates. Yet in practice, the tensions between these ideas can be a source of great confusion if they are not called out explicitly. We recommend consideration of the following questions:

What is the Value (and Cost) of Integration?
The Diversity vision is strongly centered on the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, this expectation to share and share alike ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own.

How Central are Institutions?
Diversity and Prosperity see institutions as vital infrastructure with enormous potential for community benefit. Nevertheless, it’s worth questioning at what point most institutions tend to prioritize their own preservation over the health of the entire arts ecosystem.

How Influential are Cultural Norms?
One of the most important American cultural norms involves using an individual rather than group lens to talk about benefits and harm. What are some other norms that often go unexamined? How do they impact the work of your institution?

What about the Money?
For funders specifically, if you want to support communities of color out of a desire for economic and/or racial justice, how can you ensure that you are transferring not just resources but meaningful control/ownership of those resources?

What is the Role of Race?
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. How important is racial justice to your institutional mission?

What does/can equity look like within a healthy arts ecosystem?  
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. How do we measure and evaluate wellbeing in the context of self-determination? Who decides what’s good for you?

Resource List

On the Cultural Specificity of Symphony Orchestras (2017)
What is the role of white-led arts institutions in a race-conscious world?
As longstanding concerns about cultural equity find voice in policy initiatives, leaders at arts organizations that celebrate European cultural heritage may have to ask whether their loyalty is more to their art form or their local community.

Making Sense of Cultural Equity (2016)
When visions of a better future diverge, how do we choose a path forward?
Cultural equity is increasingly a topic of concern for the arts ecosystem, but not everyone agrees on what it means in practice. This article examines four overlapping but distinct visions of success advanced by cultural equity advocates over the past half century, the assumptions underlying each of these visions, and the fault lines running between them.

Notes to “Making Sense of Cultural Equity” (2016)
Full bibliography and endnotes, along with a set of definitions related to common terms in the discussion of cultural equity.

Who Will Be the Next Arts Revolutionary? (2016)
The story of how the nonprofit arts sector got started offers would-be changemakers some clues.
This article looks into how the non-profit organization became the dominant model for the sector, reaching a boom during the mid-20th century.

Notes to “Who Will Be the Next Arts Revolutionary?” (2016)
Full bibliography and endnotes, especially point 5.

Who Can Afford to Be A Starving Artist? (2016)
The key to success may be risk tolerance, not talent.
This feature article examines whether there is evidence that risk dissuades individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds from pursuing arts careers.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Race (2013)
What can we do to create an open environment for talking honestly about race relations in all of their kaleidoscopic, maddening, shame-inducing complexity?

Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change (2013)
A report published by NCRP argues that arts philanthropy, as currently structured, perpetuates inequality across the arts and culture sector by disproportionately funding large institutions that focus on Western European traditions.

Createquity Podcasts 

• “Createquity Podcast Series 4: Approaching Cultural Equity” (2016)
  Different visions of cultural equity, and how pursuing those visions has played out in practice.
• “Createquity Podcast Series 1: Watch Where You’re Giving” (2016)
  Effective altruism and the arts.

Among this illustrious group of organizations celebrating their tenth anniversary this year is a little arts policy think tank you might know as Createquity. On October 26, 2007, a modest post here entitled “Hello, world” promised a simple chronicle of a young artist’s journey through business school, with little hint of the much more meaningful work to come. It’s a big milestone for us, one that we savor with pride. But this particular birthday is also bittersweet, because Createquity will not be joining our decade-old brethren for the next ten years. This year, 2017, will be Createquity’s last.

To understand why we’ve decided to end Createquity’s run, it’s necessary to travel back in time a bit. When we relaunched Createquity as a bona-fide think tank for the arts three years ago, I knew full well that we were plotting an ambitious path rife with pitfalls. We were taking on an insanely complex mission—to review, understand, and synthesize arts research more comprehensively and strategically than anyone had ever attempted before—with hardly any institutional infrastructure or startup financial support.

It was beyond audacious. But we felt strongly that to try and fail would be better than not to try at all. Arts leaders are drowning in information. Every year, governments, foundations, universities, and scientists invest thousands of hours and millions of dollars generating research about critical issues in the sector. But according to a 2016 survey sponsored by the Hewlett and Knight Foundations, nearly 80% of arts administrators have difficulty keeping up with information in the field, and only 5% typically read research reports all the way through. With so many professionals lacking time to fully engage with research or a framework to apply the findings in practice, a huge amount of potential goes to waste.

When Createquity relaunched in 2014, our vision was to facilitate progress towards a better world by compiling, vetting, and interpreting relevant insights from the research literature for people with the ability to make a difference. And in three years, we came a long way toward pulling off that vision. We delivered deeply informed analysis and surprising insights on topics including the benefits of the arts, arts participation patterns, artist careers, cultural equity, and the history of the nonprofit arts sector. Our research-driven features have received tens of thousands of page views—according to figures provided to us by the National Endowment for the Arts, more than the NEA’s own flagship research publications. Most importantly, in my view, we began to create a robust logic for how all of this research could optimally inform leaders’ decisions affecting the health of the arts ecosystem—decisions that affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the United States and beyond.

With the exception of a single six-month stretch, we did all this with less money in our annual budget than what I got paid to stuff envelopes all day in my first-ever arts job. At first, the resource-scarce environment didn’t faze us. Createquity had been a 100% volunteer operation in its previous incarnation, after all, with no budget or legal entity separate from my bank account. We were passionate, we believed in what we were doing, and most of us were employed full-time elsewhere or had other gigs to pay the bills. Sure, money would be nice, but it wasn’t the main point.

But then we started doing the work. And let me tell you, to do this work justice takes time. Hundreds of hours of time for every project we did. Over the past three years we’ve completed seven formal research investigations resulting in ten feature articles. That represents just a small fraction of an expansive research agenda we designed during that same period to help us identify, in a very literal sense, “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.” With team members contributing just a few hours a week on average, getting through that research agenda was slow as molasses and put extraordinary strain on our capacity.

In theory, this is a simple management problem with a simple solution: increase your capacity. Alas, doing so proved to be anything but simple. Both firsthand experience and conversations with media industry experts quickly established that ads, subscriptions, and individual donations (including crowdfunding campaigns) could be a helpful revenue supplement for a niche publication like ours, but far from a core anchor. Providing research or consulting services for hire could have helped pay the bills, but would have run a very high risk of taking us off mission as the unsubsidized work took second fiddle to business realities.

That left grant funding as the obvious answer—obvious not just because it was the only realistic alternative, but also because the funding community is a core audience and beneficiary of Createquity’s research. But the national funding landscape is almost perfectly set up to make a project like Createquity extremely difficult to capitalize. The vast majority of arts funders’ portfolios are restricted to specific geographies, to the point that we found we couldn’t even win grants in our ostensible home of Washington DC because our services were not locally targeted enough. The very few grantmakers that do fund on a national basis typically eschew general operating support and are largely uninterested in supporting grantees indefinitely. These are among the reasons why the arts field has, since the 1980s, dug a formidable graveyard for failed think tank initiatives, some of which have become so buried under the weight of history that I only learned about them for the first time earlier this year.

Even so, our first year out of the gate gave us hope that we might defy the odds. After a successful crowdfunding campaign enabling us to redesign the website and hold our first planning retreat, we quickly staffed up our editorial team, laid out a research agenda, and started reeling in our first funders, culminating in the fall of 2015 when we raised a round of seed investment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a business planning process.

As we’ve written about before, one of the most important outcomes of the business planning exercise was the recommendation to package Createquity’s remaining research investigations into a two-year initiative. To speed up the process and make it more robust, we would outsource the investigations to professional contractors through a competitive process, leaving the Createquity research team to manage the various overlapping projects in centralized fashion. We called it the Synthesis Project, and we expected that following this “surge” of funding to conquer the frontloaded inquiry part of our research agenda, we could shrink Createquity back down to its grassroots form for the follow-through (focusing on advocating specific action steps associated with priority issue areas). That way, we would skirt the challenges of long-term sustainability that had doomed so many knowledge-building initiatives of the past.

We had phone calls and meetings galore, hosted events, shook down every prospect, called in every favor, and deployed every bit of reputational capital we had in our efforts to get the Synthesis Project funded. It wasn’t enough. The planning grant we received from Mellon in 2015 was to be the last new institutional funding to come our way. On top of that, in the past two years, our two largest general operating funders each decided to refocus their portfolios locally, which meant that we no longer fit their guidelines. All in all, keeping Createquity funded at even a basic level in the years ahead was shaping up to be a major ongoing challenge.

Ultimately, we decided that it was better to close up shop than continue to fight what increasingly looked like a losing battle. We are using these final months to make connections across the threads of different investigations we’ve done and articles we’ve written over the years, tie up loose ends, and, as much as we can, tease out what it all means for practice.

Next week, we will be publishing four briefs laying out the insights we’ve gathered on the issue areas of arts participation, cultural equity, arts careers, and the benefits of the arts. Over the next couple of months, we will be polishing up our internal training materials and resources to make it as easy as possible for people in the arts community to carry on aspects of the work we’ve started in their own spaces and in their own names. And in November and December, you can expect to see some parting thoughts from our team to philanthropists and researchers seeking to optimize their investments in the arts in the decade ahead. Our goal in all of this is to activate the latent potential of our work over the past ten years into the most accessible and actionable content possible. The goal, in short, is to go out of business in style.

Our tentative plan is to cease publishing at the end of 2017. After that, the website will stay up in an archival state indefinitely. Of course, if someone decides to make another go at something akin to the Synthesis Project and wants to pick up where we left off, we will do our best to facilitate that.

I want to be clear that I still believe strongly in the mission of Createquity. This announcement comes just two days before the start of the 2017 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, which I’m extremely fortunate to have the honor of attending for the ninth year in a row. My wish for Createquity’s final birthday is for all of my friends and colleagues at that gathering to consider the urgent need for a more efficient, networked, strategic, and meaningful approach to building knowledge in service of improving lives through the arts. Though Createquity’s window of opportunity to bring that vision to life has closed, our experience has only reinforced my faith that doing so is not only possible, but tremendously worthwhile.

Many folks have asked what’s next for me. I’ve begun an independent practice working with philanthropists, investors, and governments to deploy resources for good in the social sector; you can read more about that work here. I also expect to continue writing in 2018 and beyond, though about a different set of topics than covered here, and will share more information about that in a future post. In the meantime, although I will miss the environment of learning and intellectual ferment that Createquity has provided in my life for ten years, I am excited and energized by this opportunity to bring a decade of inquiry and discovery to a graceful and meaningful conclusion. I am grateful to all of you for your role in that journey, and I invite you to join me in being a part of Createquity’s final act.

Cover image: “Dramatic golden sunset” by Cindy del Valle

Detroit Skyline, by Flickr user Wigwag Jones (via Creative Commons)

The picture of Detroit painted by the media often conveys a city in peril. Its dramatic story – the decline of the auto industry, population loss, high crime and drug-infested neighborhoods – has made the Motor City an easy target for sensational journalism and “ruin porn.” But the flip side of the tale is Detroit’s ongoing re-emergence from its 2014 Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history. Against this backdrop, mayor Mike Duggan has appointed journalist Aaron Foley as Detroit’s “chief storyteller,” the first position of its kind in the United States. Foley and other local journalists have noted that those who aren’t wallowing in Detroit’s past woes have made the mistake of overcompensating, painting the city as a beacon – a burgeoning, tech-savvy, foodie town saved by hipsters. The chief storyteller’s job is to redirect the media to stories that more fully capture the city’s complex soul, often with a tinge of self-deprecation and a focus on its more than 200 local neighborhoods in which some 80 percent of residents are African American. Getting in on the storytelling act, local museums are marking the 50-year anniversary of Detroit’s 1967 race riots with widely divergent exhibits, reflecting the complexities of a rebellion that erupted after three black men were beaten, shot, and killed by white police officers. On the silver screen, director Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit has been accused of taking undue creative license for political and marketing reasons in depicting the riots. Foley’s appointment comes at an auspicious time for Mayor Duggan, who is up for re-election in November and opposed by, among others, arts advocate Ingrid LaFleur, who announced her bid in February.

Murdoch Wins Some, Loses Some. New legislation introduced by Australia’s Liberal party would make it easier for the country’s big media conglomerates to get even bigger. The bill, expected before parliament this month and widely anticipated to pass, would likely most benefit media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of broadcasting giant 21st Century Fox as well as News Corporation, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of Australia’s newspaper circulation. If passed, the law would lift current restrictions on a single owner controlling both broadcast and print media outlets in a given market. Proponents see the bill as a way for Australian traditional media to compete with Internet titans like Google and Facebook; opponents point to the potential consolidation of power as a political move that favors the conservative, Murdoch-backed Liberal party. Meanwhile in the UK, Murdoch’s attempt to buy up the remaining 61% of Sky plc seems to have hit a wall, with Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Karen Bradley launching an investigation into whether Fox meets the country’s broadcasting standards.

Whose Art Is It, Anyway? Outcry from animal rights’ activists resulted in the Guggenheim pulling three works using live animals from an exhibition highlighting modern Chinese art. The museum cited safety as the primary reason for pulling the provocative artwork, which includes video depictions of pigs fornicating to an audience and dogs strapped on treadmills charging each other, citing “explicit and repeated threats of violence,” while artists and free speech advocates are blasting the museum’s choice to relent to the pressure. The Guggenheim episode comes just months after Minnesota’s Walker Art Center came under fire for displaying Sam Durant’s “Scaffold,” which depicted the site of a mass hanging of Native American warriors on land formerly held by the Dakota Indians. The pieces of the sculpture are set to be buried in a secret location determined by Dakota elders, but the museum is still dealing with the fallout. Museums are not the only institutions facing challenges from activists; in Berlin, a group of left-wing protesters occupied the Volksbühne Theater with the goal of converting it into a community-driven public theater.

New Museum Aims for Increased Representation of Africa – by Africa. The long-awaited Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa opened this month in Cape Town, South Africa. Housed in a 102,000-square-foot converted grain silo dating from 1912, the museum highlights contemporary art from Africa, and its diasporas, in an effort to reclaim the legacies of African countries and of Africans living in other countries throughout the world. It’s an approach that contrasts with another massive museum set to open in November: the Louvre Abu Dhabi – created through bilateral deals between France and United Arab Emirates – will feature 620 works from the national collection of Abu Dhabi; the other half will be works on loan from the Louvre in Paris. The international museum will host an eclectic blend of artifacts including Roman columns, Egyptian statues, nymphs commissioned for the Palace of Versailles, African figures, and Byzantine coins.

Declining Lottery Fund is Bad News for British Museums. Since 1994, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has played a key role in supporting capital campaigns that create new museums in the United Kingdom or maintain and refurbish existing ones. But the fund relies on sales of lottery tickets, which have steadily declined. The HLF has predicted a lottery contribution of £300 million for the 2016-17 fiscal year, down £85 million from 2015-16. The slump in sales is thought to be a result of a 25% increase to the cost of tickets combined with a change to the odds which sharply impacts players’ chances of winning. And it’s not just museums that rely on the lottery; funds also support artists, Olympic athletes, education, and other charitable causes. On the upside, Camelot, the company that operates the National Lottery, has pledged an in-depth review to explore ways to “re-engage players” after an 8.8% decline in sales from last year. The probe will be led by Nigel Railton, the CEO of Camelot Global and acting chief executive at Camelot UK after Andy Duncan stepped down in April.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• Johnnetta Betsch Cole, recently retired director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, was named a senior consulting fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, from which president Earl Lewis announced he will step down in March 2018.
• Helen Gayle has been appointed president and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust.
• After a national search, Santa Cruz local Susan True has been named CEO of Community Foundation Santa Cruz County.
• Kathy Halbreich, associate director of MoMA, has taken a new position as executive director at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
• Philip Horn, executive director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, has announced his retirement.
• Houston Arts Alliance has named John Abodeely, who was acting executive director for the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities prior to the committee’s disbanding, as its new CEO.
• Peter Herrndorf will step down after nearly 20 years as the head of Canada’s National Arts Centre.
• Former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and current VP Patrick Gaspard will take over as acting president of Open Society Foundations.
• Judilee Reed, former director of Surdna Foundation in New York City, has been appointed to lead the Creative Communities Program at the William Penn Foundation.
• The Cincinnati Enquirer has laid off its sole arts critic, Janelle Gelfand.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• Visual Capitalist used data from the University of Oxford to create a chart outlining how many jobs will eventually give way to automation. Fields requiring social skills and creativity at at the least risk, while entry-level jobs face a great probability of automation.
• Spektrix used data from its pool of more than 300 arts organizations to look for trends in marketing, sales and fundraising in the UK and Ireland.
• The Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking has released the Commission’s final report and recommendations in a free download on “how to increase the availability and use of data in order to build evidence about government programs, while protecting privacy and confidentiality.”
• Philanthropy is on the rise among Chinese and Chinese-American donors, according to a report by the Global Chinese Philanthropy Initiative.
• A report from GuideStar indicates that nonprofit CEO compensation has nearly recovered from the recession, but a gender gap remains.
• The transportation sector takes a look at challenges in creative placemaking, and identifies ways to participate in a new report called Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan.
• While conducting research for her a book, on tax incentives, Sigrid Hemels uncovered information about free ports, where art can be stored – sometimes indefinitely – tax-free.
• A new paper outlines potential consequences resulting from reductions to arts education.
• Belgian researchers say blindness creates “empty real estate” in the brain’s visual areas, which could be taken up for use by language.
• Different cultures have varied numbers of words for colors. Scientists say that people developed words for the things they most wanted to talk about, using colors as descriptive terms.
• A report from the National Endowment for the Arts supports the large body of evidence suggesting arts participation (making and doing) among older adults leads to better health outcomes.
• The first of a series of reports connecting heritage and cultural practice to well-being is a case-study on issues affecting the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.
• A report ranking European countries on cultural engagement and creativity gives Edinburgh the top spot for cities of a similar size.
• The first installment of the “Inquiry into the Civic Role of Arts Organisations” has been released, investigating barriers and opportunities for arts groups in civic engagement.
• A report commissioned by the Wallace Foundation indicates that forming partnerships is a successful strategy for nonprofits to increase their impact and effectiveness.
• Data analysis by IMPACTS shows that time is more valuable than money when it comes to visiting cultural organizations.
• A Nesta literature review yields four key findings on the integration of digital technology in the arts.
• The U.K.-based Creative People and Places has published a comprehensive report on the approaches, methods and models aimed at evaluating the agencies programs and developed over a three-year period.
• An article published by Journal of Cultural Economics reveals that cultural heritage can play a role in determining where highly skilled individuals live.
• An Ofcom report warns British TV broadcasters they are “failing to represent society” through lack of representation from women, ethnic minorities, and differently abled people.
• A report commissioned by the E.U couldn’t establish a link between piracy and displaced sales of copyrighted film, literature, or video game content, with the exception of recently released top films.
• A recent study argues that foundation-funded nonprofit publications are not the answer to the decline of commercial journalism.
• Publishers are claiming that the Trump era has shifted Americans’ reading habits, but a new HuffPost/YouGov poll suggests otherwise.
• New data from publishers suggests audiobooks are here to stay.
• American Theatre selected the top 10 most-produced plays and top 20 most-produced playwrights for the 2017-18 Season.
• According to a TripAdvisor survey of museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the world’s favorite, capping the site’s top 25.
• Some new research suggests the public still favors artwork created by humans over robot-generated works, ranking those they perceived as computer-generated to be less visually appealing.
• Medical students at the University of Philadelphia who interacted with visual art improved their observational skills.
• An RBC survey confirms substantial losses in paid cable TV, and indicates that the trend is likely to accelerate.
• Pianist and scientist Elaine Chew is creating music made from ECG data, hoping to understanding to patients with arrhythmia diagnoses.
• Austrian researchers are testing technology that facilitates direct brain-to-page music composition.
• Music lessons assist with cognition and decision making, but a new study suggests the effects are greater for those who started training after age 8.
• Classical music is believed to stimulate creativity; a new study points specifically to the baroque era.
• A research study headed by the University of Vienna unveiled “the Bach effect,” which claims that playing classical music in the background can result in women finding men more attractive. BBC Music Magazine recommends Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, voted the greatest opera of all time by a pool of 172 opera singers.
• New York University discovered some unique musical preferences that are common among individuals with high psychopath scores. So, it’s good news for you if you like “My Sharona” and Sia’s “Titanium,” which were least likely to be favored by psychopaths.