The sense of mystery that I felt was only exacerbated by the shroud of secrecy that the world of arts philanthropy continues to draw over itself. Some of our nation’s largest arts funders are among its least transparent. I just got back from the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, the only annual national gathering of arts philanthropists of all stripes, which is still largely closed to non-grantmakers and this year discontinued its recent practice of inviting bloggers to report on the proceedings from within.

So I thought it was notable when I was invited to participate on a grant panel that eschews this behind-closed-doors approach. Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the major government instrument for supporting the arts in Cleveland and its suburbs, was formed several years ago through a voter-passed tax levy on the sale of cigarettes. Like many grantmakers, especially government funders, CAC uses a panel of outside experts to help adjudicate applications, rather than handling those decisions at the staff level. A key feature of CAC’s panel process is that it is open to the public. Starting this morning at 10am Eastern time and continuing through 5pm tomorrow, I will be in a room at PlayhouseSquare’s Idea Center along with my six fellow panelists, CAC program staff – and an unknown number of members of the public, including the representatives from the very organizations we’re evaluating. The audience is not allowed to participate in the discussion itself, but they are invited to answer questions posed from the stage and correct “objective misinformation” presented by the panelists – so if any of us do a poor job reading an application, we’re not likely to get away with it.

While this public panel is not unique in the arts (the San Francisco Arts Commission has a similar process for its Cultural Equity Grants program), as far as I know, CAC’s is the only one that can be followed remotely, from anywhere in the world, via live stream. So I’m inviting you, dear Createquity reader, to join me in this rare, public glimpse into a real live grantmaking session. The 64 proposals I’m reviewing are part of the Project Support II group, which means they are all requests for $5,000 or less and come from a wide range of organizations, including some very small and grassroots entities. If that sounds like the kind of grant you often find yourself applying for, I think this could be an particularly educational experience. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, either here or – hell, let’s create a hashtag – #CuyArtsC. (This is chosen to match the official CAC Twitter account, which posts updates throughout the day regarding the progress of the panel.)

• If you haven’t been following this story about the Wisconsin Republican Party’s efforts to intimidate University of Wisconsin professor Bill Cronon (and now other university professors in other states), you should be. If this keeps up, state universities are going to face a huge disadvantage attracting both students and faculty, since no one can be assured that their private emails (even about grades, personal issues, and such) won’t be exposed by Big Brother in the course of some political vendetta. But then, maybe that’s the point – one less thing to pay for, after all. (To Wisconsin’s credit, the school administration has mounted a strong and fair response.)
• Shannon Litzenberger, who is something like my Canadian counterpart (she is writing a blog about arts policy for the Toronto Arts Fondation), has written a great three-part series on United States arts policy (covering public investment, advocacy, and the role of the private sector). Even though it’s aimed at a Canadian audience, it should still be educational for American readers – and it’s always interesting to see how we’re viewed by others. (For an update on Canadian arts policy, try this recent post.)
• One of the issues under discussion these days is the budget for public broadcasting. The House recently passed a bill (not expected to reach the President’s desk) that would eliminate funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which in turn funds NPR and PBS. In response, CNN commissioned a poll that asked Americans what percentage of federal funding is taken up by broadcasting. Turns out the median response overestimated the actual number by a factor of over 400, and — get this — the majority of Americans are just fine with that amount!
• Lots of people are talking about the Google Books decision and its implications for creators’ rights. Meanwhile, a new working paper argues that copyright may only be minimally effective at its original purpose of incentivizing creative production, using evidence from the post-MP3 era. Michael Rushton has more commentary here.

Collective Economic Action

• The long-lost Collective Arts Think Tank is back, more than a year and a half later, with a massive follow-up to their original manifesto that you can read here. In it, they continue to advocate for rank-and-file artists and small presenters taking the initiative to reduce supply themselves. Linda Essig comments.
• Tina Rosenberg provides a good overview of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding models here and here. Much of this will be familiar to Createquity regulars, but odds are you’ll learn something new.
• Even music union members think it’s time for the union to change.
• Project Streamline is making a comeback: the Grants Managers Network and the Center for Effective Philanthropy have announced an assessment tool aimed at helping funders determine if their paperwork requirements are too onerous. CEP’s Amber Bradley provides some analysis of the survey results so far. Given all this, Christopher Madden’s estimate of the deadweight loss (essentially from transaction costs) associated with grantseeking among arts groups in Australia, pegged at $3.6 million, is especially timely.
• Umm….
  

  A quick search through fiverr.com’s database tells me that you can buy as many 100 comments, a single tweet to 25,000 Twitter followers, a negative or positive review in English and Spanish, and unlimited number of blog comments for a full week all for $5 apiece. For a few hundred dollars, you can guarantee a crazy amount of comment traffic and new media attention that would rival culture blogging’s biggest superstars.

The Arts and Urban Life

• “It would be sad indeed if Dallas, having imported some of the world’s best architects, wound up creating the dullest arts district money can buy.” Great reflection on the pitfalls of institution-centric arts-led development.
• Gary Steuer connects the dots between the arts and Philadelphia’s reversal of a longstanding trend toward population decline.
• More on Detroit’s bid for an arts-led renaissance.

Reactions and Pre-reactions

• Clay Lord writes for ArtsBlog on stories vs. data. (I had actually written most of my post on the same subject prior to Clay’s, but it was published afterwards.)
• Christopher Madden offers an Australian perspective on crowdsourcing funding decisions in the arts.
• Michael Rushton responds to my article on supply and demand in the arts.

Research Corner

• Looks like one of the casualties of the budget fight could be the closure of data.gov, which had been a promising attempt to make government data more accessible to researchers and others. The Sunlight Foundation is leading an effort to save it.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, the Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability (ICSCS) is taking on the hard challenge of counting up NYC’s artist population.
• Nancy Duxbury writes that she has co-edited an issue of the journal “Culture and Local Governance” focused entirely on “culture and sustainable communities” from an international perspective. Check it out here.
• Munira Khapra reports on a survey of students and teachers about education priorities, and the intriguing finding that more than twice the proportion of students as compared to teachers “consider the arts absolutely essential to gaining an understanding of other nations and cultures.”
• Michael Rushton examines the recent NEA report on arts education research by Nick Rabkin, and (shocker alert), doesn’t buy it. I heart Michael Rushton, but think there’s such a thing as being too skeptical when it comes to interpreting research. The comment section on that post has some additional back-and-forth between us on the subject.

Etc.

• A nice article on the ultra-cool Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco.
• Good news for journalism: revenues from online advertising exceeded those from print advertising for the first time last year. Bad news for journalism: most of that revenue went to Google rather than news organizations.
• Look out, Gisele: choral composer Eric Whitacre is now a fashion model. (For serious.)

Here’s an excerpt:

What changed me the most [at business school] was the exposure to an endless panoply of other areas of human life beyond contemporary classical music. Sure, I learned about assets and liabilities and how to read a cash flow statement, but I also learned about the auction for 3G wireless ranges, competition between Target and Wal-Mart, why Turkey is an emerging power player in the Middle East, and how colleges and foundations manage their endowments. […]

In the course of this sudden immersion into what the rest of the world thinks about and does on a daily basis, I came to realize that my former existence had been focused like a laser on about 0.00001% of everything that matters. It was like the veil had been lifted on my life: the choices I faced when I voted in an election or needed to buy produce or searched for an apartment to rent or, yes, chose a graduate school had all been determined by somebody, or more often a collection of somebodies acting in somewhat predictable ways. It became clear to me that I was never going to have control over my own destiny unless I had the capacity to see and understand the external forces that were influencing my circumstances. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, too. So here are a couple of vignettes from my own journey into the belly of the capitalist beast, which I offer in the hopes of connecting my experiences (and perhaps some of yours) to the bigger picture. After all, we are just variations on a theme.

Read the rest over at NewMusicBox.

Isaac Butler, who wrote the post linked above, also offers some analysis of the situation that I totally agree with, especially this paragraph:

Let’s think for a moment about why this might be the case. There aren’t a lot of full-time, salaried staff positions for composers—essentially none, unless you count the advertising industry (and even then it’s heavily commission-based) and university faculty positions. What little money organizations do have available to pay musicians for creating new work tends to be concentrated in the hands of a very few highly successful individuals, because only those with established names and reputations can really help drive sales or put butts in seats. To put it another way, the market—even taking subsidization from charitable sources into account—only really supports a limited number of serious musicians, i.e., the ones at the very top. It supports those few quite generously, to be perfectly honest (I’m sure Lorin Maazel isn’t complaining about taking home $2.5 million a year), but once you get past the very top of the ladder, the pickings become very slim indeed. Barriers to entry for new artists are low; competition is so fierce as to practically commoditize the music, making a middle-class existence as a non-superstar composer an extremely difficult goal to achieve and highly vulnerable once it has been attained.

In an industry with so many undesirable attributes, an economist would expect suppliers (i.e., the composers) to exit—stop composing and do something else with their lives—until the overall supply was reduced enough to affect the overall dynamics of the field. This is especially the case since the costs of stopping (barriers to exit) are essentially zero. And yet, what we see is the exact opposite. It’s an accepted truth in the new music world that there are more composers today than at any previous point in history. Music schools are churning out graduates at record rates, and new departments and conservatories are established on a regular basis. Not only are there more artists than ever before, but because of the intense competition and extensive training available, the quality of those artists (or at least those at the top of their field) is arguably at an all-time high as well. Meanwhile, technology and the Internet have combined to make it very easy not only to create content like this, but also to ensure its ongoing survival in the public sphere even at an extremely low level of visibility. Thus, new content not only competes with all of the other material newly created by this unprecedented population of artists, but also the entire back catalogue of recorded material created in the past—a collection that can only increase in size and scope over time. Which is all to say that it’s a completely amazing time to be a composer, as long as you don’t care about making any money or getting more than a few dozen people to listen to your music.

One thing that’s become clear to me since starting business school is that composition is far from the only industry that is experiencing some variation of this phenomenon. I blogged last month about commonalities between symphony orchestras and the newspaper industry: the Internet is driving an explosion of interest in “citizen journalism,” yet full-time, salaried journalist positions are steadily disappearing across the country. Meanwhile, journalism schools are thriving, dutifully preparing students for jobs that don’t exist. We see similar patterns across all of the arts, including dance, theater, visual arts, literature, film, and so on, not to mention commercial analogues of these fields (such as the mainstream music industry). Generally speaking, it’s a good bet that almost any endeavor involving content creation is experiencing more freelancing, lower average salaries, and an intense level of competition for the good jobs.

That’s why I expect that we are going to start seeing more and more of the kind of “semi-professional” approach and cost structure that Fractured Atlas is using in its RFP for online courses. Such an approach is aimed squarely at the middle of the long tail of content creators in a given field: bypassing the superstars and their reputation-inflated price tags/egos, while employing incentive and filtering systems to identify the best of the rest and secure their services at a considerable savings. It sounds coldly capitalistic, but I actually think it could be a very good thing for the field in that it fights the increasing stratification between the superstars and the nobodies. It helps to create a middle ground where it’s possible to make something doing what you love even if you’re not famous. Given the realities discussed above, would that not be preferable for those who don’t already have it made?