• The dreaded sequester began Friday, affecting all federal accounts including that of the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA will lose 5% of its budget, which works out to about $7.3 million. Grants and administration will be reduced by the same percentage. The reductions only apply through March 27, however, which is the date through which the federal government is currently funded. Congress has yet to pass a budget for Fiscal Year 2013, which we’re already almost halfway through. Let’s hear it for democracy!
• John Paul Titlow predicts that 3D printing will be the next big copyright battlefield – and the lines aren’t necessarily drawn where you think. (Here’s more from Public Knowledge.)
  
• “It’s true that without exposure to the arts, it’s difficult to develop an interest in them. But it’s also true that many of the people who had, say, music education back in the 1960s and 1970s are the same people who are not going to orchestra concerts today. Some arts organizations will have to confront the fact that their audiences are declining because of an irrevocable shift in the culture, rather than simply a lack of education.” Anne Midgette explores the recent resurgence of arts education in our nation’s schools. Here is more.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Kresge Foundation has named Ariel Simon to the new position of chief strategy officer and deputy to the president. Simon formerly worked as a senior consultant in McKinsey’s social sector practice.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Poncho, a Seattle public charity that raised money for the arts through galas and other special events, is closing its doors and donating its remaining assets to the Seattle Foundation.
  
• Interesting: in recent years, needy communities in the United States are receiving millions of dollars in aid from an unlikely source – the United Arab Emirates.

IN THE FIELD

• Should museums be looking outside the traditional pipeline for their management talent?
  
• Congratulations to Inocente, the first Kickstarter-funded movie to win an Oscar (for Best Documentary Short).
• Howard Sherman draws very appropriate attention to the lack of consistency in labeling the arts and culture in newspaper listings.
• The Met Opera, long criticized for astronomical ticket prices, is actually lowering them for next year – and not as an “accessibility” measure. Attendance is down, and leadership wonders if the opera’s much-ballyhooed cinema simulcasts are partly to blame.

BIG IDEAS

• I think local programming is one of the more underexplored areas of community engagement for establishment arts institutions – especially outside of major artist meccas like New York and LA. Oregon Arts Watch’s Brett Campbell considers.
• William Deresiewicz reconsiders the is-food-art debate – he had originally come out strongly in the “no” camp, and got, uh, creamed for it.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• The NEA’s Jen Hughes reports on a new white paper and symposium covering the emerging field of design for social impact.
• Keith Sawyer shares notes from a small conference on copyright and patent reform to which he was invited to contribute perspectives on creativity.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Wall Street Journal performs an analysis of US Department of Education data, finds that “median debt loads at schools specializing in art, music and design average $21,576.” This compares to $19,445 for liberal arts colleges and $18,100 for research universities.
• Americans for the Arts is putting out a new ebook series on arts education.
• The IRS will more frequently publish data on which nonprofits have lost tax-exempt status.
• Now that everyone’s talking about walkability, more and more competitors to Walk Score are popping up. We already heard about Walk Appeal, a mostly theoretical innovation by urbanist Steve Mouzon. Now comes Walkonomics, created by Adam Davies, which uses an eight-factor index to judge walkability. The Atlantic Cities’s Sarah Goodyear has a review.
• Keith Sawyer reviews Bruce Nussbaum’s new book, Creative Intelligence.
• Can’t wait for this Barry’s Blogathon on arts research and data featuring some of the leading establishment names in the field.
• Nesta’s Hasan Bakshi explains the UK creative industry classification scheme and a fascinating critique that his organizations developed of the existing classifications. This is a dense read as blog posts go, but Sunil Iyengar helpfully puts it into simpler terms. The whole thing is essential if you do any kind of creative economy or creative industry work, but here are a couple of key quotes:
  

  “The annual DCMS Creative Industries Economic Estimates have shown that Gross Value Added (GVA) in [advertising, architecture, art and antiques, computer games, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, software, and television and radio] has in recent years grown at twice the rate of other sectors, helping to raise their profile with policymakers.”

  After conducting sensitivity analyses and other validity checks, Nesta not only can locate those industries which employ creative workers at disproportionately high rates, it can also show how most creative workers are employed in non-creative industries.

  Importantly, our analysis also shows that there are serious misallocations in the DCMS classifications; this includes a definite group of industries, which DCMS does not currently treat as creative, but which have exceptionally high creative intensities, including ‘Computer programming activities’ (62.01) and ‘Computer consultancy activities’ (62.02), which between them account for over 400,000 people.

So hooray for all that! And now to our regularly scheduled programming…

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Remember the item a while back about patent trolls? Rachael Wilkinson at the Technology in the Arts blog alerts us to a very disturbing case of a troll targeting an arts organization, in this case a theater in Connecticut for using the “Tweet Seats” concept. Looks like it’s time for arts organizations to speak up for patent reform.
• Federal arts education standards do make a difference in practice.
• Danielle Brazell of Arts for LA writes about bringing the arts into the upcoming Los Angeles mayoral election.
• Don’t miss this fantastic interview between Barry Hessenius and NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, one of my favorite people in the arts (and you’ll soon see why in the interview). Side note: I had no idea that Jamie served on the board of a group called the “No-Pants Theatre Company,” but that is just awesome.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Cultural Data Project finally has a new CEO to lead its transition to an independent nonprofit: Beth Tuttle, a consultant with METStrategies.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• One of the big trends I’ve been seeing over the last decade, and that I think we’ll see accelerate in the next, is the slow migration of low-profit enterprises with social value – think jazz venues, record labels, newspapers/journalism providers – to a nonprofit context. That trend includes independent bookstores, and this article from the Toronto Globe and Mail explains why.
• More food for thought on the economics of music streaming.
  

IN THE FIELD

• Catherine Michna has only been a blogger for two weeks, but this post on “how NOT to be a gentrifier with your theater” in New Orleans is certainly a way to make an impression.
• This is some truth right here: “[International Art English] often ‘insists on art’s subversive potential.’ Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors.”
• The Sacramento Philharmonic and Sacramento Opera will merge into the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance, following a model pioneered by the Utah Symphony | Utah Opera and the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. The article has a helpful rundown of recent mergers in the performing arts and what people are saying about them.
• Dallas Shelby at the National Arts Strategies blog: “As in politics, the key to increasing the power of your mandate is to increase the amount of stakeholders’ engagement more than they increase their expectations.“
• My Fractured Atlas colleague Tim Cynova is up at Hyperallergic discussing 7 ways to build a sustainable art career this year. (I can take credit for the “Well-Informed Arts Professional” bit.)

BIG IDEAS

• A fascinating and lengthy essay by Trevor Butterworth on Big Data and its associated necessity, Big Criticism (or as he terms it, Big Crit). Worth a read in full.
• Last month, Jacquelyn Strycker explored the artistic side of food, including the new creations coming out of the field of molecular gastronomy. Elizabeth Merritt from the Center for the Future of Museums considers another angle: the potential intersection between food and 3D printing.
• Doug Borwick offers a very helpful definitional boundary distinguishing community engagement (by arts institutions) from the more commonly-used term audience engagement.
• Bill Ivey is out with a new book (Handmaking America), and Russell Willis Taylor has the scoop.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In which all of our stereotypes about kids and music preferences are shown to be true.
• New research from the Netherlands suggests a link between practicing a musical instrument and lower blood pressure.
• We talk a lot about arts organizations needing to diversify their audiences, but that conversation is all too often painted in frustratingly broad strokes. Clay Lord is experimenting with some ways to lend a bit more definition.
• Interesting visualization and analysis of age demographics in US cities, courtesy of the Urban Institute and Atlantic Cities.
• How the Hewlett Foundation is thinking about evaluation these days (and, as Lucy Bernholz notes, a victory for transparency).
• Wow! The Foundation Center, GuideStar, and Urban Institute collectively spend close to $2 million annually to extract and upload nonprofit form 990 data into databases. A new report from the Aspen Institute argues that the government should have nonprofits fill out those forms online so that they’ll be in a database already, and then make the contents of that database publicly available.
• A new survey and report basically find that a significant portion of nonprofit development directors hate their jobs.

ETC.

• John E. Craig, Jr. explains the whys, hows, and what nexts of foundation archiving (part 1; part 2).
• What is there to say about this amazing article covering the Portland karaoke scene, other than read the whole thing? So many gems in this one, but just to whet your appetite:
  

  Portland does have dozens of karaoke bars, and over the course of six nights we did our best to visit them all. I sang Lee Ann Womack in a honky-tonk in far southeast Portland, Kanye West in a comedy club and INXS in a Chinese restaurant. I watched Emilie, my seven-months-pregnant sister-in-law, sing Melanie’s “Brand New Key” onstage at Stripparaoke night at the Devils Point, a teensy, low-ceilinged club on a triangular lot well outside Portland’s downtown, while a topless dancer worked the pole next to her. Afterward, the dancer — whose bare stomach featured a tattoo of a vividly horrible shark and the word REDRUM — gave Emilie a sweet hug.

  And…

  Chopsticks III: How Can Be Lounge is located between a heavy-equipment rental shop and a Hanson pipe factory. It’s the kind of awful nightspot where if your watch was broken, you could keep time by the diminishing height of the melting heap of ice dumped in the urinal in the men’s room. When the heap of ice read 10:00, Chopsticks III was jammed with 50 people or more: groups of women out for a night away; a dwarf with an Afro who submitted his power ballads under the stage name Micro; a group of four buddies whose Monday-night karaoke club requires them to sing any song a friend challenges them to, blind. Also, a troupe of puppeteers from a local children’s theater, their snakes, ducks and cowgirls laid carefully across a table in the back of the bar.

  This was puppet karaoke.

  And my favorite…

  Correction: January 23, 2013

  An earlier version of this article  referred incorrectly to a puppet that appeared in a show at a local karaoke club. It is known as Señor Serpiente, not Señora Serpiente.