“Museum” by flickr user World’s Direction

Title: “Taking Charge – Evaluating the Evidence: The Impact of Charging or Not for Admissions on Museums”

Author(s): DC Research Ltd.

Publisher: DC Research / Association of Independent Museums

Year: 2017

URL: https://www.aim-museums.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Final-Report-Taking-Charge-%E2%80%93-Evaluating-the-Evidence-The-Impact-of-Charging-or-Not-for-Admissions-on-Museums.pdf

Topics: museum admission, admission price, museum attendance, museum finances, UK, Wales

Methods: literature review, survey, case studies, interviews

What it says: Purpose and product: DC Research Ltd undertook this study in the first half of 2016 to understand the effects of charging or not charging for admission at UK museums – and of changing a museum’s policy toward charging – on attendance, visitor diversity, funding, visitor experience, and institutional relationships. (The research was commissioned by the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), in partnership with Arts Council England (ACE) and the Museums Archives and Libraries Division (MALD) of the Welsh Government.) The researchers produced four documents: the full report discussed here, a separate executive summary, a summary of the results from Wales, and a “Success Guide” capturing lessons learned for use by museums.

Methodology: The authors reviewed the existing literature on the consequences of charging for museum admission; conducted a survey generating usable responses from 311 museums across the UK; produced 20 case studies, primarily of museums that had changed their charging position, involving site visits and interviews with a variety of stakeholders; and consulted 18 museum experts through one-on-one conversations. Notably, all of the study components excluded National Museums and Galleries, which have tended to be the emphasis of much previous research into this issue in the UK. The authors also had access to AIM’s proprietary Visitor Verdict database.

Findings: Few clear patterns emerged with respect to what kinds of museums charge for admission or the effects of charging. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that other factors, including how a change in charging policy is communicated and managed, seem to matter more for nearly all of the metrics considered. The main exception is that charging seems to be associated with more time spent in the museum (longer “dwell times”) and possibly with greater likelihood of using the museum shop and café. Unsurprisingly, charging was found to provide a useful focal point to welcome visitors and collect data.

Of the 311 respondents, 57 percent charge for general admission and/or specific exhibitions, with a mean general admission price of about £6 for adults; this was higher for museums with more visitors and those that reported being a key attraction in their area. There was a stark difference in perceptions between institutions that are free and those that charge: the former mostly believed that being free had a positive effect on the number and diversity of visitors and on spontaneous donation and secondary spend; the latter mostly believed that charging did not have much effect on any of these. (Interestingly, separate data suggests that the average visitor experience rating was similar across the two kinds of institutions.)

Only 26 percent of the 311 respondents changed their charging policy in the last three years, with 70 percent of those who did being museums that already charged and merely increased price or scope. The institutions that increased charges mostly believed that these increases had no significant effect on number or diversity of visitors or spontaneous donations. The nine institutions that went from free to charging reported that adding a fee did reduce attendance overall (by some 35-40 percent, anecdotally) and disproportionately for locals and repeat visits, but did not seem to affect the social diversity of attendees. Data from AIM’s Visitor Verdict offers some support for this last point: the 2016 breakdown of attendees by social class was nearly identical for charging and free museums. The museums reported, however, that special outreach and discount programs are necessary to achieve this. (Some of the institutions that switched from charging to free reported an increase in diversity, although data was often thin.) The institutions that added a new fee also reported that spontaneous donations decreased, but that this was more than offset by the admissions income.

In terms of best practices for changing charging position, the authors conclude from their case studies that communication is the most important factor for success, emphasizing that staff should be trained to be confident and positive, stakeholders (especially the local community) should understand why the change is happening, any increase should ideally be tied to an improvement in the visitor experience, and thoughtful pricing tiers and discounts are key to maintaining the diversity of attendees.

What I think about it: The design of the study means the authors rely mostly on what museums perceive to be true, and so it doesn’t allow analysis of causality – especially since so few of the institutions involved changed their admissions policy. The authors wisely adduce external data (especially from Visitor Verdict) to triangulate those perceptions and adjudicate among them, but because the dataset is proprietary, it is hard to know how much confidence to place in it, and the authors do not address that question. As a result, the findings on the effects of charging must be taken with a grain of salt. More interpretation, perhaps from the case studies, might have increased the usefulness of this study.

The real value of the work may therefore be in the success guide, which provides practical advice to museums considering changing their policy. Here the anecdotal approach yields valuable insight, and the narrative style allows the authors to put their suggestions in the context of specific institutions they have learned from so their applicability to other institutions can be weighed by the latter’s staff.

The report would be strengthened if the authors made available the list of relevant institutions in the UK and/or of those that received the survey (to clarify how representative the response base is) and the survey instrument itself, without which it is sometimes hard to interpret the summarized responses. For example, only 3 percent of respondents charge for specific exhibitions only; one-third of free institutions believe being free has no impact on “admissions income”; and respondents are more likely to charge admission if they report that competition for visitors is more intense in their area.  These findings strike me as quite counter-intuitive, and I’m not sure how to evaluate them: access to the survey would help me understand whether I am interpreting the terms differently from the respondents. These are also examples of when more interpretation from the authors would be useful: if these things are true, what do they mean? If not, why do the museums perceive them to be?

What it all means: This is a topic on the minds of many museums: about half of the institutions surveyed have considered changing their admissions policy, though the vast majority think it is “not very likely” or “not at all likely” that they will change in the next three years. That last point, and the fact that such a small number of institutions actually did switch from free to charging or vice versa, suggests that this debate might be a proxy for more fundamental issues – and potentially a distraction from real engagement with them.

For example, the debate about charging in the US is often considered in terms of equity and access. This report (and especially the Visitor Verdict data it cites) suggest that charging or not charging is not the main factor in achieving diverse attendance, though the grain of salt mentioned above must be added. If that’s right, this report is a salutary reminder to focus on what matters to achieving our desired ends, which may be more about communication and implementation than admissions charge. But one additional caveat applies here: like many studies touching on diversity in the UK, this one focuses on social class based on occupation; race is not considered.

Demonstrators protest in front of the White House in support of Net Neutrality | Photo by Joseph Gruber via Creative Commons

Just days past his confirmation, Ajit Pai, the Trump administration’s pick for Federal Communications Commission chairman, is already rolling back regulations put in place by the Obama administration in 2015 to protect net neutrality and increase access to the Internet. Changes that have already been enacted include the removal of nine companies from the Lifeline subsidy program, former chairman Tom Wheeler’s initiative which reduced the cost of broadband access for low-income families; the FCC also put a stop to data-security rules enacted in October. These actions signal a rapid-fire change in the FCC’s direction and portend new battles over Internet access. Pai has yet to lay out a specific plan to reverse the FCC’s classification of broadband internet as a utility like electricity or water – one of the landmark decisions under Wheeler’s tenure – but he’s made clear that he sees that move as a “mistake” that has depressed growth in new broadband investment. Some critics consider the loss of a free, open, and affordable Internet one of the biggest potential threats to the arts, favoring corporate interests at best, with the looming possibility of censorship at worst.

Brits attempt to impose quality standards on art. Arts Council England has earmarked £2.7 million to implement Quality Metrics, a controversial process aimed at measuring the quality of art presented to the public by government grantees. Drawn from a series of evaluations by peers, audiences, and the grantees themselves, the system seeks to measure artistic quality across various art forms and types of arts organizations, and will be mandatory for all organizations receiving at least £250,000 per year in operating support from the Arts Council. The plan is set to roll out despite many concerns raised following an independent review of the pilot phase of the program, particularly regarding the use of a single set of metrics across a plethora of artistic disciplines and questions regarding feasibility, data ownership, and anonymity. Buy-in from artists has been equally lukewarm, with many expressing resistance to the very idea of quantifying the arts.

It’s getting even harder to make it in Hollywood. A recent episode of the NPR podcast Freakonomics examined America’s ailing visual effects industry, which has endured economic troubles as jobs continue to migrate out of Hollywood. Despite visual effects playing an increasingly large role in filmmaking (and obliterating trades like special effects in the process), multiple companies in the industry remain in dire economic straits. Their job attrition likely stems from producers and directors chasing tax rebates in neighboring states, and increasingly abroad, forcing many film jobs out of California and hastening the globalization of the industry. At least one Hollywood profession may be getting some help: the Los Angeles City Attorney brought charges last month against five casting workshops accused of using a pay-to-play scheme trading acting roles for cash. In announcing the charges following an investigation involving an undercover actor, the city cited the Krekorian Talent Scam Prevention Act, which bars casting agents from requiring actors to pay fees for auditions.

Libraries grapple between access and ownership. In an era of inevitable change for public libraries, some are relaxing or even doing away entirely with overdue fines, questioning whether the penalties ultimately hurt Americans who need libraries the most. The decision stands in stark contrast to recent crackdowns on overdue books in Alabama and Texas, in which authorities threatened delinquent borrowers with jail time in an effort to recover hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in lost property. The US is not alone; in the UK, more than 25 million books are lost and unaccounted for in that country’s libraries according to industry sources. So, while releasing borrowers from fines may remove the economic barrier and increase libraries’ appeal for marginalized communities, it also inevitably means fewer titles to chose from.

Federal arts funding hangs in the balance. Arts organizations are gearing up for battle as the Trump administration continues to toy with the idea of cutting arts agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts in first drafts of the federal budget. While these cuts have not yet been formally instigated, their possibility has spurred activists to flood congressional offices in opposition. Much attention is focusing on the small but politically significant cadre of Republican arts champions, including New Jersey congressman Leonard Lance and senators Shelley Moore Capito and Susan Collins, both of whom signed a letter of support organized by fellow senator Kirsten Gillibrand. The ramifications of losing these agencies would be most deeply felt in rural areas, which receive less support from state and municipal arts funding. Despite a gradual uptick in appropriations to state agencies dating from the recession, the biggest gains of recent years have been concentrated in populous states like Florida and California, while it’s one step forward two steps back in places like Iowa. Bigger cities may have the best chance for surviving a wholesale cut to the arts: Atlanta and New York are among those plotting ways to increase support at the local level by proposing dedicated arts and culture taxes, providing incentives to artists who live in particular cities or states, and bolstering public art programming.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• Director Craig Watson of the California Arts Council will step down from his role with the agency effective April 2017.
• Philadelphia’s William Penn Foundation has named Shawn McCaney as its new executive director. McCaney was previously director of Penn’s Creative Communities program.
• The Wallace Foundation named Giselle “Gigi” Antoni as its new director of learning and enrichment. Antoni had developed a national reputation as the leader of Dallas’s Big Thought arts education initiative.
• The Alaska-based Rasmuson Foundation has announced Alexandra McKay as its new vice president of programs.
• Seattle arts critic Jen Graves voluntarily resigned after more than a decade at The Stranger, stating that it’s “not a viable place for me to do the work I’ve always cared about.”
• Perhaps less voluntarily, the outspoken New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood is looking for work. Despite the implosion of jobs in arts criticism, the Times intends to fill the full-time position.
• DataArts is seeking a senior research manager to lead teams in study design, data analysis and interpretation and the delivery of the organization’s research services.
• The Boston-based Barr Foundation is hiring an arts & creativity program officer.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• The National Endowment for the Arts shared its latest installment of data on economic trends in arts and culture, produced in collaboration with the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Upshot: artists add value to the economy, but public funding for arts education is in a sharp decline.
• Out of 1,000 responses to a survey by the UK’s Guardian Teacher Network, 80% claimed their schools made or are planning to make cuts to the arts.
• New evidence suggests that formal artistic education (i.e. conservatory training) can have a positive impact on artists’ career sustainability, as can financial and business training. Of course, one must be able to afford such training; indeed, the Sutton Trust noted that British actors from wealthy backgrounds are more likely successful than those with modest upbringings. Meanwhile, college-educated white adults make more than college-educated black and Latino adults according to Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, challenging the assumption that higher education can neutralize racial wage gaps.
• Exponent Philanthropy reported that small foundations and individual donors are developing strategies to up their impact potential in grantmaking. But larger funders tend to rely on their peers as the most trusted source of knowledge, according to a Hewlett Foundation report.
• An evaluation of Arts Council England’s Catalyst program indicates it provided a significant kick-start needed to increase the fundraising capacity of grantees.
• Museums and other cultural attractions continue to face challenges. A new metric indicates that visitor confidence to US cultural organizations is experiencing a sharp decline. However, a recent review of the literature indicates that museums are developing new fundraising strategies by looking beyond wealthy socialites as sources of individual donor support. Meanwhile, the American Alliance of Museums, as it does each year, published its TrendsWatch report considering what the future might hold for the industry.
• A new Ipsos survey asked Canadians across the county to define their culture and its products in the digital age.
• A new study identified hip and arm movement as the mark of good dancing in women. A rebuttal from Slate’s Daniel Engber, however, questions the relevance of the study, deeming it science’s version of clickbait.
• Grantmakers in the Arts produced a review of the literature regarding the arts in medicine, with a specific focus on optimizing investments.
• Research from the University of Chicago indicates that it’s easier to have a negative attitude then to look on the bright side.
• New research suggests that, compared to other teens, ballet dancers experience greater rates of “psychological inflexibility,” leading to anxiety and depression. Dancing may contribute to a greater fear of failure and pressure to achieve a physical aesthetic, which may also lead to such symptoms.
• Violent video games are thought to be associated with negative behaviors. Could uplifting games elicit the opposite effect? A UNESCO-sponsored study indicates they could.
• The Kennedy Center has partnered with the National Institutes of Health to create Sound Health, an initiative that explores music’s effects on health and wellness. Fast Company interviewed author Daniel Levitin about his new book on a similar topic: the neuroscience of music, and how playing music at home impacts behavior, attention span and productivity. Levitin’s work indicates that music is no longer as prevalent in the home, perhaps due to increased screen time, and could be used to facilitate mental breaks from focused tasks. His findings contrast evidence that positions silence (differentiated from quiet, or ambient noise) as an underutilized productivity tool.
• An annual report on freedom of expression around the world released by Freemuse finds that violations of artists’ rights more than doubled in 2016.
• The University of Wisconsin found that people of color accounted for 22% of children’s books characters in 2016, a 13-percentage-point increase over the course of two decades.
• Despite the success of high-profile female artists like Adele and Beyoncé, women are, on the whole, seriously underrepresented on the top 40 charts.
• #OscarsSoYoung could be the latest hashtag criticizing the Academy Awards. A new report from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism indicates that there were only two characters over 60 nominated over the past three years…and both were played by Michael Keaton. USC researchers also found that women directors working on the top-grossing films were unlikely to have released more than one film in the last decade.

My Console Collection by Flickr user Sarah

It’s widely reported that able-bodied young men, without college degrees are underemployed and unemployed in record numbers. Despite this hardship, one recent study has found that these young men are actually happier than their equivalents were 10 years ago. The source of their pleasure? Much of it may come from playing video games instead of working. The “real-world” jobs available to them do not provide the sense of achievement or community that can be found through gaming, so many of these young men are choosing to live at home, in a virtual reality (nearly three quarters of the drop in work hours for this group is accounted for by increased time spent playing video games). It seems like bad news, but perhaps the implications of this retreat from the workforce are not as dire as they seem: inventive researchers are working with gamers to find cures for disease.

Can the Quality of Art be Quantified? Arts Council England is betting on it. The government agency recently announced a plan to have all of its National Portfolio Organizations (NPO) that receive over £250k per year must adopt and adhere to the Quality Metrics program, a standardized measurement approach designed to consistently and meaningfully measure artistic quality. These grantees are required to participate in a number of annual evaluations and engage in regular peer review, regardless of art form and organizational structure. Despite significant concerns raised in a post-pilot evaluation of the platform, the program is moving forward – for now. The news has sparked quite a row from UK artists on Twitter, and even incoming ACE Chair Nicholas Serota has expressed skepticism. In other quantification news, a new algorithm predicts the likelihood that a book will become a bestseller and, thanks to Apple’s iBeacon, many of the world’s major museums are using big data in their attempts to improve their visitors’ experiences.

High Culture and Pop Culture Converge. BBC2 is dropping an unorthodox bomb in this autumn’s rating wars: high culture. The British television station will shelve its usual schedule of repeats, to air poetry, dance, and documentaries on Saturday evenings. This new focus on culture will feature contemporary programming rooted in traditional forms and narrative (for example, a twist on WH Auden and a production by a performance artist who merges hip-hop, poetry and theatre). Through the creation of a “cultural destination” for its viewers, BBC2 may well provide the UK’s artists and arts organizations with invaluable opportunities and exposure.

The Connected Future of Fine Art? We suppose it was only a matter of time before “hacking” would come for classical art forms.  In August, the Dutch National Ballet premiered Night Fall, a new ballet choreographed by Peter Leung – not for the stage, but for virtual reality (VR).  Viewers need only a VR-compatible device to experience the “goose bump-worthy” performance, the first of its kind, as technology enables the performers to embark on an instant global tour. Meanwhile, the Tate Britain launched the IK Prize-winning online initiative Recognition. The program employs artificial intelligence to match the Tate Britain’s iconic collection with photojournalism from the contemporary 24-hour news cycle. It is designed to provoke new questions about art and life.

Culture vs. Terrorism. In September, France’s President François Hollande stood in the Egyptian Galleries at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and announced the formation of a $100 million fund to combat terrorist attacks on cultural sites in the Middle East. (He did not say how much his own government would be contributing to this “public-private partnership,” but did express hope that the Met’s donors would pitch in.) Hollande also referenced an upcoming (December 2016) conference hosted by the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which will focus on culture and terrorism. Although the preservation of cultural artifacts is integral to global human culture, it is interesting that France’s president advocated for the asylum of art works while its Prime Minister expressed reluctance to grant asylum to people.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Laura Sparks begins her term as the Cooper Union’s first female president in January.  Currently, she’s finishing her term as executive director of the William Penn Foundation; her replacement will be the foundation’s fifth head so far this decade.
• Heather Kim brings over 20 years of experience in higher education research to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in the newly created role Director of Institutional Research.
• Sir Nicholas Serota will leave the Tate, after 28 years (!), to become the next chairman of Arts Council England. Will significant government cuts to the arts prove challenging for the “virtuoso fundraiser”?
• Just four months after being reappointed by David Cameron, BBC chair Rona Fairhead will step down. Her successor has not been named.
• The Center for Arts Education is hiring a Director of Advocacy and Engagement.
• The Center for Artistic Activism is hiring a part-time Non-Profit Manager.
• The New York Public Library’s Library of the Performing Arts is hiring a Deputy Director of Research and Collections Services.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Cultural Innovation released a long-awaited report on trends and conditions affecting U.S. artists, an update of a major, decade-old study and a centerpiece of Chairman Jane Chu’s “Creativity Connects” program. Meanwhile, new arts data profiles published by the NEA offer state-by-state perspectives on Americans arts participation. The data highlights a north-south divide in American creativity, and reveals that the percentage of American adults who read literature fell to at least a three-decade low last year, after a “long, steady decline.”
• A Los Angeles County Arts Commission literature review on public engagement in the arts, and reports from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Our Museum program provide resources on cultural equity and inclusion in museums and beyond.
• Research commissioned by the UK’s Association of Independent Museums, Arts Council England and the Welsh Government shows that introducing admissions fees does not affect diversity, but may cause attendance to fall.
• The latest annual report from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project focuses on institutional connections, resources, and working across disciplines for arts alumni. And a recent study from artnet suggests that the institution from which an artist receives an MFA has implications for career “success.”
• The National Center for Arts Research released its most comprehensive report to date on national fundraising trends. Meanwhile, a new study published in the Public Performance and Management Review suggests that arts donors aren’t influenced by high attendance.
• Partners for Sacred Places has released the results of an evaluation of its pilot program to match artists to historic sacred spaces.
• John Sedgwick and Mike Pokorny’s research on financial risk in the film industry challenges conventional wisdom on the peripatetic nature of box office predictions. And new research from the Journal of Political Economy investigates movies as a shared experience. Unfortunately, the latest report from the University of California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism reveals that Hollywood is all talk and no action when it comes to advancing diversity.
• A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance suggests a link between ballet and sensitivity to others. On the other hand, new research from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law reports that more people find lyrics threatening if they believe they are from a rap song, as opposed to a country ballad.
• Income inequality isn’t the only kind of inequality: using information from the National Center for Education Statistics, the New York Times reports that the educational inequality gap is narrowing for children entering kindergarten. And results of a new study published in the Review of Income and Wealth indicate that happiness inequality is on the decline.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy released a comprehensive report on evaluation practices at foundations.
• A new study from the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis – Center on Philanthropy explores thirty years of nonprofit research.
• Research from Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales found that viewing art relieves anxiety in dementia patients and helps them to “stay in the moment.”
• A new book from Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall chronicles the growth of El Sistema-inspired music education programs around the world. Not everyone, however, is convinced.

Men playing go – photo by flickr user J.A.G.A.

Computers have a long history of beating humans at complex games. This month, Google clinched the crown jewel a decade earlier than anticipated, when its program AlphaGo defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol in four out of five games of Go. Invented some 2,500 years ago in China, the game is deceptively simple: despite straightforward rules, there are more possible legal positions in the game than there are atoms in the observable universe (actually, than all the atoms in all universes if there were as many universes as there are atoms in our universe!). As such, it has long been an irresistible challenge to artificial intelligence researchers. Google’s DeepMind project team’s winning strategy was to abandon the traditional AI tactic of building search trees in favor of deep neural networks, training AlphaGo not only to learn from games past, but, importantly, to discover new strategies for itself. Why does this matter for the arts? Well, first of all, we just witnessed a computer mastering an art form: historically, Go was considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholar, the others being a musical instrument, calligraphy, and painting. And second, the implications of AlphaGo’s win for the future of artificial intelligence go far beyond this single match; the principles DeepMind uses in AlphaGo may have broader applications for artificial “general” intelligence, which could include creating artistic work. More controversially, the early completion of this milestone may signal a hastening of the moment when machines take over the world.

China cracks down on TV. Cultural censorship in China reached new levels this month when the the government released updated regulations for what’s shown on television. The guidelines make it illegal to depict “abnormal sexual relationships and behaviours” on screen. This means, effectively, no incest, extramarital affairs, one night stands, underage relationships–and no gay people. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, it still remains taboo, and the first show to be cut under the new rules was Addicted, about the lives of queer high schoolers, outraging the show’s many fans and angering LGBT activists. The measures are a challenge for everyone, not least of which for Chinese video websites, which have benefited from a lack of government regulation of online television: in 2015, Chinese video platforms produced some 805 online shows, compared with 200 shows in 2013. All eyes are on if and how the new regulations are circumvented or resisted. The increased censorship comes at a time of rising individualism in China, and on the heels of a recent tiff between President Xi Jinping and Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang which unexpectedly spurred journalists, scholars and party insiders to come forward in his defense. Will it be enough to force a wavering of the party line? Only time will tell.

Canada follows through with big arts funding increases. Just two months after committing to diversity at the grant level, Canada continues to lead the way in government arts funding with the announcement of Justin Trudeau’s budget plan. Fulfilling campaign promises, the cultural sector will receive a $1.87 billion boost over five years. $75 million was reinstated to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s budget this year, to be followed by $150 million a year until 2020-21. The Canada Council for the Arts also received welcome funding news, though a bit less than expected; it will see an additional $40 million this year, eventually rising to $180 million by 2020-21. Likewise, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada will each receive $3.5 million this year, and $8 million annually thereafter. (The NFB made its own news this month when it announced that it is committed to ensuring that, in the future, half of its films are directed by women and half of its production budgets are spent on films directed by women.) After years of budget slashes by the previous Conservative government, all are in agreement that the funding is a “game changer.” The package also includes capital funding for Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, which announced this month that it will launch a new Indigenous Theater department that will equal the NAC’s English and French Theater companies in importance.

ISIS is out of Palmyra. The Islamic State’s ongoing destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria has received lots of coverage from Createquity over the past year (see here, here, and here.) This month, ISIS was finally driven by Syrian government forces from the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the center of Syria. With ISIS gone, the work of restoring the ancient site can begin. Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s head of antiquities and museums, has said that “eighty percent of the ruins are in good shape,” and that the city will be fully restored in five years. Beyond Palmyra, significant efforts are underway to preserve antiquities under threat. The Italians, in conjunction with UNESCO, have created a task force dubbed Peacekeepers of Culture which is aimed at keeping ancient artworks, monuments, artifacts and archaeological sites in conflict areas out of the hands of extremists. In addition, several organizations have undertaken to document cultural heritage digitally, most recently the French 3D digitization agency Iconem. Finally, the International Criminal Court this month is considering whether to take to trial Malian jihadi leader Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi for destroying mausoleums and damaging a mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012. If the trial goes ahead, it will be the first time that war crimes against cultural heritage constitute the main charge of an ICC hearing.

Cultural policy is so hot right now in the UK. The UK’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, published a much anticipated White Paper this month, the first such statement since 1965. It comes at a critical juncture for the arts in Great Britain, as organizations across the country continue to recover from the recession-era austerity policies that forced a greater reliance on American-style private funding and government advocacy. The White Paper calls for a widening of access for the arts, announces a Cultural Protection Fund for heritage in global conflict zones to be launched this spring, and calls for a detailed reviews of museums, arts and heritage, due to be completed by summer 2017. (In advance of the paper’s release, Arts Council England announced earlier this month a major restructuring to its grant programs, which are in direct support of many of the tenets of Vaizey’s work.) Though some have criticized Vaizey for a lack of vision, many welcome the “vote of confidence” it places on the arts. Meanwhile, the Cultural Value Project, a two-year exploration of the value of culture beyond economic measures, concluded this month with the publication of a significant evidence review that perhaps controversially concludes that the value derived from arts and cultural activity arises primarily at the individual level.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Maurine Knighton, currently senior vice president at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, has been named new program director of the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, replacing Ben Cameron.
• Malcolm White returns to the helm of the Mississippi Arts Commission after three years as the state’s tourism chief.
• Pew Center for Arts & Heritage seeks a Center Specialist in the visual arts. No closing date.
• The League of American Orchestras is hiring a Director and a Manager for its Knowledge Center. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Americans for the Arts and Ipsos surveyed 3,020 adults in December 2015 on topics such as support for arts education and government arts funding, personal engagement in the arts, and the personal benefits and wellbeing that come from engaging in the arts. Here are the results.
• A report commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation looks closely at what arts leaders across generations “really need” while the Center for the Future of Museums’ TrendsWatch report looks at what museum audiences “really need.”
• Art of the Rural and the Rural Policy Research Institute launched Next Generation: The Future of Arts & Culture Placemaking in Rural America, a “digital learning commons” designed to address major challenges facing rural arts practitioners.
• A paper published in the Journal of Cultural Economics this month looks at the history of copyright in music and of music publishing.
• “Neighborhood Diversity, Economic Health, and the Role of the Arts” zeroes in on the relationship between arts organizations and economic and cultural diversity in New York City.
• Over the last three years, the Denver Public School system has invested $40 million into its arts education programs. This month, it released an analysis of the impact of this investment.
• Several reports this month look at the benefits of music making. A close look at choral singing published in Psychology of Music suggests that the “well-being benefits afforded by choral singing could be distinct in comparison with other leisure activities.” Another study, this one from WolfBrown and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, looks at the positive impact that making live music together has an families. A third builds on the Manchester Camerata Orchestra’s pioneering music projects with dementia patients.
• A paper published this month offers a systematic literature review of the applications of cultural impact assessment internationally.
• Besides the Cultural Value Project’s final report, several other studies have come out of the UK this month. One report looks into whether physical proximity to a museum or gallery affects whether or not you’ll visit. A survey by the Entertainment Retailers Association finds that the number of stores selling music and video has more than doubled since 2009, while another finds that London-based organizations receive almost twice as much arts funding as the rest of England combined. Finally, researchers from the London School of Economics and Goldsmiths College suggest that there is a “class ceiling” in British performing arts organizations.

“Untitled” by flickr user Jakob Montrasio

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past twelve months. You can read the previous editions here: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. Creation of this list is distributed amongst our editorial team. Authorship of individual items is noted at the end of each story.

Compiling our annual list of arts policy stories has always been a loose exercise, involving quite a bit in the way of editorial judgment calls. What constitutes a “top” story? Is it one that captured the most attention? That’s most relevant to our readership? That makes for the best reading? In the past, we’ve navigated these questions intuitively and implicitly for the most part, but this year, in keeping with our work towards identifying the most important issues in the arts (which faces similar dilemmas), we’ve added a twist. The stories below were selected and ranked based on our estimate of how many people they affected (or will affect), and how deeply, worldwide. As a result, the stories you’ll see below have a distinctly global flavor compared to our previous lists. We’re planning to use a similar method to rank our Newsroom stories in the new year. Speaking of which, from all of us at Createquity, best wishes for a happy and healthy 2016!  –Ian David Moss

10. At the casino with national arts councils: Australia shuffles the deck, Canada doubles down, England tries a new game

Australia’s system for government funding for the arts was turned upside down this year, and the implications are still shaking out, even as Communications Minister Mitch Fifield took over the Arts Ministry portfolio from former Arts Minister George Brandis in November. Brandis surprised (and angered) the Australian arts community in May by pushing over AUS $110 million in cuts to the Australia Council arts funding body over the coming four years. The money didn’t disappear, but instead was earmarked for the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, a new arts funding program under direct control of the Ministry for the Arts, and thus managed, rather alarmingly, by Brandis. Money wasn’t the only thing Brandis moved from the Council to the Arts Ministry–he also took control of the public-private partnership program known as the Creative Partnerships Australia. The ongoing tug of war between the Council and the Arts Ministry highlighted key issues in arts funding structures, including a hard look at the Council’s principle of arm’s length funding. Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the English-speaking world, new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his new Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly pledged to double funding for the Canada Arts Council last month. And in the arts sector in England, movement towards a more fully American-style funding system continues apace, with so-called “national portfolio organizations” now raising more than double each year the amount that has been lost in government funding as a result of cuts several years ago to Arts Council England. That said, the Council averted further cuts this year and instead is to receive a small annual increase of £10m yearly until 2020. –Michael Feldman

9. Hollywood begins to wake up to its diversity problems

This time last year, Hollywood was rocked by the Sony Hack scandal, which–beyond spectacle and threat–revealed in no uncertain terms the stark gap in gender pay at Sony. Turns out, Sony is not the only offender, and women are not the only ones affected. In January, when the coveted Oscar nominations were announced, there was not a single person of color among the nominees for lead and supporting actor and actress, not a single women nominated in either of the screenwriting categories, and the director category was dominated by white men. Although television fought back with a more diverse slate of Emmy Awards nominations in July, and the recently announced nominees for the 2016 Golden Globes are somewhat more balanced, the situation on the small screen is not much better: a study from the Directors Guild of America looked at the 2009 to 2014 television seasons, and revealed that in this five year span, 87% of first-time TV directors were white, and 82% of them were male. More studies follow suit: a report from the Ralph E. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA which looked at film and television makeup in 2012 and 2013 shows minorities and women lagging behind in all categories (with particularly low numbers of LGBT and Latino players) and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s study of the 700 top-grossing films between 2007 and 2014 shows that women had less than a third of speaking parts in the most popular films and worse, that only three of those same films were directed by African Americans.

Hollywood is finally taking note. Top-billed Hollywood actresses (and George Clooney), heeding Jennifer Lawrence’s rallying cry, have started speaking out about gender pay inequity. In May, citing bias against women, the ACLU asked state and federal agencies to investigate Hollywood’s hiring practices. In October, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission followed suit and began contacting female directors to investigate gender discrimination in Hollywood. Also in October, the Women in Film and the Sundance Institute organized a two-day, closed-door meeting with 44 top industry officials to discuss solutions to the gender issue. (The four strategies identified during this meeting were made public in December.) As for racial diversity, in November Cheryl Boone Isaacs (who, it should be noted, is the first African American and only the third woman to hold the post of president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) finally announced a five-year plan aimed at diversifying the Academy’s leadership, and stars of color such as Aziz Ansari continue to draw attention to the issue. –Clara Inés Schuhmacher

8. Culture fails to make a dent in UN Sustainable Development Goals

This September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a new agenda for sustainable development, replacing the 2000 Millennium Development Goals. The so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a significant milestone for global policy and help define the framework that will be used to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars in global aid over the next 15 years. In the two years prior to the adoption of SDGs, a consortium of organizations including the IFACCA, Agenda 21 for Culture, IFCCD, Culture Action Europe, Arterial Network, IMC, and the ICOMO launched an international campaign to advocate for the inclusion of cultural indicators among the SDGs. UNESCO–the cultural arm of the UN–also advocated for the inclusion of culture in the SDGs, developing a manual for the collection of data on culture and development. Yet even with 17 goals and 169 targets addressing economic, social and environmental development, culture would up notably absent from the agenda. Despite the setback, some notable progress was made in the final weeks of 2015. On December 14, the Second Committee of the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the resolution on Culture and Sustainable Development, which recognizes culture as a driver of sustainable development and points out that policies responsive to cultural contexts yield better development outcomes. Importantly for the future of the SDGs, the resolution also suggests that the role that culture plays in development should be included in the follow-up and review framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. – John Carnwath

7. Controversies and troubles in social science research

It’s been a year of upheaval and, yes, even scandal, for the social sciences. In February, the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced it would ban the “null hypothesis statistical testing procedure,” claiming that p-values, the time-honored method of establishing statistical significance of research, are easily manipulated and were never meant to be the be-all and end-all of scientific rigor. The announcement was met with celebration, caution, and mood dampening within the statistics world, and brought a bit of mainstream media attention to an existential struggle that’s been gripping the scientific community for years. The high-profile retraction of an influential study about political canvassing came three months later. The study, which suggested that canvassers from the Los Angeles LGBT Center were effective at changing attitudes towards gay marriage, had received national media attention in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, This American Life – even a tweet on Createquity – and launched primary researcher Michael LaCour’s career all the way to a plum tenure-track job at Princeton. It received a different kind of attention in May, when two graduate students trying to recreate the study arrived at the conclusion that the data was likely falsified. When LaCour was unable to produce the original data set collected, the study’s high profile co-author Donald Green promptly requested a retraction from the original publisher, Science. And it’s not just wrongdoing at play. In August, The Reproducibility Project released the results of its attempts to replicate the findings of 100 foundational social science studies. In 62 of the replicated studies, the effect observed was weaker than in the original, suggesting that the original findings were not confirmed. Both the LaCour scandal and the Reproducibility Project findings raise important questions about “irregularities,” the dependence of study results upon circumstances, and the need for replication. Whether it’s greater transparency and a culture of whistleblowing, increased focus on data sharing and replication, or more innovation and rigor in the use of statistics, psychology and the social sciences will surely continue to debate potential reforms in the year to come, with implications for arts research as well. –Katie Ingersoll

6. ISIS loots cultural heritage to fund terrorism

2015 has been a tragic year for culture in the Middle East, with egregious heritage crimes committed by ISIS in Sabratha, Nimrud, Hatra, and Palmyra (twice!) as reported in these pixels in March and September. The real problem goes much deeper, however. In May, Iraq’s top antiquities officials suggested that the destruction of cultural sites was in fact a cover-up for the systematic looting and resale of antiquities, prompting an international investigation into the Islamic State’s oil & antiquities department (known as “Diwan al-Rikaz,” or, the “Department of Precious Things That Come Out of the Ground,”) and how it helps fund terrorist activities through the sale of relics on the black market. A link was made to the Western art trade as blood antiquities from Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq were discovered to be being sold in London, New York and elsewhere. In August, the FBI issued a warning directly to art dealers to watch out for “terrorist loot,” and in September the U.S. Department of State offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the disruption of ISIS trafficking of antiquities and oil. In November, a report released by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) found that “IS completely dominates the antiquities trade in the areas under its control,” taking 20% or more of the revenue from items sold to smugglers. While the total value of the looted pieces is difficult to assess (some say it’s in the hundreds of millions, others say the total value is, in fact, nominal,) the extensive destruction has galvanized many into action: archaeologists are racing to capture Middle East’s historical sites with digital renderings before they’re destroyed, and Syria’s “Monuments Men” are cataloging theft and destruction on the ground. UNESCO took its own serious step against ISIS in May when it adopted a resolution affirming that “attacks intentionally directed against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art … or historic monuments, may amount to war crimes”. Meanwhile, these revelations have raised the age-old question of who actually owns ancient art and has prompted a closer look at the astounding scale of looting and selling of ancient artifacts globally. –Shawn Lent

5. The Every Student Succeeds Act is passed by Congress

Fifty years after the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Congress finally passed a reauthorization of the landmark federal education legislation called the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) this December. After the stringent accountability measures and top-down approach of the embattled prior authorization No Child Left Behind (NCLB), ESSA attempts to delegate more authority to states and local education agencies over accountability regarding student growth measures, professional development, and federal funding allocation for high-poverty schools. Notably for arts education, the ESSA replaces the language of “core subjects” from NCLB with “well-rounded education,” and the definition of a well-rounded education includes the arts. While NCLB did include the arts in its list of core subjects, popular wisdom held that its emphasis on strict testing of academic subjects created incentives for schools to shift focus away from the arts. More flexibility in creating and monitoring student growth measures may allow schools and local education agencies to increase their investment in the arts. Further, the new legislation allows for arts and music education programming to qualify for new, state-administered grants. While we will have to wait and see how the legislation is implemented to learn how this new reauthorization will impact arts education, it seems likely that ESSA will at least maintain and perhaps improve arts education for all US students. –Louise Geraghty

4. Big Tech gets in on entertainment action, Big Media gets in on nonprofit action

Income from streaming services eclipsed CD sales for the first time in 2014, and the fatcats took notice. In January, Sony announced that Spotify would replace Music Unlimited as the music streaming outlet for its PlayStation Network. That platform, available in 41 countries (which triples Sony’s live streaming reach), went live on March 30. In March, Jay Z announced the launch of his own streaming service, Tidal, and despite a rocky year–a major lawsuit, three CEOs in eight months–the service is holding on with a million subscribers, a 31-country reach, and a surprise release from Prince. Apple jumped on the increasingly crowded music streaming bandwagon in June when it unveiled Apple Music, its own music streaming platform spearheaded by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame. As with Tidal, Apple’s service offers a paid option only, though it certainly has a marketplace advantage: the app is packaged into every iOS download, and it integrates neatly with iTunes, which at last count had some 800 millions user accounts. Pandora, not to be undone, turned on the offensive this year, acquiring Ticketfly, Rdio Inc and Next Big Sound, and signing unprecedented licensing agreements with Sony/ATV, and with Warner. While it remains to be seen what effect recent US Copyright Royalty Board rulings will have on internet streaming, everyone won with the arrival of the Beatles catalogue to the streaming universe. Streaming services aren’t the only mechanism by which tech giants tried to elbow into the entertainment business this year. In March, Google launched YouTube for Artists, a set of online tools aimed at helping musicians generate more revenue from their music, and ostensibly plan better tours through in-depth access to viewer information on a city level.

If 2015 signaled a convergence between tech and media, within media itself we saw another convergence: between nonprofit and for-profit. In August, premium cable channel HBO struck a deal with the nonprofit Sesame Workshop to bring first-run episodes of “Sesame Street” exclusively to its network and streaming outlets starting in the fall. Although new episodes will eventually be available on (free) PBS–the show’s home for the last 45 years–the news raised some troubling questions about mission and access. As if that weren’t enough, after 127 years, the National Geographic Society, “one of the largest nonprofit scientific and educational institutions in the world,” sold a 73% stake in its iconic magazine and other media assets to a Murdoch-headed partnership in exchange for $725 million in September. –CIS

3. A landmark victory for net neutrality

The first half of this year delivered big-time for proponents of net neutrality. In February, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 in favor of classifying broadband Internet as a public utility, outmaneuvering a previous court order that had handicapped proposed regulations. Far from done, in May the FCC shot down the proposed merger between cable giants Time Warner and Comcast in another move celebrated by net neutrality advocates, and the following month the agency approved a proposal to expand the Lifeline program and allow participants to apply its subsidies to broadband internet as well as to landline and mobile telephone service. (The $1.7 billion subsidy program, created in 1985 under the Reagan administration, serves some 17 million low-income people nationally.) Over the summer, nine internet service providers filed lawsuits to overturn the Open Internet Order, including telecom giant AT&T, who is waging legal war against the commission on its own; all arguments were heard in court on December 4. A decision is expected in spring 2016, and at least one commentator suggests that the Open Internet’s prospects are looking good. On the federal side, Republicans in Congress have attempted to overturn the initial FCC ruling all year (see here and here) and at the last minute, slipped an anti-net neutrality rider into the end-of-year, must-pass spending bill. Luckily, the bill passed without those provisions, thanks in part to pressure from companies such as Etsy, Kickstarter, Tumblr and Vimeo. Meanwhile, across the pond, the European Parliament rejected several proposed amendments limiting Internet companies from playing favorites with legal online content, reminding us all that this issue is a global one. –CIS

2. China becomes dominant player in global arts markets

In 2014, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest economy, and in 2015, it solidified its ascendance in the arts with many important firsts. With the value of art traded in 2014 reaching an all-time high at an estimated €51 billion, China edged out the United States as the world’s largest market for modern art with a 30.6% share of global sales. China rose to second place worldwide in the global art market more generally, tying the UK with a 22% share. Both percentages are likely to increase, especially given the jaw-dropping $170.4 million Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian paid Christie’s for Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couche in November. Unfortunately, however, Chinese collectors aren’t paying those kinds of prices for works made at home: sales of contemporary Chinese artists have dropped significantly as buyers focus on Western pieces and Western art fairs, like Art Basel Miami. At the box office, China did as spectacularly, beating out the United States in February film proceeds with $650 million in revenue. (Star Wars, which may or may not tilt the scales, will not be released in China until January 9.) What’s more, Chinese box office sales jumped a whopping 48% this year, putting it firmly in second place globally; a report from Ernst & Young predicts that China will be the world’s biggest film industry by 2020. The year ahead looks bright for gaming, as well. This past May, China’s Ministry of Culture lifted a fourteen year-old ban on the production and sale of video consoles gaming, opening the door to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to manufacture and sell their Xboxes, PlayStations and Wii in-country. Although it’s not immediately clear what impact the lifting of the ban will have on Chinese gamers, or on the bottom line of these big three, China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s largest mobile gaming market by 2016. We may very well see China back on this list this time next year. –CIS

1. Terrorism hits the arts

Deaths from terrorism have reached their highest level ever recorded, and the arts are increasingly in the crosshairs. The year dawned with attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in which two Islamic fundamentalists killed twelve, including Charlie Hebdo’s editor and several cartoonists, in apparent retaliation for the magazine’s repeated depictions of the prophet Muhammad. Though this attack was aimed a small group of individuals, its effects were felt deeply and on the global scale: a solidarity march held on the Sunday after the attack drew almost four million citizens and some forty world leaders. In March, gunmen attacked the National Bardo Museum in downtown Tunis, killing two Tunisians and 20 foreign visitors, and wounding at least 50 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack – Tunisia’s deadliest since 2002 – shaking a country that prides itself on having emerged as the most successful post-Arab Spring democracy. In October, two Bangledeshi publishers were stabbed to death purportedly for having printed the work of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism. (Roy was himself assassinated in February of this year.) The close of the year saw coordinated terrorist attacks once again reverberating throughout Paris on November 13, this time even more devastating. Gunmen opened fire at a Eagles of Death Metal concert at Paris’s historic Le Bataclan music hall, killing 89, and at bars and restaurants throughout the city, killing another forty individuals. U2 frontman Bono called the Bataclan massacre “the first direct hit on music in this so-called war on terror,” pointing to an unsettling new direction in terrorism this year in which cultural institutions (and not just local or politically symbolic international sites) have become targets.

This year’s attacks, collectively and individually, have prompted an avalanche of news coverage and reactions from all corners of the globe, and precipitated a growing backlash across Europe and in the United States against Muslim immigrants, Islamist terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, and importantly for this forum, freedom of expression. In November, President François Hollande revealed a proposal for France’s museums to temporarily house Syrian cultural objects “at risk” of ISIS looting, and Minister of Culture Fleur Pellerin announced a relief fund for French organizations affected by the attacks. Meanwhile, Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has pledged 1 billion euros to spend equally on culture and security, and the Bardo Museum in Tunis, site of the March attacks, announced a cultural partnership with the Museo di Arte Orientale in Turin, Italy, in an effort to contribute to peace and stability in the region. –CIS

Honorable Mention:

• The Ford Foundation shifts its focus to inequality, reboots creativity & free expression program
• “Happy Birthday” is finally in the public domain
• Charitable giving to the arts is on the rise
• Building frenzy in NYC

For some prognostication on what we might be seeing in 2016, check out Thomas Cott’s annual roundup of predictions from his readers. Happy new year!

The Office – photo by flickr user Nick Chapman

In 2013, unpaid interns everywhere won a major victory when Judge William H. Pauley III of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled that plaintiffs who had worked without compensation on the Fox Searchlight movie Black Swan should have been classified as employees. The ruling resulted in a slew of lawsuits leveled by other unpaid interns, many settled out of court for large sums. This month, that decision was vacated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which argued that the proper way to determine a worker’s status is to apply a “primary beneficiary test,” in which the worker can be considered an employee only if the employer benefits more from the relationship than the intern. Crucially, the decision also states that an internship can be legal even if it doesn’t meet the traditional six-factor checklist set in place in 1947, especially if it is tied to the receipt of school credit and helps the student fulfill academic commitments. As a result, a number of commentators have expressed concern that the decision encourages employers to  continue to exploit interns under the guise of education. 

The Beginning of the End of the No Child Left Behind Era: Speaking of education, thirteen years after the Bush Administration passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)–ushering in an age of highly criticized, high-stakes standardized testing–the Senate voted 81 to 17 to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The Senate bill, nicknamed “Every Child Achieves Act,” includes many welcome provisions, including doing away with the adequate yearly progress (read: serious standardized testing) mandate of NCLB. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed its own reauthorization, the Student Success Act, with no support from Democrats and under the threat of a White House veto. The House and Senate will now begin working on a final bill for approval. What that might ultimately look like, and when it might come to pass, is anyone’s guess. To start, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has stated that the Senate’s bill falls short, and there is still much work to be done.

Film Tax Credits Get the Axe: Last year, we reported on the growing disenchantment in some states with film tax credit programs due to their questionable track record of impact on employment and economic prosperity, at least when it comes to big Hollywood studio productions. This month, two more states decided such incentives were no longer worth it: Governor Bill Walker repealed Alaska’s film tax credit in its entirety, and Governor Rick Snyder signed legislation ending Michigan’s program (though he did keep the Film Office, for the time being.) More unsettling to the film industry was Louisiana’s capping of its film tax credit program at $180 million, with an additional stipulation that limits credits per film to $30 million. This new limit is almost $100 million less than what the state has spent on credits annually in the last few years. Louisiana’s move is notable, as it has long been one of the most important places to film outside of California. The film industry is working on proposed reforms to the legislation, but the clear trend for the time being is towards greater consolidation back in Hollywood’s home state.

Hard Times for the Arts in Britain: The UK saw some serious threats to its cultural climate this month. UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced that, in order to make the government’s goal of £20 billion in savings, it would “prioritize spending that achieves the best economic returns.” In literal terms, this means that “unprotected” departments (that’s everything other than health, schools, defense and foreign aid) would face significant budget cuts. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport will face the most significant of cuts: 40%. This will be the third time Arts Council England has suffered a significant budget reduction since 2010, and the impact will be felt throughout the country: on the local level, councils are looking at forecasted cuts averaging 12%, and many will be forced to reconsider their arts budgets. Meanwhile, facing financial pressure of a different sort, the BBC announced this month that it will cut 1,000 jobs as it struggles to close a $294 million budget gap projected for the coming fiscal year. The gap is only expected to widen as more individuals move from TV to the internet, costing the BBC its network licensing fees, which account for more than 70% of its revenues. The government has appointed a committee to review the BBC’s Royal Charter, which expires in 2016.

SESAC Buys the Harry Fox Agency: After a year more than a year of exploration and discussion, SESAC, one of the three performing rights societies operating in the US, has finalized a bid to buy the Harry Fox Agency, the US’s primary collecting agency for mechanical rights. SESAC collects royalties whenever a song in its catalog is played on the radio, streamed online or otherwise played in real time. The Harry Fox Agency, currently under the aegis of the National Music Publishing Association, handles the mechanical licenses that record companies need to sell CDs and downloads (which was, in the heyday of record sales, quite lucrative.) The acquisition gives SESAC the ability to issue both licenses, thus handling digital rights more efficiently. It also, according to the New York Times, will give SESAC “control of the valuable data that is generated from digital outlets like Apple, Spotify and Pandora, giving it an advantage over ASCAP and BMI, its much bigger rivals in the American performing-rights business.” The question on everyone’s mind: what’s next for ASCAP and BMI now that SESAC is stepping up its game? And perhaps more importantly, what’s next for the creators of all this music?

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

Lots of activity this month!

• Clifford Murphy has been named the National Endowment for the Arts’ new director of folk and traditional arts.
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced two new appointments this month: Ella Baff, until recently the executive and artistic director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, was hired to a new position of senior program officer in the Arts and Cultural Heritage program, and Karen Brooks Hopkins, former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was named Senior Fellow in Residence.
• Erik Takeshita, currently Director of Creative Placemaking for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, will join the Bush Foundation as its new portfolio director for Community Creativity.
• After 23 years with the Henry Luce Foundation, Ellen Holtzman will retire from her position as program director for American art in September. She is to be succeeded by Teresa A. Carbone.
• Ruby Lerner, founder and executive director of Creative Capital, has announced she will step down at the end of 2015 after seventeen years.
• Colleen McDonough has been promoted to executive director of the ASCAP Foundation. She succeeds Karen Sherry, who retired after seventeen years in this role.
• The George Gund Foundation named Jennifer Coleman its new Senior Program Officer for the Arts, replacing the retiring Deena Epstein.
• Allyson Esposito has been appointed Director of Arts & Culture at the Boston Foundation.
• Jessica Booth was appointed Georgia Department of Education’s first-ever fine arts specialist.
• Dr. Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte has been named executive director of the Christensen Fund.
• Sarah Martínez-Helfman was appointed new president of the Samuel S. Fels Fund.
• Diana Aviv is stepping down as CEO of Independent Sector to become CEO at Feeding America.
• The David and Lura Lovell Foundation seeks an Executive Director. Posted July 31; no closing date.
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund is hiring for ten positions, including positions in business development, financial services, marketing and more.
• Philanthropy New York is hiring a Director of Learning Services. Posted July 15; no closing date.
• Vilcek Foundation seeks a Program Officer. Posted July 23; no closing date.
• Crown Family Philanthropies seeks a Program Analyst. Posted July 6; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Cultural Value and Inequality, a report commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project, examines hard questions: who gets to make culture, who gets to consume it, and the impact of inequality.
• The National Endowment for the Arts published the first representative analysis of arts participation patterns among people with disabilities.
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums, released the results of a new survey gauging the ethnic and gender diversity of art museum staffs across the United States.
• In 2005, the Center for an Urban Future published “Creative New York,” the first comprehensive analysis of the economic impact of the city’s many nonprofit arts organizations and for-profit creative businesses. This month, the Center published a follow-up to this seminal study, which looks at what has changed in the past decade. Meanwhile, statistics released by the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport show that employment within UK’s creative industries is increasing twice as fast as the wider economy.
• A new study published in the American Economic Review looks at how behavioral tendencies can affect grant decisions.
• July was the month of music research. Researchers at Cambridge University released a study suggesting that one’s taste in music reflects the way one thinks. Across the pond, On the business end, Berklee College undertook to analyze the many disparate elements of the music industry in an effort to fix the aging, fractured business. Finally, a new study published in the journal Self and Identity shows that, despite the naysaying and hand-wringing around metal music in the 1980s, so-called “metal kids” turned out pretty well, reporting higher levels of youthful happiness and fewer regrets.

Sony’s The Interview hits theaters – photo by Travis Wise

The massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, purportedly by North Korean hackers, captured the popular imagination in December. Recent hoopla has focused on Seth Rogen and James Franco’s movie The Interview, one of five Sony pictures leaked in the attack. The movie, which depicts the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, provoked threats of violence from the hackers, leading Sony to delay a theatrical release. After much debate — even President Obama weighed in on the mess — Sony moved forward with limited release in theaters on Christmas Day, coupled with a broader (and massively successful) online release. (The debacle made the No. 2 spot on our 2014 Top 10 Arts Policy Stories roundup.)

Lost in The Interview‘s shuffle, however, are revelations about Sony as a business and questions about the journalism and the First Amendment that bear a closer look. Hollywood (heck, lots of major US corporations) has long suffered a gender and race gap. Leaked documents revealed the situation at Sony is pretty stark: only one of the seventeen Sony employees making more than $1 million is a woman, and 88% of these top execs are white. (The pay gap trend extends to actors, too.) More troubling than the obvious, however, is Sony’s efforts to stop the flow of information. Sony successfully took down Reddit content citing copyright infringement, threatened twitter with legal action, and demanded that media outlets to refrain from publishing stories about the hack. In good news for journalism, however, Sony is not in the legal right, as media outlets are generally protected by the First Amendment (as long as they aren’t stealing the data themselves.)

Arts Council England Prioritizes Diversity: In December, Arts Council England (ACE) announced new funding regulations with several strategies aimed at making the arts more accessible. Chief among these is a diversity tenet, in which organizations must demonstrate diversity – of audiences, programming and in their workforce – in order to continue receiving public funding. This “fundamental shift,” presented by ACE Chair Peter Bazalgette, “[places] responsibility on every funded organization to make their programme of work more reflective of the communities they serve.” British theater companies have mostly welcomed this “diversity drive,” though some do question its feasibility. The 670 nonprofits currently receiving ACE funding have some time to get their act together. The Council will not systematically consider diversity data when making funding recommendations until 2018. The monitoring of progress, however, is to begin next year.

Level Funding for Arts Agencies Secured in Cromnibus: The end of 2014 found the “least productive Congress ever” hard at work on eleventh hour legislation, with many implications for the arts. On December 14, the Senate narrowly passed the annual budget bill, this year colorfully nicknamed the “Cromnibus,” thus funding the federal government through next September. The bill, signed into law by President Obama on December 16, includes stable funding for National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities; each will receive $146 million. In addition, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Arts in Education program within the U.S. Department of Education, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will all be funded at previous levels. While a bill to make permanent certain charity tax breaks – including the popular IRA Charitable Rollover – was rejected, the Senate did approve a bill retroactively extending these breaks for 2014, providing donor incentives through December.

Penn Foundation Wipes Out Two Philadelphia Arts Organizations: Philadelphia’s only remaining major arts funder, the William Penn Foundation, has been a driving force behind the push towards capitalization of institutions within the grantmaker community over the past few years. Unfortunately, when you invest in capitalizing some organizations, there’s less left over for others, as a few Philly organizations recently found out the hard way. In November, the Foundation declined to renew its general operating grant to Dance/USA Philadelphia (Dance/UP), which it has funded for the last eight years to the tune of $2.7 million. As a result, Dance/UP announced last month that it would have to close, prompting an angry outcry from the local dance community. The foundation later agreed to provide short-term transition funding to allow Dance/UP to close responsibly by migrating some of its programs to other area organizations. Meanwhile, Penn also declined to fund The Philadelphia Singers; in recent years, grants from the foundation had accounted for almost a full third of the chorus’s annual operating budget. The chorus, founded in 1972, announced that it too would cease operations following its May 2015 concert, citing loss of funding as the major contributing factor in the decision.

US Reaches Diplomatic Breakthrough with Cuba: In a historic breakthrough reversing fifty years of U.S. policy, President Obama announced on December 17 that the US would begin normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba. The announcement, considered by many to have been a long time coming, offers potentially significant implications for artists. Although the embargo has not prevented cultural exchange between the US and Cuba in recent years, many are hopeful that improved relations will ease logistical headaches around visas and artist payments, encouraging more presenters to book Cuban artists and fostering new relationships with our neighbors to the south.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• The New England Foundation for the Arts has named Cathy Edwards as its new executive director, replacing longtime leader Rebecca Blunk who passed away last year.
• Sharnita Johnson is the new arts program director at New Jersey’s Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
• Arts Council England has appointed former Classic FM director Darren Henley as its new chief executive, replacing Alan Davey who is leaving ACE to become controller of Radio 3.
• In two retirements at the New York Times, celebrated music critic Allan Kozinn and veteran arts writer Carol Vogel left the newspaper of record after tenures of 37 and 31 years, respectively.
• William Ruprecht, chief executive of New York-based Sotheby’s, and Steven Murphy, chief executive of London-based Christie’s, departed their respective posts at the end of the year.
• Two staff departures this month came with some public controversy. Matthew Lennon, Houston Arts Alliance’s Director of Civic Art and Design, resigned his post over objections to the city’s handling of a major arts commission. And longtime Artistic Director Ari J. Roth was fired from his position at Washington DC’s Theater J, following a tumultuous tenure that frequently saw him pushing the boundaries of his home institution’s tolerance for free expression. Roth’s ouster prompted a strong protest from his colleagues in the theater world.
• New Yorkers for Parks is hiring a Director of Research and Planning. Posted December 10, no closing date.
• The Barr Foundation is looking for a Program Officer for Arts and Culture. Posted December 15, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• New research published in the journal Urban Studies looks at the economic impact of cultural hubs on urban development nationwide, suggesting that localized, place-specific approach to arts initiatives are the most beneficial to economic development.
• On the other hand, the What Works Network, a government-backed organization in the UK, released a report suggesting that large sports and arts facilities have “zero” economic impact.
• The National Endowment for the Arts has released a summary of its June 2014 symposium, which was titled “Measuring Cultural Engagement: A Quest for New Terms, Tools, and Techniques.”
• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research published its second major report on the health of the arts industry, with in-depth data on 26 of 184 previously identified performance indices.
• The American Alliance of Museums published the first-ever field wide survey of compensation in the museum industry, with information on salary, benefits and demographics for 51 positions, broken out by geographic area, museum discipline, governance and operating budget.
• The Hewlett Foundation released an assessment of its regranting intermediaries strategies in San Francisco, which includes key takeaways for the larger field.
• The Irvine Foundation released its third and final study of arts engagement strategies, this time partnering with AEA Consulting to analyze the relationship between arts programming, new audiences and unusual spaces.
• A study released by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations shows grantmakers are shifting support towards general operating & multiyear funding.
• Finally, in less than promising news for this section of the Newsroom, research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that our beliefs are driven more by psychological associations than by hard facts.

Metropolitan Opera House – Photo by Flickr user Zio Paolino, Creative Commons license

Never fear, Wagner lovers: the largest opera company in the US will open its season on time. Faced with what it called an unsustainable financial strain, management had threatened a lockout this fall if labor representatives refused to accept drastic pay cuts. In the end, General Manager Peter Gelb was able to secure the first pay cuts for the Met’s unionized employees in decades, but the cuts were by no means as deep as initially proposed. Singers and orchestra members agreed to a 3.5% pay cut, effective immediately, and an additional 3.5% cut in six months’ time. That’s a far cry from the 17% reduction that Gelb had previously sought, and will be partially offset by a 3% raise in the fourth year of the union’s contract.

From the standpoint of the larger nonprofit arts field, the most significant part of the deal is a clause that allows an independent financial analyst to monitor the financial management of the organization on behalf of the employees. Experts claim this highly unusual provision could have ripple effects throughout the industry. This agreement came about when the unions, faced with the drastic cuts proposed by Gelb, developed a list of alternative cost-saving measures. While the management didn’t adopt those proposals outright, it agreed to let the employees have a say in how the overall savings are achieved.

California turns to tax breaks to reassert film industry dominance
Just as North Carolina decides to follow the examples of Michigan and New Mexico by scaling back its support of the motion picture industry, California is doubling down (actually, tripling down) on its incentives in an attempt to keep Hollywood productions in Hollywood. Governor Brown and the state Legislature have expanded California’s tax credit program from $100 million to $330 million per year. While the ability of film tax incentives to increase employment and stimulate the economy remains highly questionable (as previously discussed here at Createquity), California lawmakers have described the expanded tax program as a demonstration of their commitment to the film industry. California may indeed be in a somewhat different position than most other states in that a lot of film industry professionals are based in and around Los Angeles and would presumably prefer to work closer to home if the production costs, which can be significantly reduced by tax incentives, are roughly on par with other states.

International cultural agencies shake things up
The Australia Council for the Arts has announced what it’s billing as the most sweeping overhaul of its grant programs in 40 years in order to make them more inclusive and reduce the administrative burden on applicants. Each of the newly created funding categories will be open to artists of all areas of practice and applicants will be able to choose which discipline’s peer panel they want to assess their application. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Council England has rebalanced its portfolio of funded organizations to direct more funding to organizations outside of London at the expense of such venerable institutions as the English National Opera. Nevertheless, critics say the plan to devote 53% of the Arts Council’s budget to regions outside of London (up from 49%) doesn’t go far enough. Finally, the French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, has resigned in protest of austerity measures that led to cuts in her Ministries budget. She will be replaced by Korean-born Fleur Pellerin.

New foundation to support American classical composers
The Chicago music critic Lawrence A. Johnson has launched a nonprofit foundation that will provide grants to ensembles and presenters that perform American classical music and commission new works by American composers. The American Music Project is still in the early stages of fundraising, but it’s already commissioned its first new work and is set to start awarding grants for the 2015-16 season. Johnson hopes to have raised $500,000 by next spring and eventually establish a standing endowment of $1 million. There’s no word yet on the size of the grants that will be doled for performances of rarely heard American works or how many organizations will be supported each year. While some might question the need for another nonprofit dedicated to classical music, Mike Scutari argues that the American Music Project will fill a gap in current support mechanisms with its focus on increasing the breadth of the American repertoire featured in concert halls around the country.

Corbett Foundation closing
Cincinnati’s Corbett Foundation, which has provided more than $70 million to arts and education nonprofits in Ohio and Kentucky since 1955, is finally closing its doors. The dissolution of the foundation has been planned for years; indeed, it was never intended to persist beyond the founders’ lifetimes. Explaining why it took until now to wrap things up after Patricia Corbett’s death in 2008, Executive Director Karen McKim said in effect that rising markets had foiled plans to spend down the foundation’s funds despite best efforts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• The Pittsburgh Foundation has announced its new president & CEO, Maxwell King.
• The National Association of Media Arts and Culture has a new executive director, Wendy Levy.
• The Center for Cultural Innovation’s board chair Angie Kim has been appointed interim leader as the organization’s search for its next President & CEO continues.
• Oregon Cultural Trust has hired Brian Rogers as executive director.
• Grantmakesr in the Arts has chosen Jim McDonald to be its new deputy director and director of programs, replacing the retiring Tommer Peterson.
• ArtWorks, an art therapy service provider in New York & New Jersey, is looking for an executive director. Posted August 15, no closing date.
• National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers seeks a project director; work virtually. Salary: $30-35k for 20 hrs/wk.
• McLean Project for the Arts (DC area) is in the market for an executive director. Salary: $55-70k. Posted August 6, no closing date.
• The Boston Globe is seeking an arts reporter. Posted August 21, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Research on the effects of video games is booming; much is unknown, but apparently Grand Theft Auto promotes bad behavior in real life and playing Voldemort makes you evil. But it’s not just video games: watching reality TV can make you a worse person, too.
• Rhetoric about a “universal language” aside, it turns out that about 3% of people just don’t like music at all, and they’re amazingly not monsters.
• A new study finds that true stories aren’t any more emotionally resonant than fictional ones, despite expectations to the contrary.
• Hollywood still lags behind in diversity. According to a new study, whites had 74% of the movie roles despite making up only 64% of the population.
• A Kennedy Center evaluation found that 4th- and 5th-graders in arts integrated classes displayed more creativity and better problem-solving skills than peers.
• A college-aged mathematician has put together a linear regression model predicting the length of Broadway show runs.

Jane Chu is inching towards nomination as the next NEA Chair, as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted to approve her candidacy with “no controversy.” Over the past few years, Republicans appear to be content to let the NEA languish in level-funding purgatory rather than continue to whip up the kind of culture-war controversy that proved so successful in handcuffing the agency in the ’90s. Let’s be grateful for small victories.

STATE AND LOCAL

This is the season for state arts council budget drama, and there are certainly a few stories worth reporting. First and foremost is the prospect of an incredible resurgence for the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which had its budget cut an astonishing 94% over a three-year period and nearly zeroed out in the heady summer of 2009. Since then, arts advocates have slowly moved the needle towards more funding, but nothing compared to the 384% increase the agency would be in line to receive if Governor Rick Scott signs the budget recently passed by the Legislature, restoring funding to pre-recession levels. It’s not a done deal yet, though – Scott has line-item veto power and may be itching to use it.

In somewhat more bittersweet news, after all the brouhaha from last time, Maryland has agreed to increase tax incentives to Media Rights Capital, the producer of Netflix’s House of Cards, settling on $11.5 million to keep the show in the state. The figure does represent a decrease from the average amount the show had received in previous years, but as previously reported the state had to raid a fund intended for local arts organizations to make the deal happen.

On the local front, the Art Newspaper takes stock of NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s arts agenda: whereas Bloomberg invested in large-scale projects designed to drive tourism and economic impact, de Blasio appears to be focused on the outer boroughs, access, and community engagement. Meanwhile, de Blasio’s first budget for New York City is out, and with a 6% overall increase in spending gives educators a lot to be happy about: steps toward universal pre-K, expanded after-school programs and a $20 million allocation for arts education.

Los Angeles may be on the verge of overhauling its public art ordinance, thanks to an audit that recommends the city relax the requirement that developers’ public art fees be spent within one block of the constructions that generated them. Paralyzed by the geographical restriction, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs had been sitting  on $7.5 million in funds earmarked for public artwork.

Any cities or counties pondering local tax increases for arts and culture, take note: the ultraconservative Americans for Prosperity is wading into local politics with a campaign against a local tax increase in Franklin County, Ohio meant to benefit the Columbus Zoo.

INTERNATIONAL

The authors of last year’s report showing that the UK Arts Council gave London-based organizations five times as much money per capita as those in other parts of the country have released a new study showing that UK lottery arts funding is similarly concentrated in the capital. The Mayor of London and organizations in his city  support raises for others but not cuts for themselves. And Parliament may decriminalize non-payment of Britain’s $250 annual TV-licensing fee, the primary source of income for the BBC. Scofflaws, such as the 107 TV owners jailed in 2 years for failing to pony up, would still be subject to civil penalties. Meanwhile, the BBC is calling for payment even by those who don’t own televisions in an age when physical TVs are an afterthought.

Australia’s conservative government has taken aim at the arts, enacting more than $100 million in cuts to various national funding bodies. Since most of that amount is spread over a four-year period, the impact is not as drastic as it sounds, and the head of the Australia Council doesn’t seem too worried. Still, $100 million is $100 million…well, about $94 million in American dollars. On the other side of the ledger (and the world), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is investing $1.7 billion to build 230 new museums across the country, intended to show off the nation’s rich cultural history. Private-sector firms, including the oil giant Saudi Aramco, are getting in on the museum-building act as well.

Despite all the money that Russia pumps into the arts, there is mounting criticism—especially in the theater world—against its contents, with a new, envelope-pushing generation of artists facing political pressure from the government. Woolly Mammoth Theater’s Festival of New Radical Theater, which was set to include works from Russia, has become the most recent collateral damage in Moscow’s politicization of art. Meanwhile, on July 1, it will become illegal to curse in public performances in Russia – though the ban may cover only four very, very dirty words. Russia, of course, isn’t the only major world power wanting to shape artistic expression: China appears to be stepping up its campaign against Western media, banning four US television shows from streaming websites for violating a regulation aimed at shows that “harm the nation’s reputation, mislead young people to commit crimes, prostitution, gambling or terrorism.”

On Thursday, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jane Chu for the position of Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Chu, the president and CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, MO, brings big-institution arts industry experience and a middle-America background to the job. If confirmed, she will become the first Asian American permanent chair of the NEA, although Joan Shigekawa has served that role in an interim capacity for the past year and a half. Reaction from the field has been one of pleasant surprise, but she’s getting rave reviews from back home.

Meanwhile, two of Chu’s predecessors warn that her task will be all about money, money, money. Earlier, in yet another down-to-the-wire process, the United States Congress authorized a spending bill in January covering the rest of the current fiscal year, which ends September 30, 2014. The NEA and other federal cultural agencies were essentially level-funded compared to last year’s appropriations, which is effectively a (small) raise from the amounts each agency had to work with after the so-called sequester kicked in last year. However, the NEA’s budget is still down from its recent peak of $167.5 million from fiscal year 2010, and far below its inflation-adjusted peak from the Carter years.

The budget friction is affecting the arts in other ways, too: for example, the Department of Transportation has failed to meet a deadline to require airlines to accommodate musicians’ instruments on flights because it says Congress didn’t provide it with enough funding to hire the people necessary to write the guidelines. A group of Congressional representatives led by Jim Cooper (D-TN), for its part, is calling BS and asking the DOT to get its act together. Meanwhile, the European Union is moving toward a uniform policy for instruments brought on airplanes.

It’s been a rough 2014 so far for net neutrality. Last month’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals means that cable and telephone companies could privilege certain kinds of content, which could endanger the wealth of artistic innovation on the web. AT&T, for its part, says nothing is about to change – possibly because the decision leaves open other means of regulation that could be worse for internet service providers. In fact, Wired seems to think that the court order has given the FCC carte blanche to regulate the entire internet. Yet if you thought the invisible hand of the market would help secure net neutrality on its own, you might be concerned that America’s largest cable company is buying its second-largest. Time Warner Cable’s proposed merger with Comcast seems to bode ill for open Internet advocates, given that Comcast already has a monthly cap on bandwidth in place; if things continue down this road, a former FCC Commissioner warns of scenarios like cable companies bundling internet content the way that cable channels currently are, and censoring stories about their own terrible customer service. All eyes are on the FCC as it considers its next steps.

STATE AND LOCAL

While Los Angeles awaits the appointment of a head of its department of cultural affairs, new mayor Eric Garcetti met with arts leaders to drop hints on “a more cohesive arts policy” — which apparently does not include any increase in city funding. Meanwhile, alleging mismanagement, Fairfax County in Northern Virginia will pay $30 million to take control of the Lorton Arts Center and avoid foreclosure.

INTERNATIONAL

The UK’s Building a Creative Nation has been launched to create 50,000 creative sector jobs for young people ages 16 to 24 by 2016. Part of the initiative aims to combat unpaid internships in the arts industry by subsidizing 6,500 training positions. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg claims the program is “paving the way for a new wave of young British talent,” who will contribute “billions to the economy” in the fastest-growing employment sector of the British economy in 2011-2012. Nearly 1.7 billion Britons (5.6% of the workforce) are employed in the creative industries, more than half of them in squarely cultural areas like the performing and visual arts, film, photography, and publishing.

Not all is rosy in the UK, though: Parliament is investigating the fairness of grants made by Arts Council England, which a report found gives five times as much per capita to London organizations vs. others. Philanthropic dollars are similarly concentrated. (By way of comparison, 82% of private UK arts giving went to London; in the US, according to the Foundation Center’s database, 20% of major grants go to New York State.) That might be part of the reason that space for art in London is now at such a premium. Meanwhile, the Council will require new grantees to capture, report, and share information about audience size and composition and has called on the BBC to collaborate with arts organizations.

Elsewhere in the British Isles, Creative Scotland has announced a new 10-year strategic plan; Wales’s capital city is trying to transfer responsibility for two arts venues to the private sector; Newcastle hasn’t been able to raise any money for a matching fund campaign aimed at private donors; and Irish arts funding is down 7% after having been cut for the sixth consecutive year.

In Spain, four years of funding cuts to the cultural infrastructure by that country’s right-wing and debt-ridden government have increasingly spurred protest, and now the Spanish film community is starting to fight back, claiming political conspiracy. Even Pedro Admodóvar is speaking out against what he calls Spain’s “awful cultural policy.” Elsewhere in Europe, Iceland’s state broadcaster has cut almost half its music staff. But in a bit of good news, regulators in France have decided to reverse a decision that would have raised the import tax on artworks from 7% to 10%, instead reducing it to 5.5%.