• The Los Angeles Times, via music critic Mark Swed, revives the Secretary of Culture talk, this time nominating Peter Sellars and Leon Botstein for the job. It’s an earnest appeal for an idea worthy of consideration, but if it was a political nonstarter four years ago, it’s hard to see how it has more legs now.
• Video game makers are finding themselves in the regulatory crosshairs after the Newtown shooting massacre, despite limited evidence that games played a role in motivating recent shootings. (Certainly a lesser role than…guns.)
• Margy Waller continues the charitable deduction discussion in a guest post over at New Beans.
• The NEA has relaunched the “Your Town” program as the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, which invites proposals for community-led workshops to improve quality of life in rural areas with the help of creative placemaking experts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Well, that didn’t take long: Richard Dare, who just left the Brooklyn Philharmonic to take the top job at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, abruptly stepped down after a New York Times investigation into his past.
• Clayton Lord is leaving Theatre Bay Area, where he pioneered a number of research initiatives, to take the position of Vice President of Local Arts Advancement at Americans for the Arts. Lord replaces Mitch Menchaca, who left to become COO of Chorus America.

IN THE FIELD

• Joe Patti makes some astute observations about convergences between the arts and religion, including ways in which churches are getting into the placemaking game and the tidbit that newly minted pastors are more interested in starting their own flock than in joining established institutions. Fascinating stuff!

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Kickstarter juggernaut continues on, raising an astonishing $274 million for projects in 2012. Yancey Strickler’s prediction that the company would outpace the budget of the NEA proved more than prescient. The Economist has more.
• Artspace, the nonprofit artist housing developer, is the recipient of a new $2.7 million grant from the Ford Foundation. Createquity previously reported on a $3 million program-related investment Artspace received from Ford in 2011.
• “Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone” – the New York Times on what it means to be “middle class” on the country’s most expensive island.
• Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill wonder why we haven’t yet given up on GDP.
• Need lots of money for a wacky, wildly ambitious and possibly ill-advised art project? Britain’s Artangel might just be your ticket.

BIG IDEAS

• I think Diane Ragsdale has become the arts sector’s “questioner-in-chief.” She’s back after a monthlong hiatus with a doozy of a question.
• Michael Hickey ruminates on scale, efficiency, and what size grants would encourage the most art created per dollar. (But is it about the most, or the best?)
• A year in the life of Collective Impact.
• Phil Buchanan, writing at the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog: “I think this whole aversion to dependency may be yet another example of where analogies to the for-profit world have created confusion in our sector. We’re so enamored with market analogies that we can’t get our heads around the fact that certain work simply requires ongoing philanthropic support. Other than large-scale government support, there is no ‘exit’ event on the horizon for nonprofits, no analog to the IPOs that allow early private sector investors to cash in and get rich.”
• I wholeheartedly endorse this pledge on Andrew Taylor’s part not to discuss “generic topics” in 2013. Taylor identifies three in particular that provoke discussions with “lots of heat, but not much light”: business models, advocacy, and value.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new research study from Germany appears to show a causal relationship between music training and “verbal memory” (and by extension, speech and language processing). The study seems well-designed although the sample is on the small side.
• The New York Public Library system appears to be more vital and in demand than ever despite budget  cuts over the past decade, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future.
• A woman named Amy Webb found her life partner online…data scientist style. She conducted a detailed study of popular women’s behavior on JDate by creating 10 fake male profiles and interacting with 96 women over the course of a month, taking notes all along. It’s all ever so slightly unethical, but it does make for some, ah, engaging reading.
• This is a great example of how a theory of change can illuminate assumptions needing testing. Do more entrepreneurs and more companies = more innovation?

ETC.

• In 2011, Createquity shared the story of Aaron Swartz, who had been indicted by federal authorities for “liberating” some 4.8 million academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR in an act of protest against restrictive copyright policies. In a sad coda, the 26-year-old Swartz, who suffered from depression, committed suicide this month in the face of a potential 35-year prison sentence (although the prosecutor in the case claims that she was only seeking six months). Among the other tributes making their way around the web, it turns out that GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky (of course) had developed a personal friendship with the kid supergenius.

• A new candidate for NEA Chair? Scuttlebut says Nathan Cummings Foundation arts and culture program director Claudine Brown is being seriously considered for the position.
• This somehow escaped mention last week, but NewMusicBox is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a look back at the previous decade. Check out this cool video cobbling together some of the more entertaining interview moments.
• The Council on Foundations annual conference was last week, and Sean Stannard-Stockton hosted a rotating crew of commentators on his website. I especially appreciated this post from Kathleen Enright, CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, who notes that “the current pace of philanthropy is completely out of sync in our changed world.” Meanwhile, Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz was on fire last week, challenging philanthropists to “consider the alternatives” to the status quo at even the most basic levels and questioning why institutional isomorphism (organizations mimicing like organizations) need be rampant in the sector. Change, it seems, is just around the corner, if those in the driver’s seat are ready to take the wheel. Will the L3C help get the party started?
• Speaking of bloggers on fire, Holden Karnofsky from Givewell has been on a roll lately, publishing two important posts last week. The first makes the case against funding small, unproven charities if you’re an individual donor. I am more or less on board with his reasoning, with the caveats that (a) this really is about lay individual donors, not foundations who theoretically should have the expertise to evaluate unproven models; and (b) this idea is much more applicable to “save the world” type charities with very general missions, rather than organizations in fields that thrive off of diversity and competition (like, for example, the arts). Then, over the weekend, Karnofsky pointed attention to a new study showing unprecedented educational outcomes for Harlem Children’s Zone. This development, as Holden explains, is really an astounding event given the rigor of the study and the sheer magnitude of the impact demonstrated.
• And for the final entry on the “bloggers on fire” series, Andy Horwitz of Culturebot looks to be emarking on another grand multi-part rant on the future of arts management. The first installment is here.
• Things may have changed a lot in recent decades, but Europe still hearts the arts way more than the US of A. The latest is that Pennsylvania is threatening to completely zero out arts funding from the state budget, while across the country, the arts continue to get hit hard from all sides. Despite high hopes for the new administration, Quincy Jones’s culture czar idea seems to be going nowhere fast (though Quincy isn’t about to give up advocating). Meanwhile, across the pond, Britain is funding rehearsal spaces for rock bands. At least Forbes is showing public art some love.
• Arts policy geekout alert: Canadian consultants Lord Cultural Resources publishes a cool-looking quarterly called Cultural Capital. The spring edition is here.
• Great article about how Yale Med school is using art history/appreciation classes to help train doctors’ attention to visual detail.

• The New York Times has the inside story of how the $50 million shot in the arm for the NEA came to be saved last week. Apparently none other than Robert Redford got into the act, placing a well-timed phone call to Nancy Pelosi pleading the case. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, also gets big ups. Meanwhile, good ol’ Chuck Schumer, who voted for that ridiculous amendment prohibiting money in the package from going to a range of recipients including arts centers, zoos, and aquariums, admitted that “he had been unaware that the amendment ruled out money for museums and theaters.” (Incidentally, those zoos and aquariums didn’t fare so well — the language barring them from receiving any of the money is still in there. I guess the Bronx Zoo porcupine will still have to hit the unemployment rolls.)
• Not good enough, says Greg Sandow in the Wall St. Journal, wondering “if this is such a victory.” Greg’s op-ed has been getting a fair amount of attention, and I hope to write a fuller response this week if I have time.
• Meanwhile, The Nonprofiteer offered her own well-written take on public funding for the arts not too long ago. She argues that consumption of art, not the creation thereof, should be the focus of advocacy:
  

  In other words, brethren in the arts community: stop talking about public funding for the arts as if the point were for the public to support YOU. No one cares about you. What we care about as a society is US, and how exposure to what you do will improve us.

  And once you accept that, you have to accept another, equally painful truth, which is that no one can actually determine what’s “art” til at least 25 years after it’s been created. Probably the Nonprofiteer doesn’t need to remind you that people threw things at the stage the first time they saw and heard The Rite of Spring, now part of the musical canon. But what she probably does need to point out is that this doesn’t mean the public should accept and/or fund every objectionable thing it sees in hopes that it will ultimately turn out to be art. Rather, it means that support for creation is a mug’s game, a gamble at which most players lose, and that the public should instead put its money into presentation.

  This excerpt makes her post sound more hostile than it actually is, but I agree with the underlying points here. The arts do not suffer from a creation problem. Far more art, great art, is being created right now than can possibly find a supportive, sustaining audience through existing channels. The Nonprofiteer does not argue that art creation shouldn’t be supported at all, but rather that public support (as distinguished from private philanthropy) should focus on getting those creations to the eyes and ears of the masses. It’s not far off, in fact, from my own vision of an artistic marketplace, one in which the mechanisms of artistic curation and activity are sufficiently subsidized such that talented individual artists don’t need to win fellowships and grants in order to survive, they just need to win the respect of their peers and colleagues.

• Somehow I missed this the night of, but The Recording Academy’s president and CEO Neil Portnow pimped the Secretary for the Arts idea during the Grammy Awards broadcast.
  

  And to our new president, we have a request: Our finest national treasure is our culture and the arts. It’s also one of our most embraced and economically significant exports all around the world.

  So it’s time that we acknowledge that fact with the creation of a cabinet position of secretary of the arts to promote and develop this vital contribution to society everywhere.

• Obama is following through on his campaign promise to create an Office of Urban Affairs, and Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión has been named its founding director. As a reminder, the Urban Affairs office has “support regional innovation clusters” as one of its prime directives.
• Speaking of urban affairs, Richard Florida has a LONG article in the Atlantic speculating on how the economic crisis will reshape American cities. A very interesting read.
• Giorgio Armani is donating $1 million to support art in the New York City public schools.
• Here’s an interesting experiment: artists selling shares of their work in order to fund its creation, with the interim value determined by a stock index-like metric based on the “social capital” the artist has accumulated. Donors and artists’ incentives are thus aligned in the direction of helping the work find an audience. I know a fair number of people who would gag at this kind of thing, but the b-school student in me is very intrigued.
• For any nonprofits out there who want a free website, this guy might build one for you if you apply in the next week.

Up on Capitol Hill, the Obama stimulus package has passed both the House and the Senate — but there’s just one problem: the Senate version doesn’t include the $50 million for the NEA that was in the original design of the bill (and that made it through the House). Americans for the Arts has set up another trusty tool to email your Congresscritters here. If you have any time at all, I strongly urge you to use it — few would debate that what the arts need most right now is cold, hard cash, and $50 million is less than one ten-thousandth of the package that Congress is about to dump on America.

Here are some other news and notes from around the web:

• Veteran staffer and Yale Drama School grad Patrice Walker Powell has been named Acting Chairwoman of the NEA.
• Matthew Guerrieri calculates how much of a bailout the arts really deserve in the stimulus package, using the assistance afforded to the auto industry late last year as a benchmark. How does 12.4 billion smackers sound to you, America?
• Robin Pogrebin in the NY Times has a round-up of recent arts-related developments on Capitol Hill and names some other possibilities for NEA Chair, including Wynton Marsalis, Agnes Gund, Richard J. Cohen, and Bill Ivey. Musical America’s Susan Elliott gives the inside story of the meeting between the arts service organization lobby and the Obama transition team earlier this month.
• That pesky Secretary for the Arts business gets some more bad press. Isaac rebuts.
• Andrew Taylor talks about perverse incentives in the arts.
• Mayor Mike was the leading individual donor in the US last year, handing out $235 million to recipients including a ton of arts organizations in NYC. Not all of the top donations by individuals last year took the form of money, however. According to the Slate 60, the Harvard Art Museum received a gift of $45 million from Emily Rauh Pulitzer along with 31 works of art that, according to the museum, were worth four times as much as the cash, bringing the total value of the gift into the $225 million range.
• Via Tactical Philanthropy, the Chronicle of Philanthropy has a new Innovations column highlighting new and interesting funding models for nonprofits. It’s normally available by subscription only, but the first one is free. Also, Bill Gates on the role of foundations.
• Lucy Bernholz is the latest blogger to get on the twitter bandwagon.
  

  I’ve been invited to comment on people’s books, slide shows, and discussions, been offered condolences by people I’ve never met, had poems sent to me from friends in other countries, songs recommended to me, and conferences brought to my attention. I’ve been asked to participate in a radio program and a speakers bureau, invited to judge a business plan competition, and discovered that communicating with direct messages in twitter beats email hands-down for some conversations. I’ve also found that folks too hesitant about their writing to comment on blogs will opine away in twitter – being confined to 140 characters puts the Ralph Ellisons among us on the same footing as those who find pain in writing grocery lists. Because twitter feeds into my facebook page I’ve also reconnected with three friends from high school.

  I haven’t joined yet…I’m kind of scared. Anyone out there have experiences to share?

• The guru of the aforementioned Yale Ivestments Office, David Swensen, co-wrote an op-ed in the Times this week arguing that it’s time for newspapers to move to a nonprofit model. It’s almost like he’s been reading my blog:
  

  If we can agree that journalism does provide an indispensable public good, in the form of in-depth, factual information not available anywhere else, I can’t help but see it gravitating toward a contributed income model in the coming years. No matter what steps the current industry giants take to shore up revenue streams, whether it be the Washington Post buying Kaplan or the New York Times Co. grabbing a piece of New England Sports Ventures, their core journalism operations will remain loss leaders, and thus vulnerable to cost-cutting pressures. Absent a significant change in industry dynamics, I would not be surprised if nonprofit journalism models become more common in coming years.

  Seriously, though, I do think that nonprofit status represents the most plausible, if not the only, path to salvation for our nation’s most respected news operations. (To be clear, this is not about saving the newspaper as a form, as if that were any more important than saving microfiche. This is about saving the concept of a news-gathering institution with the infrastructure to conduct the kind of original investigative and large-scale journalism that blogs and citizen reporters, even the best of them, can’t replicate on anything like a consistent basis.) Of course, this is still a very controversial idea, provoking responses like this one from Allison Fine: “Times Editorial = Downright Stupid.” I’ll let you be the judge:

  So, newspapers are a sacred trust that now require tax exempt status to survive according to the authors, David Swensen and Michael Schmidt, neither of whom are journalists or nonprofit professionals. Instead one manages the financial portfolio at Yale that lost nearly 30% of it’s value last year and the other is a “financial analyst” whatever that means. [….] I am not a journalist or an expert on that subject

  Aside from pot calling kettle black, Swensen and Schmidt are in fact nonprofit professionals, given that they work for Yale University, which last I checked is a nonprofit organization. Furthermore, it’s hard to see the endowment losing 30% of its value as some kind of indictment when the rest of the market has lost 40% over the same period. Fine does have a point that raising money to support a $5 billion endowment is probably a pipe dream, but I think Swensen’s point was more that we have endowments that are bigger than that already, so it’s not like the idea is completely absurd.

• Sometimes the intersection of politics and the creative industries can be unintentionally hilarious. (see pic at the top of this post)
• Other times, intentionally so (and poignant, too). Well done, Bronx Zoo.

Here are some of those in favor of an Arts Secretary position:

• Matthew Guerrieri of Soho the Dog (from comments):
  

  It’s not necessarily a bigger bureaucracy, just one on a higher level of the pecking order. And what makes you think that such a department would “police” artistic expression any more than the market already does? The censorship in the “NEA Four” days came from Congress, not from within the NEA. And it came because the NEA was an easy target. There’s a reason Congress doesn’t gang up on, say, the Department of Commerce that way.

  Here’s another concrete example: if there had been a cabinet-level advocate for the arts, No Child Left Behind probably wouldn’t have gone through without at least a consideration of how much it screws over arts education.

  (See also this post from 2006.)

• William R. Ferris:
  

  But as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1997 to 2001, I learned firsthand that these institutions, though united by a shared goal, can sometimes run into conflict with one another. There were bureaucratic tangles, overlaps and missteps that, with foresight, could have been avoided.Which is why I believe the president should create a cabinet-level position — a secretary of culture — to provide more cohesive leadership for these impressive programs and to assure that they receive the recognition and financing they deserve.

• Quincy Jones:
  

  Jones, who has been promoting the idea for at least 10 years by his count, said yesterday that he has specific responsibilities in mind for the office. He wants an education system that teaches the history and personalities of the arts, particularly music. “I have traveled all over the world all the time for 54 years. The people abroad know more about our culture than we do,” he said.

• The 23% of NPAC attendees who voted for “Create a Department of Culture/Cabinet-level position which is responsible for implementing a national arts policy” as their top strategy to communicate the value of the arts on a national level

Then there are those in the camp of appointing a National Advisor or some other high-level administration official whose job would be to coordinate arts themes across various agencies, but without bringing those agencies under his or her control. Adherents include:

• Isaac Butler (though he kind of equivocates on Cabinet or not-Cabinet):
  

  There are people out there (including myself) already trying to find ways to creatively conceptualize and agitate for integrating the arts throughout the Federal Government. What we don’t have is someone organizing this and making it work in a comprehensive fashion, we don’t have someone coordinating arts policy across the federal government. Someone who does things like set arts policy and help coordinate (for example) comprehensive arts education with DOE. We need someone to do those things.

  That person does not necessarily need to be a Cabinet Officer.

• Tyler Green:
  

  The nation would benefit if Congress and the White House created a new office for a White House arts adviser, a humanities-driven sister-office to the White House science adviser. Increasingly policy is made in the White House and not at cabinet-level agencies, which generally administer policy. Putting a federal arts adviser in the West Wing would ensure that the arts is a part of many White House policy, not a frivolous, forgettable island unto itself….Just as science has an impact on most Cabinet-level departments and other agencies, many executive branch entities have cultural issues within their purview. (This is a reason why an arts-specific cabinet department is the wrong solution.)

• Americans for the Arts advocates a “senior-level administration official with an arts portfolio”:
  

  The president should name a senior-level administration official in the Executive Office of the President to coordinate arts and cultural policy, guiding initiatives from federal agencies responsible for tourism, education, economic development, cultural exchange, intellectual property policy, broadband access, and other arts-related areas.

And finally, we have Team Nuh-Uh. These folks believe that a Secretary of the Arts position is a disaster waiting to happen:

• Jeremy McCarter:
  

  Quincy Jones has said in recent interviews that he wants Obama to appoint a secretary of the arts, and last month a dozen-plus arts organizations issued a joint statement making a similar call for a new “senior-level administration official.” It’s true that the United States is rare in not having a minister of culture, but a cabinet-level post is still a bad idea. For one thing, it’s just asking for some Republican administration to kill it—or, worse yet, to bend it to the right’s own wishes. Better to leave the cultural programs safely decentralized in many hands.

• Drew McManus:
  

  For an incoming administration that recently appointed a chief performance officer (CPO) with a mandate Bloomberg reported as “scour[ing] the budget, wring inefficiencies out of federal programs and establish more accountability in government,” it seems creating a new White House level office dedicated to arts issues may inadvertently reduce cumulative Federal arts spending. Assuming the government’s new chief performance officer is as capable as she seems, it won’t take very long for her office to uncover redundancies in spending programs between the new White House Arts Office and the National Endowment for the Arts.

• David Smith, Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, TX (quoted on NPR):
  

  Maybe the greatest thing about the arts in America is their decentralized nature, and I think the perception would be detrimental to that decentralized vibrancy if you wound up with something as ponderous as a Department of Culture and a Secretary of Culture.

  (UPDATE: Smith has an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal expounding on his argument.)

  Many will say (often in a testy voice) that the arts deserve a cabinet-level presence because they are just as important to the country as the Defense Department. While that’s something of an apples and oranges comparison, the deeper problem is that it assumes that the country’s defense and its arts can be furthered via the same sort of bureaucratic means.

• Not surprisingly, Reason Magazine is not a fan either:
  

  What an absurdly stupid idea! Is the U.S. suffering from a lack of artistic production? Not enough movies, popular music, dance troupes, community theatre productions, books published, operas, and so forth?

So what’s my take? For the record, I do see some merit in the concerns of the naysayers, particularly in the notion that it would be very easy for the benefits of a Cabinet-level position to be neutered or even corrupted later on down the line by an administration that was less friendly to the arts than the current one.

Despite my concerns, earlier this week I went to petitiononline.com and I added my name to the list of supporters. I think you should too. Here’s why:

• I am not one to pooh-pooh the symbolic significance that a Cabinet-level position would have for national recognition of, and yes, pride in the arts, and this moment in history seems like the best opportunity we’ll have in a while (arts-friendly administration + sense of urgency about change) to convince those in power to recognize the arts in a big way.
• More importantly, though, even if there were to materialize a significant movement around creating a Secretary for the Arts position, I very much doubt it would happen in Obama’s first year — or anytime soon after that. Creating a new Cabinet position is not something that just happens; it would require an Act of Congress, which means it would generate some significant debate from both sides of the aisle. Given that one of the prime motivators for establishing the department seems to be a lack of championship from inside government, I’m not sure exactly where people think the support that will be needed to establish a whole new Cabinet post is going to come from.
• What pushing the Cabinet position idea does do, then, is move the Overton window on the concept of federal support for the arts closer to our side. The Overton window is a theme oft-mentioned on political websites like Daily Kos, many of whose members believe that their role in the political discussion is to make progressive policies previously deemed radical seen as acceptable, and previously acceptable ideas sound sensible. They do this by centering discussion on the extreme; by making a lot of noise about the dream scenario, so that the compromise that is their actual target is more likely to happen. This is what skilled negotiators do: they anchor high so that there’s room to come down to where they actually want to be. By moving the Overton window on government support for the arts, we might not get a Cabinet position out of it. But we might get that federal advisor position. We might get a significant increase in NEA funding. We might lay the groundwork for a future Cabinet post that manages the arts along with other creative industries like film, software, and video games. All of these would be good things–perhaps better, even, than a Secretary of the Arts.

So, team, I say let’s move the Overton window a little to our side. The more noise we make, the more they know we’re out there and that we care. Quincy knows what he’s doing.

Meanwhile, the whole cabinet position for the arts thing receives some more press — this time from the Chicago Reader. And the RIAA is finally giving up on mass lawsuits against file sharers.

In the meantime, here’s some other arts policy buzz around the web, and a look back at the week that was:

• Via Fractured Atlas, another group called ArtsPolicyNow has a competing arts policy platform on Obama’s Citizen Briefing Book, which you can vote up or down as you please. The full document is available here (pdf). (As an aside, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is looking a little sad right now; I’m embarrassed to say that as of this writing the top recommendation is for marijuana legalization, and that #5 is “Revoke the Tax Exempt Status of the Church of Scientology.” Really, people? This is the best you can do?)
• Yet another action item: this petition to create a Secretary of Arts cabinet position, inspired by Quincy Jones, already has an impressive 146,000 signatures.
• Barry Hessenius notes all of the recent activity and takes the opportunity to issue a righteous rant on artists coming together in 2009.
• Not directly arts policy related, but a new mini-study (pdf) by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation finds that business start-ups are important to job creation, much more so (in the aggregate) than established firms. From the report:
  

  The fraction of employment accounted for by U.S. private-sector business startups over the 1980-2005 period is about 3 percent per year. This measure is interpretable as the employment-weighted business startup rate for the United States. While this is a small fraction of overall employment, all of this employment from startups reflects new jobs. As such, 3 percent is large compared to the average annual net employment growth of the U.S. private sector for the same period (about 1.8 percent). This pattern implies that, excluding the jobs from new firms, the U.S. net employment growth rate is negative on average. This simple comparison highlights the importance of business startups to job creation in the United States.

  The report doesn’t consider nonprofit startups, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same principle holds true. (h/t PND)

• The current edition of Newsweek has a long article from Jeremy McCarter on Obama and the arts, looking back to FDR and the New Deal and tackling some of the issues discussed above.
  

  When President Roosevelt signed the Works Progress Administration into law in 1935, it included provisions for four arts programs: theater, writing, music and art. The $418 million (in 2008 dollars) allocated in the first year was a tiny slice of the agency’s total, but, as Nick Taylor relates in “American-Made,” a new history of the WPA, it was extremely effective. Arts organizations such as theaters and symphonies tend to be highly labor-intensive, making them a quick and efficient way to help put many people back to work. (Take note, you writers and artists threatened by new media and the Death of Print: part of the rationale for the program was to find jobs for talented people left unemployed by industrial shifts that predated the Depression, such as vaudevillians being put out of work by the movies.)

  From the vantage point of our current crisis, new employment may be the least interesting result of the arts programs. Without trying to be a latter-day Medici, FDR sponsored some impressive creations, including Orson Welles’s trailblazing, voodoo-inflected, all-black staging of “Macbeth,” as well as countless dazzling murals and posters. These achievements weren’t merely esthetic. The WPA’s investment in the arts also helped bring about a change in values—one that’s especially evident in the work of the Federal Writers’ Project. The agency published state guidebooks that were far more ambitious than itineraries for tourists on car trips. Contributors—including the young Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright—collected stories about the history, people and day-to-day life of cities and towns, making the books part essay collection, part encyclopedia and part vehicle for exploring a certain ideal of Americanness.

• Tom Borrup has an extensive report from the 2008 Creative Clusters conference (a.k.a. The International Creative Economy Network and Conference) in Glasgow over at the Community Arts Network.
• Closer to home, former Miller Theater executive director and darling of the new music world George Steel is returning triumphantly to New York as the new director of City Opera. After watching him leave unexpectedly last year for the Dallas Opera in what seemed at the time a rather strange marriage, the Big Apple media are excited to welcome him back. And Dallas seems content to let him go — the opera’s board chair has a remarkably gracious quote in the Times piece, and Scott Cantrell of the Dallas Morning News writes a bizarre hit piece on Steel, calling him “remote and aloof” and tittering that he didn’t show up at enough dress rehearsals and patron gatherings. Take it for what it’s worth; Cantrell doesn’t seem to much care for newfangled creations by people not named Mozart or Puccini. For example, the same piece (Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place) that is “much maligned” according to Steve Smith is “generally dismissed” in Cantrell’s estimation.
• Umm, so yeah, it turns out that like a quarter to a half of all nonprofit organizations could lose their tax-exempt status next year. Oops! (In fairness, many of those are probably dead organizations that are still on the books for one reason or another. But if you know someone with a small nonprofit, make sure they read this article!)
• Hilarious.
  

  I understand that you’re used to working long hours at Lehman Brothers. Not-for-profit people work crazy hours too — without the promise of overtime pay or the possibility of a car service to take us home at 10 p.m. when we finally turn the lights off. (FYI: We turn those lights off by ourselves.)

• Finally, the Lodestar Foundation has an intriguing $250,000 prize for the best merger or collaboration between nonprofit organizations. Two of the eight finalists are arts and culture applicants, and another is a fascinating merger of a YMCA with a JCC in Toledo.

• More beating the drum for a high-level arts policy director position in the federal government. The arts policy document I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is now up at change.gov. Isaac offers a cogent vision for cross-departmental government arts support, and Adam responds.
• A new resource center for program-related investments debuts at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship. Hitting a number of themes discussed during the recently concluded Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference, the center “will work to expand the field of mission investing through the sharing of tools, best practices, lessons learned, and ideas for products and services that could move the field forward,” according to its press release.
• I missed this one the first time around, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy posted a list of its most widely-read articles from the past year. One of these was a screed by Mark J. Drozdowski about bad fundraisers who keep getting hired again and again and again. A few observations:

This is definitely a real problem, not just with development directors but with executive directors as well. It’s all too easy for people to “fail upwards” in the arts (as in other industries as well).

I can’t help but feel that this is what happens when the availability of development positions outpaces the kind of proven, reliable talent that organizations usually seek. The explosion of nonprofit organizations and the expansion of development departments at the nonprofits that already exist worry me for this and other reasons.

Fixing this problem is probably going to take some drastic changes in the field. Probably the easiest, and the one that already has the most momentum behind it, is for organizations to place more trust in emerging leaders (i.e., millennials and young Gen-Xers who are still in their first decade of experience in the field). They come cheap and often full of idealism, and as the Obama campaign proved, can be extremely effective despite their inexperience if organized properly.

I don’t think that’s going to be enough though. Grantmaking organizations are going to have to work aggressively together to simplify the application process and make it less resource-intensive for organizations to run fundraising operations. Funders could help to stem the tide by taking more responsibility for the financial success of the programs that they sponsor; that is, by either (a) being open to fully funding program costs if it is within their budget to do so, or (b) playing an active role in facilitating funding coalitions with peer organizations on the program’s behalf. Either approach would take some pressure off of grantee organizations’ own fundraising operations, which in certain cases could be beneficial.

Finally, infrastructure to allow organizations to share fundraising staff and back-office operations, an extension of what some theater and dance companies are doing with office space, could open up some economies of scale and make fundraising more affordable and efficient.

• Community Arts Network has two recent postings of interest: a history of arts-related public works projects from the Great Depression forwards, and a syllabus for a course at Goucher College in Baltimore called Cultural Ecosystem: The Arts in Community.
• Finally, via PhilanTopic, an online directory of fiscal sponsors from the San Francisco Study Center has debuted. Learn more about fiscal sponsorship here.