“The Blue Marble,” by flickr user Chris Jupin

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

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

1. New tech and media swallow the world whole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Democracies around the world curb freedom of expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Great Recession wreaks havoc on the global economy

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

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

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

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

7. Asian governments make huge investments in cultural infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. The (near-)death of arts journalism

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

10. Obamacare passes and survives…so far

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

Honorable mentions

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

• Seems that New York City’s recent bill forcing schools to report out on the availability of arts education in its schools comes not a moment too soon: an audit from the state comptroller found that roughly half of seniors graduated from high school without having met arts education requirements.
• Denver is out with a bold new seven-year cultural plan, “Imagine 2020.” Among other things, it seeks to “increase the visibility of local and creative talent” by inventorying and ranking the availability of the arts in all neighborhoods, and supporting micro-art projects that can create new gathering spaces across the city.
• A federal court has ordered Google to remove the infamous “Innocence of Muslims” film from YouTube after an actress who appears on screen for only five seconds – and was told she was appearing in an adventure movie – asserted that posting the film against her wishes violates her copyright in her performance. The injunction is preliminary; Google is appealing.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The two latest articles to document artists’ struggle to make ends meet, even once they are established: on writers in London and artists in New York City.
• Hooray for practicing what you preach: the Hewlett Foundation takes stock of the two strategies of its Effective Philanthropy program – and announces that it will wind down and replace the one that the evidence suggests wasn’t working.
• Aditi Kapil from Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theater Company unpacks lessons from the company’s free ticket initiative, such as the idea that infrastructure costs make “free cheaper than cheap.” And thanks to to a new grant, all visitors to the Wilma Theater can now enjoy $25 tickets during the first four weeks of a show’s run. The newly flattened price structure will be in place for three years.

IN THE FIELD

• The Future of Music Coalition has been quizzing musicians on their knowledge of current copyright law, and the results are mixed, suggesting “there remains widespread confusion about the difference between musical composition and sound recordings” and musicians are generally unaware of “the changes in the digital landscape that have altered the way that money flows back to creators.”
• After managing to squeeze twelve years out of what was intended to be a three-year program, the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program ended with its final fellows last November.
• Getty Images has released 35 million photos to be used freely for non-commercial purposes, bowing to widespread, often ignorant infringement of its images. There are a few catches: the interface is clunkier than for paying customers, Getty can track usage data, and they reserve the right to put ads in the embedded image viewer. Now that we’ve liberated images and music, are books and movies next?
• Yes, data-driven decisions can come from cocktail napkins: Nina Simon offers a nifty example of how a simple measure of “success” can help draw comparisons across programs.
• The new performing arts center planned for the World Trade Center site, in the works for over a decade, faces an uphill battle to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for construction with former mayor and big-ticket arts champion Michael Bloomberg no longer in office. The project will have to compete with several recently-opened theater spaces of similar size as well as the nearby 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

BIG IDEAS

• An example-driven look at how grantmakers are building innovation into their programs to tackle large social problems in Stanford Social Innovation Review pairs well with this examination by four Boston Consulting Group strategists of what nurtures the “evolvability” of big companies like Google and Netflix. Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor poaches more lessons from the for-profit world by examining what the “Minimum Viable Product” familiar to tech start-ups might mean for the arts.
• March 20 was both the first day of spring and the UN’s International Day of Happiness, co-sponsored this year by Grammy winner Pharrell Williams. The designation of the day was inspired in part by Bhutan’s embrace of Gross National Happiness as a critical indicator of the country’s health. Culture is one of the pillars of GNH, so Createquity readers have special reason to celebrate.
• The Future of Digital Longform Project is out with a whopper of a report on how “long” (i.e. 5,000+-word) pieces of nonfiction are evolving, what “designing a story” can mean, and how and if writers can hope to make money from these efforts.
• Digital platforms continue to creep into the edusphere, with the College Board announcing a plan to (finally) counter the overpriced SAT-prep industry via a partnership with Khan Academy, and EdX, the only major non-profit MOOC provider, expanding its list of course partners to include NGOs and nonprofits ranging from the Smithsonian to the IMF.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Egads! First we learn we can’t always trust research; then we learn we can’t always trust the research that tells us not to trust research.
• The UK’s cultural sector’s hiring practices unfairly stifle diversity, a report from Creative and Cultural Skills finds. CCS calls out a widespread preference for unpaid workers and a tendency to hire people already known to existing employees as particular problems.
• A new report from the National Center for Arts Research has found that well under half of directors of the nation’s largest art museum directors are female, and they earn roughly three-quarters the salaries of their male counterparts.
• Southern California’s “creative industries” are booming with roughly 1 of 7 jobs in the Los Angeles area tied to the creative sector, according to the 2013 Otis Report on the Creative Economy. However, the relationship between the report and the fiscal health of the arts sector — and the economic stability of artists in the region — is murky.
• The international art and antique market, meanwhile, is  almost back to pre-recession levels. The uptick, however, is more due to the rising cost of artwork rather than an increased number of sales, suggesting a continued and worrisome creep toward a “winner take all” economy.
• The Brookings Institute tried out a badass new research methodology — a “survey with placebo” — in a recent attempt to measure the impact of advocacy organizations on the passage of school choice legislation. The method is one of several new and intriguing practices in advocacy evaluation.

• Americans for the Arts’s Narric Rome provides a vital update on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind), and what it all means for arts education, as it makes its way through the Congressional committee process.
• Proposed copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is mobilizing a lot of opposition from the “geek” community – and within the arts.
• A transportation bill making its way through Congress is potentially bad news for public art.
• This isn’t good: citing “budgetary constraints,” the NEA will no longer accept consortium grant proposals in FY13. It’s one organization, one grant from here on out.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The European Commission is betting big on culture, with a €1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) commitment to film, visual, and performing arts over six years under the name “Creative Europe.” ARTINFO is calling it “the world’s largest-ever cultural funding program,” although that seems doubtful once you take the six-year time horizon and inclusion of film into account. For example, in 2007 alone, Germany allocated more than 1.2 billion euros to culture. (via quiet.quiet.quiet.)
• Arts Council England is cracking down on unpaid internships among its grantees (they’re already illegal in the UK). Good for them.
• The Toronto Arts Council is facing a 10% cut.

PHILANTHROPY NOTES

• It’s giving season, and that means the advice is flying fast and furious. The Wall Street Journal is out with its annual special section on philanthropy, which features some stupid debates like “Should Charities Act Like Businesses?” (Umm, you mean like Lehman Bros.?) This year, as in the past, I plan to entrust my non-arts giving to GiveWell, which conducts the most comprehensive and intellectually honest research on giving opportunities I’m aware of anywhere, a veritable wonky wet dream. GiveWell just released its top recommendations for 2011, and they include two disease control charities, Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
• Philanthropy futurist Lucy Bernholz is out with her annual forecast for philanthropists and social investors, Blueprint 2012. Here’s Lucy on the importance of open data as the building block for the future.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is convening a multi-agency task force to fund and promote research on the arts and human development, and has already published a white paper on the subject. This level of engagement with other agencies of government, centering on Health & Human Services, is unprecedented for the NEA’s research department, and has the potential to turn into a big deal if they stay on it. Sunil Iyengar has more.
• Whaddya know? Two of the ten happiest jobs in the United States, according to the highly respected General Social Survey, are authors (#4) and artists (#7). In fact, every single one of the top 8 exist largely or entirely within the nonprofit and public sectors.
• Speaking of happiness, a new study from the co-creator of the “Mappiness” iPhone app, who happens to be a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics, attempts to determine the association between various kinds of (self-reported) activities and (self-reported) happiness for the app’s UK-based users. Clay Lord did some honest-to-goodness journalism and found out that four out of the six happiest activities are arts-related. (#1 on that list, of course, is “intimacy/making love.”) Linda Essig has more.
• WESTAF has published the proceedings of a symposium called “Engaging the Now” featuring the participation of leading arts research lights Ann Markusen, Julia Lowell, and Steven Tepper among others.
• Theatre Communications Group has published the latest version of Theatre Facts.
• Alex Tabarrok on the problems of regression-based studies regressing to the mean. (Translation: small sample size can be a problem even when your sample size isn’t that small.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Adrian Ellis is stepping down as executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center to return to his consulting firm, AEA Consulting.
• And the arts journalism attrition continues: the Denver Post has offered buyouts to a number of longtime staffers, including at least two arts critics.

IN THE FIELD

• Things that make you go hmm: Knoedler & Company, a 165-year-old New York art gallery that was one of the most prestigious in the country, abruptly ceased operations last Wednesday. The next day, a lawsuit was filed by a collector claiming that Knoedler & Company sold him a fake Jackson Pollack for $17 million. ARTINFO has more.
• Well, it was just a matter of time: Occupy Wall Street Occupied Lincoln Center, with composer Philip Glass joining in a protest outside a performance of his own opera, Satyagraha.
• Videos from the National Arts Marketing Project conference are now available on Livestream.
• The blog series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council on notable trends in the field continues with Gabi Jirasek’s entry on the Grand Rapids Lip Dub project and Ebony McKinney’s analysis of arts incubators.
• Some blog salons going on now: Grantmakers in the Arts is having a discussion of Holly Sidford’s recently published cultural equity manifesto “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” from December 6-16, and Americans for the Arts is hosting its first ever local arts agency salon December 5-9.
• Rachael Wilkinson writes up some of the crowdfunding options available to artists. It’s worth noting that Fractured Atlas has partnerships with both IndieGoGo and RocketHub that allow fiscally sponsored projects to receive tax-deductible contributions through those platforms. For for-profit crowdfunded concepts, a bill making its way through Congress would loosen the investor regulations that currently apply.

ETC.

• The Pittsburgh Steelers have a unusual way of selling season tickets: fans can buy a “personal seat license” that gives them theright to buy season tickets for that particular seat. These PSLs are like real estate – they are durable goods, so therefore they increase in value over time. And boy, are they a hot property – Freakonomics reports that on average, prices have increased over 700% in ten years. And you thought dynamic pricing in the arts was bad! (Actually, could this be applied to the arts?)

[T]he growing influence of blogs, chat rooms and message boards devoted to the arts has given the local professional critic a slew of competitors….Many arts institutions even allow their audience members to write their own critiques on the organizational website.

This is a scary trend.

He goes on to add:

Anyone can write a blog or leave a review in a chat room. The fact that someone writes about theater or ballet or music does not mean they have expert judgment.

But it is difficult to distinguish the professional critic from the amateur as one reads on-line reviews and critiques.

No one critic should be deemed the arbiter of good taste in any market and it is wonderful that people now have an opportunity to express their feelings about a work of art. But great art must not be measured by a popularity contest. Otherwise the art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best.

Responses are all over the original post and the blogosphere; Andy Horwitz has one of the best over at Culturebot. You don’t need to think too hard to guess at my reaction; after all, I’m on record as saying that I think citizen critics (though I prefer the term “curators”) are the potential saviors of the artistic marketplace. However, that’s not to say that everyone’s opinion matters equally in every context. I believe in experts, I just think that newspaper editors shouldn’t be the only ones who get to decide who the experts are. Much more on all of this here and here, but in the meantime try the short version below:

What we need…is a way of broadening out the selection and adjudication process to a greater number of people without sacrificing the qualities and expertise that make professional program officers [or critics -IDM] special. To do this, we’ll still want to access the crowd, but rather than treat everyone the same, we’ll need to differentiate between good members of the crowd – the ones who are generous with their time, consider differing viewpoints thoughtfully, and demonstrate personal integrity – and bad members of the crowd – “one-issue” voters, poorly informed fly-by commenters, and vendetta-carriers. Put another way, we want to give anybody the opportunity to participate meaningfully without having to give that opportunity to everybody.

In other words, we need to curate the curators – something that, gee whiz, it turns out the internet is pretty good at.

Many have already pointed out the irony that Kaiser wrote his commentary on a website, the Huffington Post, that relies for much of its content on unpaid bloggers (of which Kaiser is one, I can only assume). But I also found it ironic that Kaiser’s post drew an approving two–part response from Rocco Landesman, who cites the NEA’s recent collaborative grant program with the Knight Foundation as a positive example of bucking the trend. Rocco writes:

Very often there is no one even vestigiall­y qualified as an expert and what little opinion we get is from “cost effective” freelancer­s or a gaggle of blog posts. […]

Here at the NEA we are trying to do something about this. In partnershi­p with the Knight Foundation­, whose domain is both journalism and the arts, we have made grants in our new Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge. Each of the winning grantees (in Charlotte, Miami, Detroit, Philadelph­ia and San Jose) has presented a sustainabl­e business model for a new way of delivering arts criticism.

And yet one of the projects (out of five) awarded a grant in the first round of the program is the Detroit iCritic van, which parks outside of arts events and offers exiting audience members the opportunity to record a video about their experience and share it with the world. Several of the other initiatives also afford citizen journalists a prominent role, with few restrictions on access. If this isn’t the democratization of arts criticism, I’m not sure what is.

Following the field dialogue on participation is so interesting. I really do think people want it both ways: they want the good things that can come from decentralizing power, access, and speech (thoughtful praise and constructive criticism, freeloading on volunteer labor, the moral high ground of inclusiveness) without having to accept the accompanying challenges (mindless or malicious attacks, declining revenues, having to listen to people you didn’t really want to invite to the table).

That particular drama has played out for centuries, really – it speaks to the fundamental dilemmas of collectivism. But the difference now is the way in which recent communications technologies, and the cultures that have built up around it, make everything more open by default. The social web connects strangers to each other around shared interests and foments dialogue, dialogue that filters down into everyday practice and informs collective actions that previously took place in isolation. And so you have these formerly untouchable institutions who are all of the sudden the ones asking for a place at the table…because the conversation is happening, and the world is moving on, with or without them.

I think what sometimes gets missed by those who lament our shifting reality is the inexorable fact that there’s no going back. There just isn’t. Newspapers are never again going to be a dominant force in our lives, and the bizarre economics that briefly made it possible to subsidize full-time professional arts critics via want ads and real estate listings are not likely to return. It’s like complaining about the oversupply of artists – y’all had better get used to it, because it’s not going away. I’m confident that our emerging content delivery systems will figure out ways to match up the opinions of smart people with the consumers who demand them. But I doubt very much that it will look anything like the models of the past. I suggest that rather than pine for the good old days, we instead consider what kinds of systems and structures can accept these new voices as a necessary input and still produce meaningful guidance for consumer and society alike.

• The Hewlett Foundation has finally released phase two of its Youth in the Arts report, conducted by Barry Hessenius. This edition used focus groups of young arts professionals to explore the implications of generational change in arts adminstration. Many of the themes resonate with my Ten Strategies for Engaging Generation Y in the Nonprofit Workplace. The full report is available here. I read it as a very powerful indictment of the status quo and I hope it helps change some common attitudes and practices regarding entry-level employees.
• Via the Artful Manager, a report on the National Performing Arts Convention from last June.
• The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article from a week and a half ago on how Cleveland is openly embracing the idea of supporting artists as a strategy for local economic development. It makes sense; artists (especially visual artists) do well in converted industrial spaces, and the Rust Belt certainly has plenty of those. In response to the article, Kwende Kefentse from the Creative Class Exchange asks,
  

  So are the artists we refer to in the gentrification and renewal discourse really more of an economic model – liberal people with fixer-upper money, within a limited margin? Why doesn’t it seem that local street artists who are embedded in the community, often telling the story of the community, don’t have the same renewal/gentrifying value as the sculptor or the graphic designer who move in? And how can we create that value?

  I wonder if what’s really going on here is that the economic value actually comes from the “fixer-upper” part – and that artists are valuable to communities precisely because so many of them are willing to essentially donate their time and funds doing just that in exchange for the opportunity to take advantage of the fruits of their labors. I’ve suggested before that arts-led economic development tends to be more successful when storefront spaces are involved, not just the presence of artists in a neighborhood. I don’t mean to suggest that that’s the entirety of the economic value that artists provide, but it certainly seems like both (a) a big part of the story and (b) a necessary first step in order to make further value creation possible in depressed neighborhoods. Leonard Jacobs has some additional thoughts.

• While we’re on the creative economy kick, Louisiana [edit: Lieutenant] governor Mitch Landrieu is apparently a believer…
• …and Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, writes about a “creativity stimulus” in The Nation.
• More hard times for arts journalists: the ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards were abruptly suspended last week. I don’t know how much these were costing ASCAP, but to the extent that quality journalism helps to promote the music that the organization represents, the decision seems a bit short-sighted to me.
• Americans for the Arts’s Adam Thurman has a hilarious cautionary tale for people thinking about starting their own arts organization that might hit a bit close to home.
• MaryAnn Devine tells arts organizations not to be afraid of competition, and also highlights this very witty marketing blog.
• A new $250,000 visual art prize, which will be the largest such prize in the world, will select the winner via popular vote. I’m kind of intrigued and horrified at the same time. As much as I am not a fan of gigantic prizes to individuals, at least this one is leveraged in service of a cool event that looks like it will bring a lot of people to Grand Rapids, MI and raise interest in contemporary art. So good luck to them.
• Speaking of new grants, the Ford Foundation has spun off the first foundation specifically for Native American artists.
• And remember how there was that whole kerfuffle last summer when Leona Helmsley directed that all of her foundation’s assets should (literally) go to the dogs? Well, the first round’s grants are out, and aside from $1 million in “canine grants,” they look pretty normal.
• Not all organizations are taking this recession sitting down: the Wall Street Journal has a round-up of some creative responses.
• You must, must view this amazing presentation from Swedish researcher Hans Rosling, developer of Gapminder, from the TED Conference. Arts freaks will especially appreciate how he values culture vis-a-vis other human development goals.