• A lot of people are talking about the news that Detroit’s emergency fiscal manager is exploring whether the city-owned art on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts (which I visited for the first time just a few weeks ago) can be considered an asset in the event of a municipal bankruptcy. I will be shocked if anything like this actually happens, but in the meantime it’s provoking some rare discussion of deaccessioning in mainstream media space. See Tegan Kehoe’s recent piece on Createquity for more on the ethics and debate around deaccessioning.
• Wondering what to make of the IRS nonprofit oversight controversy? The Nonprofit Law Prof Blog has a good overview of commentary and analysis from lawyerly circles.
• A new paper by Roger Colinvaux examines the US tax deduction for charitable giving and comes to many of the same recommendations for reform as John Carnwath in his article on the subject for Createquity. Speaking of charitable giving deductions, countries in Europe that have similar legislation are finding that they have to extend the benefits to other member nations of the European Union, whether they want to or not.
• Next City takes a look at the record when it comes to the subsidies cities pay to Bass Pro retail stores (over $500 million to date!) in hopes that they will generate jobs. (It’s not good.) I’m kind of mystified as to why there isn’t more of this kind of before-and-after analysis of these kinds of policy interventions – it seems like rather fertile ground.
• The NEA Art Works blog has a nice interview with Maryland governor Martin O’Malley.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Denise Montgomery, the new executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
• Joanna Woronkowicz is moving on from the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts to become an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Public Affairs working under Michael Rushton, and offers a farewell post in which she touts the idea of an interdisciplinary research cabal focusing on cultural policy.

BIG IDEAS

• Dallas is making a big play to put itself on the world cultural map. Led by Maxwell Anderson, who is the head of both the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Arts District, Dallas officials have launched a new network of “global” cultural districts to be managed by Adrian Ellis of AEA Consulting, assembling an advisory board including representation from New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hong Kong…and lots and lots of people from Dallas.
• Congratulations to Mediuum, a digital marketplace for visual art, which has won the first Creative Arts Competition prize as part of MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for student entrepreneurs. The Creative Arts Competition is awarded for the “innovative use of the arts as a core component of business plans.” (h/t Joe Patti)
• Asking funders to be less insular may be a familiar refrain, but no one can articulate the case quite like Arlene Goldbard, and she does so again in a recent doozy of an essay. Meanwhile, Linda Essig has a review of Arlene’s new book, The Culture of Possibility.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• “So, yes, it’s party time in the world of social impact investing.  But it’s a potluck my friends, and you’d better know what dish [you’re] bringing.” Michael Hickey talks turkey about money you have to pay back.
• Corporate giving is back on the rise, according to a new report from the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy.
• The President/CEO of the New York State Health Foundation offers some perspectives on risk taking at the foundation level.
• Real estate in Detroit is so cheap, it only takes $142,000 to save a historic rock venue from being auctioned and get one of its theaters named after you.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Good rule of thumb for aspiring grad students (especially in the humanities): the more specialized your degree, the more useless it is. Sadly, specialization seems to be the prevailing trend. The University of Nottingham is blazing the trail of single-genre music studies with a two-year course in heavy metal studies. By the way, a study from 2004 indicates a negative correlation between a graduate degree and earnings for jazz players.
• Back when it was super popular, I though Myspace would be an incredible data source for researchers on the music industry. Myspace has largely fallen by the wayside in that regard, but two sociologists from the University of Chicago managed to grab a complete dataset back in 2007 and it’s now showing up in Richard Florida’s blogs.
• According to a new study, people of color tend not to move as much as whites and to stay close to home when they do, which perpetuates spatial inequality.
• A new meta-analysis of studies of art therapy on cancer patients indicates that “the benefits tied to creative arts therapies were small, but similar to those of other complementary techniques such as yoga and acupuncture.” And another study says don’t trust those correlations between music education and SAT scores – smarter students are more likely to take music classes, but that doesn’t mean music classes make you smarter.
• The study of diversity in Bay Area theater that Clayton Lord has been blogging about for a while is finally out; an abbreviated version of the executive summary is here. Five-word version: all the stereotypes are true.
• Sentences to ponder: “Voting is just another survey without individual consequence.”
• First there was Dance Your Ph.D., and now we have JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments – “the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing scientific research in a video format.” ArtScience ascendant!