Seats – photo by flickr user Ryan Wiedmaier

Build. Build. Build. So goes the unofficial mantra of arts marketers as arts organizations seek to maintain relevance in a changing society. Along with the parallel pursuit of financial stability, the goals have been clear: build demand for arts experiences to build and diversify audiences that build revenues. But the how in this seemingly linear formula – the pathways toward achieving these goals – remains less clear.

A 2016 report from the Australia Council for the Arts flips the usual script by drawing attention to the supply side of the equation. In “Showcasing Creativity: Programming and Presenting First Nations Performing Arts,” researchers Jackie Bailey and Hung-Yen Yang of BYP Group aim to understand the motivations – and the barriers – involved in presenting performances by Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (the “First Nations” referenced in the title). In contrast to most previous examinations of audience development and diversification, this study focuses on the programs themselves, and the people curating them. How does the current performing arts landscape in Australia promote or prohibit inclusive cultural narratives? What does it take to establish a supportive, equitable infrastructure? What cultural factors get in the way?

“Showcasing Creativity” is the second study in a series of three that explore Indigenous performing arts in Australia from the perspective of audiences, the market (i.e., presenters and producers), and the creators, respectively. The sequence of studies alone suggests multiple nuanced paths toward building audiences. More notably, it contextualizes the notion of audience development by placing it within a broader framework for addressing cultural inequities in the Australian performing arts infrastructure. In other words, it paints a picture of audience development as one point of intervention among many.

Interest vs. Attendance

In a national arts participation survey from 2014, nearly two-thirds of Australians surveyed expressed interest in First Nations performing arts (i.e., works with Indigenous creative involvement, Indigenous cultural expressions, or content tied to Indigenous-related histories, groups, or politics). However, the survey revealed that only one in four actually attended First Nations arts events. Exploring this gap between interest and attendance, “Showcasing Creativity” analyzes data collected through a mixed-methods approach that includes a mapping of publicly available programs across 135 “mainstream” venues (defined as presenting works from various cultural backgrounds with no sole focus on Indigenous arts and no control or management solely by Indigenous people); a survey among 44 mainstream presenters, six Indigenous presenters, and 11 producers; and 40 interviews with presenters and producers, half conducted before the survey and the other half after.

“Showcasing Creativity” primarily focuses on shortfalls in programming and marketing that, if addressed, might improve and increase opportunities to present First Nations performing arts. An assessment of the landscape revealed a number of key findings.

• Programming: Only 2% of approximately 6,000 works programmed in 2014-15 or 2015 (depending on a venue’s season) were First Nations performing arts. Moreover, a mere 12 presenters of the 135 included in the mapping were responsible for more than a third of this programming. Nearly half of Australian presenters did not program First Nations arts at all, and more than a third of works programmed were small in scale, with less than five performers. Five works, produced by companies with known brands, accounted for almost a third of total First Nations arts programming.
• Marketing: Though audiences perceive First Nations arts as “traditional,” they are motivated to engage with contemporary works, which accounted for 84% of First Nations works presented in 2015. Only a third of presenters reported that their most recent First Nations program, on average, filled more than 75% of house capacity. Although a third of survey respondents reported that box office results failed to meet their expectations over the past two years, audience satisfaction for those who attended was high – suggesting that box office results might be attributed to limited reach in marketing, as opposed to likeability of works.

Presenters also cited several motivators for presenting First Nations arts, including opportunities to:

• engage existing audiences with new and/or challenging content
• build new audiences
• support more Indigenous works
• engage local Indigenous communities
• demonstrate breadth in artistic excellence
• meet strategic goals tied to community engagement or a broader reconciliation agenda

Perceived Barriers

What, then, comes between these motivators among decision makers and the actual implementation of programs? One such obstacle is financial risk, which can be prohibitive for some presenters and producers. Nearly half of survey respondents cited financial risk as a major obstacle, along with the price tags attached to available, brand-name works. This partially explains why presenters tend to opt for smaller, cheaper productions. Despite this perceived risk, the report highlights opportunities to grow attendance in metropolitan areas, where there are more risk-taking audiences, not to mention an existing concentration of First Nations performing arts programming.

Other perceived obstacles that are less tangible but equally significant include:

• tokenism, as indicated by the third of mainstream presenters that programmed only one Indigenous work in 2015
• concerns about the receptiveness of conservative audiences to the seriousness of themes in First Nations works
• fear of wrongly selecting, presenting, and marketing Indigenous works in the absence of those with lived experiences and/or cultural knowledge that might otherwise inform decision-making
• systemic racism, which manifests through discriminatory practices and programming decisions that favor dominant, Western cultural paradigms

Also worthy of note: although the majority of First Nations arts programming (59%) takes place in larger Australian cities, they represent only 2% of total performing arts in those cities. By contrast, these percentages are higher in remote and regional parts of Australia (7% and 3%, respectively), despite deep-seated racial tensions that may cause non-Indigenous audiences to be less receptive to such works. This section of “Showcasing Creativity”  offers a rich trove of qualitative data that paints a highly revealing picture of the race anxieties of Australian audiences and programmers alike. As one interviewee suggests, “Living in a very European community it is hard to get audiences to engage with Indigenous work. People see it as earnest, preachy and not fun.”

Multiple Pathways

What does all of this mean? Readers may recall Createquity’s August 2016 feature, “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” which sifted through a number of visions that emerged throughout the decades-old history of cultural equity advocacy in the United States. The big takeaway was that the four distinct visions that were parsed out – diversity, prosperity, redistribution, and self-determination – were not mutually exclusive, as one often had implications for another, despite differences in desired outcomes.

It’s no coincidence, then, that “Showcasing Creativity” similarly suggests multiple pathways for addressing inequities in the Australian performing arts infrastructure. One such pathway is the development of alternative presenting opportunities – such as Blak Lines, a touring initiative highlighted in the report that presents contemporary First Nations dance and theatre through a consortium of venues across Australia. This type of initiative – most aligned with the diversity vision for cultural equity, addressing homogeneity within mainstream institutions – holds promise in its ability to develop relationships between presenters, audiences, and Indigenous artists and communities, while providing leeway for targeted, localized marketing.

Another pathway might be increased opportunities for Indigenous people to help maintain creative control and integrity of First Nations works. As an example of the self-determination vision – which centers communities’ ownership of cultural life – this would include greater opportunities to involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in non-performer roles, where there is further underrepresentation. These include producer, technical, or administrative roles that often entail greater decision-making responsibilities.

There is also something to be said about how presenters find First Nations works. Nearly three-fourths of survey respondents indicated that prior relationships and peer networks with artists, producers, and community members are most important in this context. Similarly, in building capacity to deal with cultural sensitivities, peer-to-peer learning and long-term community engagement activities help to establish the meaningful relationships needed to foster in-depth, cross-cultural exchange. Ultimately, social networks and relationship building become central to addressing the intangible obstacles above.

“Showcasing Creativity” highlights the varying, simultaneous efforts needed to address cultural inequities, encouraging us to move away from any singular path and toward more coordination to effect and sustain infrastructure-wide change. The report’s section on barriers to programming First Nations work, in particular, offers a new and valuable contribution to the literature that is remarkable for its candor. As noted in this report, additional research about learning and training opportunities for technical and administrative roles might prove useful in understanding what barriers exist for Indigenous populations beyond performer roles. We would also love to see more research examining how these kinds of cross-cultural programming challenges play out in other national contexts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

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

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

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

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

STATE AND LOCAL

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

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

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

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

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

INTERNATIONAL

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

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

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

The biggest news on federal support for the arts is a lack of news. Following the 16-day shutdown in early October, the federal government was reauthorized at last year’s budget levels (post-sequester) until January 15. Which means we get to do this all over again in just a month and a half! Woohoo!

Congress has had its share of squabbles over NEA funding in recent years, but it remains remarkably steadfast in its support for the National Gallery of Art. It increased the Gallery’s federal appropriation by a whopping 70 percent between 2001 and 2011– not exactly a kind decade for arts funding. The secret to the National Gallery’s success? The original act of Congress that required the federal government to “provide such funds as may be necessary for [its] upkeep . . . administrative expenses and costs of operation.”

Meanwhile, in a decision some are hailing as a “huge victory for online innovation,” a federal judge ruled that Google’s scanning of more than 20 million books counts as “fair use” under copyright law – meaning, among other things, that the company need not compensate writers or publishers for making very short excerpts available on the Web. The Authors Guild plans to appeal.

Finally, the U.S. has lost its voting rights at UNESCO, two years after ceasing payment of dues, then 22% of the organization’s budget. National Security Adviser Susan Rice called the outcome shameful, urging Congress to amend the law that bans support of organizations that recognize Palestine as a nation-state. The withdrawal of voting rights is also automatic under UNESCO rules, but it may still endanger the U.S.’s applications for World Heritage status for sites like Poverty Point in Louisiana and Spanish missions in San Antonio.

STATE AND LOCAL

According to Jay Dick of Americans for the Arts, the results of the off-year election contests in Virginia, Boston, St. Paul, and Dayton, OH, among other places bode well for the arts, with several new pro-arts officials taking power. In New York City, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio acknowledged the importance of the arts to the city by including several arts leaders in his newly-appointed transition committee. In other Big Apple news, the City Council held a public hearing on a proposed bill that would require the Department of Cultural Affairs to develop a cultural plan by 2015. Advocates believe this could coordinate cultural resources across agencies, increase available resources, and help keep artists in the increasingly-expensive city.

In other local election news, after fifteen years of attempting to find private funding for a performing arts center, the Myrtle Beach arts community won a victory at the polls this month when 54% of residents supported higher property taxes to raise the necessary $10 million. The City Council must still decide to undertake the project, but now “the rubber has met the road.”

The Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, despite having its budget slashed to the bone in the most recent budget session, has been approved for $560,800 in federal matching funds from the NEA after losing out on that match for two years. The restored federal match unlocked further funding from Kansas’s regional arts agency, the Mid-America Arts Alliance. It’s unclear how the most recent budget shenanigans will affect the situation with the NEA. To raise additional funds, the Commission is trying an arts license plate scheme to replicate the success of a similar initiative pioneered in California. Speaking of California, that state’s Arts Council managed to get a donation check box back on income tax forms for 2013, although the name has been changed from the “Arts Council Fund” to “Keep Arts in Schools Fund.”

INTERNATIONAL

Our friendly neighbor to the north has made it a lot harder for American musicians to perform in small venues. The Canadian government recently established a new fee and permit system for musicians and performing artists visiting from outside of country. Interestingly the fees apply only to artists seeking to perform in bars or restaurants – and both the artists and the hosting establishment have to pony up the funds.

Across the Atlantic, Scotland deserves major props for a) unveiling its first national Youth Arts Strategy (with £5m of funding to boot);  b) releasing aforementioned strategy as a graphic novel; and c) offering open feedback sessions to arts professionals and interested public as a precursor to the April 2014 release of Creative Scotland’s 10-year strategic plan and funding program. The new initiatives coincide with a significant staff restructuring at the agency. Meanwhile, the UK as a whole has just relieved producers of the burden of health-care contributions for entertainers they employ, though it is not yet clear whether this will lead to higher salaries for artists, larger production budgets, or simply smaller losses for backers. Shocker alert: producers and Equity feel differently on the matter.

Speaking of British arts agency planning documents, Chris Unitt went through the just-released second edition of Arts Council England’s strategic framework to see where digital technology fits in. There’s a heavy emphasis on using digital tools to reach new (i.e. international) audiences; less about using them to create new work or collaborate with other artists.

Australians have elected a new government to be led by Coalition, the country’s mainstream conservative party. George Brandis, arts spokesman for Coalition, has announced the party’s arts platform, which condemns an alleged tendency to reward “inwardness, mediocrity and political correctness” and emphasizes excellence, integrity, and artistic freedom. (Under the recent Labor government, arts industries in Australia had been receiving bipartisan support with a broad, positive impact on cultural production.) Brandis claims that the country should return to funding excellence in the arts, criticizing the Labor party for using arts to advance a social agenda.

Not to end on a down note, but freedom of expression difficulties continue in the Middle East. Qatari poet Mohammed Al-Ajami’s 15-year prison sentence for reciting on YouTube a poem celebrating the Arab Spring was upheld by the country’s Supreme Court, although his family can make a final appeal to Qatar’s Emir. Despite pressure from the international community, Al-Ajami is being held in solitary confinement as a potential insurgent. And in Egypt, comedian and talk show host Bassem Youssef, considered the country’s closest analogue to Jon Stewart, had his show suspended after just one episode amid alleged pressure from the country’s new military government.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Australia is relatively fresh off the adoption of a national cultural policy, and with that policy come calls for new ways to measure culture’s intrinsic value.
• Fractured Atlas has created a simple but useful infographic explaining what ObamaCare means to individuals, including artists.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Kris Tucker, Executive Director of the Washington State Arts Commission, has announced that she will step down in January. She has held the position since 1999; her successor will be chosen by the Governor following a search process led by the Commission.
• At Cincinnati-based ArtsWave, longtime president and CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson will step down next August. As part of a standing succession plan, current Chief Operating Officer Alecia Kintner is expected to become President and COO.
• The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City has chosen a new executive director to succeed founder David Hughes: Julie Gordon Dalgleish took up the post this month.

BIG IDEAS

• Why we need a GiveWell for the arts: bioethics professor Peter Singer applauds “effective altruism” or evidence-based grantmaking, and, in the process, slams the idea of donating to an art museum. The article has provoked several responses from Adam Huttler, Janet Brown, Laura Zucker, and Linda Essig. Before we get tangled in semantics (isn’t “effectiveness” beside the point of true altruism?) GiveWell thoughtfully unpacks what the term means to them.
• Nonprofit executives both in and outside of the arts, meanwhile, aren’t putting much faith in data-driven strategies. According to a poll by Infogroup Nonprofit Solutions, executives consider “using data and analytics to drive strategy”  by far and away their least important nonprofit fundraising practice.
• The second batch of guests at the much-anticipated Arts Dinner-Vention Project  — Kristin Thomson, Salvador Acevado, Devon Smith, Lex Leifheit, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Meiyin Wang — weigh in on what a “new movement around the arts” would look like.
• Kerry Lengel explores the challenges and opportunities present in the battle for relevance and ticket sales for arts presenters in Arizona, and everywhere really.
• Think tanks in DC have increasingly focused on advancing a pre-existing agenda, raising funds, and political advocacy. Is there still a place for objective research in policy decisions? We’d like to think so.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Three trustees of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation claim the foundation owes them at least $60m; foundation staff asks, “What are they thinking?” Florida courts will decide.
• Amid the controversies over how little musicians are paid from streaming services, Doug Wolk takes a big-picture look at the revenue flows of sites like Spotify and Pandora to explain who is and isn’t getting paid by whom, and whether it really matters.
• Maryland’s Forum Theater, in an attempt to make its work more accessible, is allowing audience members to determine the price of their tickets next season. The strategy may prove to be wishful thinking, but raises the question of whether it’s more effective to ask audiences to “pay what they can” or to “pay what they each think a performance was worth.”

IN THE FIELD

• Amid national discussion surrounding recent lawsuits by unpaid interns, Fractured Atlas’s Jason Tseng offers concise takes on the history, legality, and possible future models for internships in the arts.
• Another Fractured Atlas staffer, Tim Cynova, interviewed 26 top professional leaders over the past several months about what it takes to attract and retain stellar staff members. He shares their responses in a video compilation here and will be releasing videos of each interview on his #StellarStaff website over the next month.
• Book lovers sound off on the Justice Department’s recent suit against Apple and publishing companies for conspiring to raise e-book prices. Meanwhile, independent bricks-and-mortar booksellers appear to be back on the upswing.
• Good news for cinephiles outside New York and LA: you may no longer need to invest in home theaters. A new website called Gathr allows users to band together to bring independent films to theaters across the country with a Kickstarter-like crowdsourcing engine.
• Bad news for cinephiles outside: drive-in theaters across the country are imperiled by the need to invest in expensive new digital projectors. Honda will save a few based on online votes; some theater operators are turning to the internet on their own to stay in business.
• Non-news for cinephiles: the general public is more complimentary of films than professional critics. How much more? The New York Times has a nifty analysis of Rotten Tomatoes scores from critics versus average moviegoers over the last ten years.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Look out, Rick Perry: the Cultural Data Project is coming to Texas.
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have released two reports on their Leading for the Future experiment, which granted $1m in “change capital” to 10 leading arts organization to improve their capitalization. The summary report highlights factors that contributed to or limited success (stable finances and a well-informed board help; a major recession does not); the more interesting case studies of each organization offers detailed information on how they defined and evaluated success.
• NewMusicBox’s Rob Deemer follows up on our recent item about the NEA’s artist workforce research to argue that there should be a separate occupational category for composers. Meanwhile, the NEA has a new research report out on industrial design. The sector is large, growing, and apparently very versatile: nearly 40 percent of people named in design patents are also named in utility patents, implying they have a penchant for invention.
• A new report on the music industry in Nashville finds that the city has by far the highest number of music industry jobs per capita and the second-highest average salary after LA. This handy infographic breaks it down.
• If you’re looking to get up to speed on everything important that’s been written on the arts and Big Data so far, here’s where to start. Chris also has a review of “Counting What Counts: What Big Data Can Do for the Cultural Sector.”

• The Future of Music Coalition has a great roundup of takeaways from a recent congressional hearing on copyright law and the technology sector. Big ones include the very different challenges posed by copyrights versus patents, and that for the most part, technology companies don’t see copyright restrictions as stifling their ability to innovate.
• A new arts center in New York City (and the whopping $50 million in city capital funding that’s making it possible) has Mayor Bloomberg’s fingerprints all over it.
• Reason #22 to think twice before moving into a glass house: the New York State Supreme Court has ruled that a artist was well within his First Amendment rights when he took and then exhibited photographs of his neighbors — including two small children — inside their glass-walled home from across the street. Upon recognizing their images in an advertisement for the upcoming exhibit, the neighbors had attempted to sue the artist for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Katy Locker will join the Knight Foundation as its Detroit-based program director; she is currently VP of Programs at the Detroit-based Hudson-Webber Foundation. In an interview with former ArtPlace CEO Carol Colletta, she lists the arts as one among several “levers to continuing Detroit’s turn around.”
• Lisa Hall will become VP for Programs at Houston Endowment. She comes from YES Prep Public Schools, where she was VP for Talent Support and General Counsel.
• KPAC, a classical radio station in San Antonio, has cut its five local hosts to reduce costs and will use a syndicated service from Minnesota. The station has offered the hosts part-time work; so far, only one, Dierdre Saravia, has accepted.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Newly-appointed Ford Foundation President Darren Walker offers three lessons on philanthropy: collaborate broadly, as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation did in the Harlem Chlidren’s Zone; invest in due diligence into grantees to ensure leaders are both passionate and adequately supported by their organizations; and recognize that the kinds of metrics used to measure success in business won’t apply in many philanthropic contexts.
• Grantmakers in the Arts continues to take a more activist stance regarding cultural equity. Earlier this summer, the entire GIA board of directors underwent two days of anti-racism training led by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. A similar two-day workshop (though led by a different group) will be offered to grantmakers attending this year’s GIA conference in October.

BIG IDEAS

• Organized labor is declining, the nonprofit sector is expanding, and two may well meet in the middle. Employees at a homeless service nonprofit in San Francisco successfully unionized in June, signaling what might be the beginning of a broader trend.  And while unions have been getting a bad rap recently this article points out that “the mission-driven nature of nonprofits can prove to be an asset in providing an alternative model to the us-versus-them framework adopted in most private sector organizing.”
• Angie Kim shares two great examples (both arts-related) of nonprofit membership associations, typically ill-equipped to drive sector-wide change, assuming a leadership role at the risk of alienating members or compromising revenue streams.
• Half of Barry Hessenius’s “Dinner-vention Party” guests offer their thoughts on how the arts can address declining audience numbers and shifting participation in truly new ways. This first batch includes “briefing papers” by Laura Zabel, Kimberly Howard, Clayton Lord, Margy Waller, Tamara Alvarado, and Nina Simon.
• What happens when video-game designers become auteurs? In the case of Thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen, the artists reworks his art many times before releasing it to get the “emotional impact right,” his company goes bankrupt as the project runs over schedule and over budget – and the final product becomes a critical darling, breaks sales record, and wins its creator a $5.5m venture-capital investment.

IN THE FIELD

• A new movement in the architecture and design field builds on LEED certification’s environmental standards, and calls for a triple-bottom-line approach that takes social factors into account as well.
• Amazon has launched Amazon Art, a partnership with more than 150 galleries that allows you to browse, purchase and review (or faux-review) fine art much as you would a kitchen appliance. At least one blogger isn’t impressed, noting, “Much as I admire [Amazon’s] shipping practices… why compete in a market where an awesomely speedy physical delivery network means next to nothing?” Speed might not matter here, but access to artwork—especially for people who don’t live in major urban centers – might.
• The community-supported agriculture model is being transferred to the arts in cities including Pittsburgh, St. Paul and Flint. Most of them are visual art-specific, with at least one performing arts version as well. And they never have to worry about getting too much Swiss chard…

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) has updated its annual survey of arts alumni. SnaapShot 2012 presents the results in attractive infographics, and SNAAP’s 2013 annual report interprets the data. The theme of the report is inequalities among graduates of diverse backgrounds. Findings include a lack of access to networks among black and Hispanic arts alumni, which disproportionately discourages these alumni from becoming artists; and persistent pay gaps between male and female graduates.
• The Australia Council for the Arts has released a new study of the Australian arts sector in 2012. The report is bullish: attendance at arts events is up by about 3.5%; box office across genres was up 16% (only theater box office declined); and private sector contributions held steady.
• GlobalGiving, GuideStar, the Foundation Center, and TechSoup are collaborating to create an international registry of philanthropic entities. The project, funded by the Hewlett and Gates Foundations, will develop a system of unique identifiers and establish a database for information like the nature and location of philanthropic work.
• A new paper from Yuan Ji, an attorney for Wilson Sonsini and recent Yale Law School graduate, examines the conversion of Burning Man from for-profit to nonprofit status.
• Do copyright laws “make books disappear”? A researcher examines the numbers of books available in print over the last two hundred years, and finds they tend to vanish quickly, only to reappear later when they fall into public domain.
• A new study found that undergraduates tended to like the paintings of the critically-respected 19th-century artist John Everett Millais more with repeated exposure – but they liked the work of the popular but less canonical Thomas Kinkade less the more they saw of it. This is in tension with previous research into the “mere exposure effect” that found that  familiarity just about always breeds affection, even for lesser Impressionists.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has decided a potentially landmark copyright case in favor of an artist who had been sued for appropriating images from a book in his art. While this would seem to be a victory for fair use, the court’s opinion doesn’t provide much in the way of hard and fast guidance for future cases. Donn Zaretsky has been providing extensive coverage over at The Art Law Blog. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition Policy, and the Internet has been holding hearings on potential adjustments to current copyright law.

With Rocco Landesman and Julius Genachowski out of government, the Future of Music Coalition shares what they would like to see in an NEA Chair and an FCC Chair.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has proposed legislation that would bring tax incentives for Broadway productions in line with what film and television producers currently enjoy. The current tax code provides for essentially a tax shelter on the first $15 million of expenses provided that 75% of that goes to pay for services performed in the USA. Schumer’s bill, the STAGE Act of 2013, would extend that protection to live commercial theater productions. Of course, this is Congress we’re talking about here, so don’t hold your breath.

STATE AND LOCAL

Actually, all local news this month. The City of Chicago is investing $1 million to bolster arts education in its public schools, part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s commitment to implement the Chicago Cultural Plan completed in 2012. The money will go toward dedicated weekly instruction time, increasing professional development and training for teachers, increased community partnerships, and more funding assistance and supplies. Sadly, the Philadelphia public school system has a $304 million budget shortfall and is looking at potential cuts to music and art programs if the city and state don’t pony up some more cash.

The intrepid Guy Yedwab has been getting more involved with the League of Independent Theater in New York, which has been doing some admirable community organizing to put the arts on the platforms of local candidates. Guy has posted video from an event he helped organize with that specific purpose in mind, and notes from a mayoral forum that wasn’t arts-specific but had ramifications for the arts nevertheless.

INTERNATIONAL

A new law in the United Kingdom attempts to make it easier to license orphan works, but may open the door to online photo image plagiarism in the process. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, the UK’s inaugural City of Culture festival, held in Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, is in financial trouble a third of the way through the yearlong program because “income from sponsorship and ticket sales is much less than…expected.”

Small steps toward a better world: Israel and Palestine have agreed to let UNESCO implement a 2010 plan to safeguard Jerusalem’s Old City and its holy sites, part of a larger process that is hoped will have the effect of depoliticizing the international cultural agency. Cultural diplomacy fans, this is where it’s at right here.

Remember when we had those stories last year of ancient culture being destroyed by Islamic militants in Timbuktu? Well, if this story from a Tibetan exile publication is to be believed, a similar, if less violent, destruction may be taking place in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese government in order to create a “tourist city” replete with shopping malls. Elsewhere in the Pacific, the Australia Council for the Arts has a new director in Tony Grybowski, an insider who had been heading up the council’s Major Performing Arts Board. Grybowski will be charged with implementing Australia’s new national cultural policy, which despite being championed by ousted arts minister Simon Crean seems to be moving through the legislative process without difficulty so far.

After a long lull, we’re starting to see some action on the arts and related topics at the federal level. First, the House and Senate have passed a continuing resolution enshrining the “sequester” cuts in the rest of Fiscal Year 2013, meaning that the National Endowment for the Arts and other federal agencies are sustaining a 5% decline from their originally enacted budgets. For the NEA, this means that the new budget is approximately $139 million instead of $146 million, which puts it at the lowest level since George W. Bush was president. (At the first link above, Americans for the Arts has a short video touting the importance of getting involved in Arts Advocacy Day. It’s nicely put together, but as with other videos of this type I can’t help but feel the message might be more compelling if it were accompanied by some music that the NEA actually funded.)

Second, President Obama has released his FY14 budget request. While this still needs to get through Congress, it’s significant in that it sets a likely upper bound for the budgetary appropriations of various arts-related agencies. The LA Times’s Mike Boehm reports that Obama’s budget is relatively generous to those agencies compared to previous years, providing a 4.5% increase in the aggregate above the pre-sequestration levels. The budget allocates $154.5 million to the NEA, which is right about what Americans for the Arts was pushing for but is still well below peak levels. The Smithsonian and National Gallery of Art do relatively well under the President’s proposal, while the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Kennedy Center get lower priority. Despite the reasonably good news, Obama’s budget request also brings back a much-derided proposal to cap deductions at 28% of adjusted gross income – including the charitable deduction. (More on the charitable deduction later this week.) Watch AFTA President Bob Lynch discuss the budget proposal on PBS here.

In non-appropriations-related items, the Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 in favor of Supap Kurtsaeng, the Cornell math student who made bank by reselling Wiley textbooks purchased overseas at a cheaper price, thus preserving what’s known as the first-sale doctrine in copyright law (i.e., that you’re free to sell used items without first getting permission from the copyright owner). An ongoing legal battle between network television broadcasters and a startup called Aereo, which uses micro-sized antennas to rebroadcast over-the-air content to tablets and smartphones for a monthly fee, could have implications for internet TV more generally. Amidst all this, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski has announced his retirement from his influential position affecting issues like low-power radio and net neutrality; Future of Music Coalition issues a statement on his departure, and as a bonus offers a review of Maria Pallante’s appearance before the US House to testify about potential updates to the Copyright Act. Finally, many of the critical measures in the America Invents Act patent reform legislation went into effect earlier this month; Keith Sawyer offers some analysis.

STATE AND LOCAL

This isn’t quite “news” since it’s still highly speculative, but for the first time in several years, there is a serious bid afoot to restore the California Arts Council to its former glory. The CAC had its budget cut by 94% a decade ago in the face of financial pressures on the state budget, and has languished among the worst-funded state arts councils per capita ever since. AB 580, sponsored by lawmaker Adrin Nazarian, is a bid to raise the CAC’s state appropriation from $1 million to an eye-popping $75 million, which would easily take the prize for biggest state arts funding story of the year if successful. California’s budgetary situation is arguably no better than it was when the CAC was cut in the first place, but arts advocates are hoping that Governor Jerry Brown, under whose leadership the Arts Council was brought into being back in 1975, will be the difference between this effort and three previous ones that failed (the most recent in 2009). I enjoyed this excerpt from the article:

At the hearing Tuesday, John Gallogly, executive director of L.A.’s Theatre West and a board member of the statewide advocacy group Californians for the Arts, presented each committee member with a crayon that cost 3 cents — the amount per resident that he said state government now funnels to the Arts Council if the federal and license plate money are excluded.

“We’re trying to say ‘give us a small box of crayons,'” instead of just one, Gallogly said. “You can’t create a rainbow with just one color.”

In other state news, the newly reorganized Connecticut Office of the Arts is receiving some bad press from the Connecticut Mirror. A number of arts organizations are apparently unhappy with the new creative-placemaking-oriented system for awarding grants, which relies on a cumbersome application process and out-of-state panelists who evaluate the proposals asynchronously. And Washington State has hit venues where patrons “are given the opportunity to dance” with thousands of dollars in back taxes on the basis of an obscure law dating from the 1960s that hadn’t been enforced in decades.

With the economy now four years removed from the official end of the Great Recession, we’re starting to see some recovery in local government budgets and with it, some welcome increases in arts funding revenue streams – particularly in the West. In Nevada, Clark County (which contains Las Vegas) voted to create a Percent for Art program for the first time, which will “divert 5 percent of annual room tax collections and 5 percent of the county’s share of property taxes into the Arts Fund, not to exceed $1.25 million.” In Utah’s Salt Lake City, increased tax revenues have boosted city arts funding by 14% over last year. California’s San Bernadino County, part of the fast-growing Inland Empire region, lost its arts council in 2006, but as of this year it’s back, with a budget of almost $300,000. And in Atlanta, mayor Kasim Reed seems to be proposing a 25% increase in the budget for the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs, though no one seems sure exactly what he means by that.

Meanwhile, the LA Unified School District has declared the arts a core subject for its 660,000 students but is finding that the devil is in the details, and things have gotten so bad in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra labor dispute that the Mayor’s office has gotten directly involved in the negotiations – though to no avail as yet.

INTERNATIONAL

What a bizarre story from Australia: just 11 days after arts minister Simon Crean unveiled the country’s new cultural policy to great acclaim, he is out of a job following a failed coup attempt aimed at Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Crean’s departure leaves the new plans in significant doubt, despite the fanfare with which they were announced. Ben Eltham has more.

Elsewhere, the news is still mostly bad but at least it’s letting up a bit. Arts Council England is taking it on the chin with yet more cuts, this time of just over 1%. In Spain, where the arts community has been deeply affected by austerity measures, arts groups are coming up with some innovative ways of coping – for example, by handing patrons carrots instead of tickets to protest/get around a punishing 21% sales tax on the latter. And in Romania, a national museum has had to partially shut its doors due to a lack of funds.

Former entrances to the US Department of Education. The red schoolhouses were removed by the Obama administration in 2009. Photo by Andy Grant

Common perception among arts educators in the United States is that the arts are “edged out” of the curriculum because schools value them less than math and reading. Schools value the arts less than math and reading because math and reading are on state tests; in turn, math and reading are on the state tests because schools are required to show growth in these areas under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). If only those federal policies around arts education were different, we often say, things would be better.

But what might a different national policy look like, and to what extent could it change the degree to which arts education is implemented – and implemented well – in public schools?

One way to get a sense of our options is to take a look at how other countries handle this issue. Such an investigation is particularly timely right now, as most states in the US have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) – the biggest step we have ever taken toward a “national” system of curriculum and assessments. While the Common Core has generated its own share of debates (head over to Americans for the Arts’s recent Common Core blog salon for a great cross-section of perspectives from arts educators), it nevertheless represents a defining moment in education policy in the United States. A big selling point of the standards is that they are internationally benchmarked. This will provide, in theory, a better sense of how our students are doing in relation to peers in other countries, so that we don’t keep getting sideswiped by the United States’s “poor performance” on the dreaded Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). (Whenever you hear policy makers lament that we are xxth in math or reading, PISA scores are usually what they are referring to.) Other counties even point to the Common Core as evidence that we are finally willing to learn from strides made elsewhere.

So how do arts education policies look in other countries?

This article covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany and South Africa. Specifically:

• What policies and standards are in place at the national level regarding the arts in schools?
• What dedicated funding streams are available (again, at the national level) for arts education during the school day?
• What are the roles of federal versus state/municipal governments in implementing/monitoring education?

The first two questions relate to concerns I hear voiced most often about the national arts education landscape in the United States – i.e. that the policies set by The Government (in the broadest sense) aren’t conducive to flourishing arts practice in public schools, or that we don’t dedicate enough money to arts education. The third question is necessary for context-setting –how The Government makes decisions about education depends on whether education is a national or a local responsibility.

Limiting my scope to the national level means a lot is left out, particularly regarding funding. If a country doesn’t have a lot of national funding directed toward arts education, that does not mean that its state and local governments aren’t choosing to invest in it. On the flip side, a country may have strong national policies that are haphazardly enforced at the state and local levels.

Though by no means an exhaustive overview of arts education practice in each country, this article aims to provide a bird’s-eye view of national policies that affect which students get which disciplines during the school day, and how. Let’s begin with a quick refresher on national arts education policy in our own country.

The United States

If you’ve paid even scant attention to public education debates in the last decade, you’ve heard of No Child Left Behind, our much decried cornerstone of national education policy since 2001. No Child Left Behind is an updated and renamed version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), originally passed in the 1960s. Per our Constitution, education is a state responsibility – each state is responsible for setting standards in each academic discipline, implementing its own assessment systems, and providing the bulk of education funding. Our federal department of education oversees the ESEA and provides funding for certain provisions of that law (e.g. Title I, which aims to “improve the educational achievement of the disadvantaged”).

Jennifer Kessler’s 2011 Createquity post on ESEA provides a great summary of its history and relevance to the arts. The ESEA was up for reauthorization when Jennifer wrote her article and is still awaiting reauthorization now. The Obama administration has floated a number of ideas for how it would like to change ESEA, but since education did not factor prominently into the 2012 election cycle, the chances of reauthorization happening anytime soon, with or without substantive adjustments, are slim to none.

In the decade-plus since the 2001 version of ESEA/No Child Left Behind was passed, it has been nearly universally blasted by arts education advocates – mainly due to its negative impact on schedule, workload and funding for programs related to the arts. However, No Child Left Behind did include the arts in its definition of “core academic subjects,” as follows: “The term `core academic subjects’ means English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography.”

Using the single word “arts” leaves a lot up to interpretation. However, the arts’ inclusion as a core subject is important for a couple of reasons:

1. It places the arts, as a matter of policy, on equal footing with other subject areas
2. It allows any federal funding designated for “core academic subjects” – including Title I, Title II, and economic stimulus funds –  to be used for arts education

The latter point has faced obstacles: despite Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s 2009 letter clarifying that the arts are eligible for general purpose federal funds, some states have pushed back.  California’s State Superintendent, for example, maintains that schools cannot use Title I funds for programs whose “primary objective” is arts education, but can apply them toward arts-related strategies that have been demonstrated to raise achievement in English and math. As the issue of federal-versus-state control of our education system is both heated and politically fraught (especially in the era of Common Core), Secretary Duncan is unlikely to take anyone to task over this.

Besides general purpose federal funds for education, national funding streams for arts education include the National Endowment for the Arts’s arts education grants and the Department of Education’s Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) Grants Program.  While the NEA’s commitment to arts education appears steady, AEMDD grants are slated to be collapsed with other subject areas under Secretary Duncan’s proposed revisions to ESEA, in favor of creating a new, larger pool of competitive funds to “strengthen the teaching and learning of arts, foreign languages, history and civics, financial literacy, environmental education and other subjects.”

Again, because the effort to reauthorize ESEA is currently dead in the water, don’t expect this or any related proposal to gain momentum in the immediate future. Few people seem to like our major national education law, but even fewer seem to agree on how best to fix it. Until they do, it will sputter along on autopilot as the Obama administration absolves states of meeting its more stringent requirements in exchange for agreeing to equally controversial reforms such as linking teacher evaluation systems with student test scores.

Add the sorta-kinda-national-but-not-really-Common Core movement into this mix and the future of national arts education policies in the United States form a big, bold question mark – but one with a great deal of potential to shift our landscape.

Australia

For a glimpse of what we may have in store if the Common Core movement gains enough traction to anchor a “national” curriculum, look no further than Australia, which adopted a standardized curriculum andassessment system in 2008. Australia and the United States have a great deal in common: Australian K-12 education primarily has been the responsibility of state and territorial governments, and according to Robyn Ewing’s excellent overview of the history of arts education in that country, British and North American traditions heavily influence Australian arts education policy. While the arts have been designated one of “eight key learning areas” across the country for more than a decade, visual art and music tend to be taught the most, while drama is lumped in with English/language arts and dance with physical education (sound familiar?).

That’s poised to change, however, with Australia’s Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority (ACARA), newly responsible for developing and implementing curriculum across the entire country. That curriculum includes the arts as five distinct disciplines: visual art, music, dance, theater and media arts.

That’s right, five disciplines. Our national policy defines the arts as “arts,” and Australia’s gets into specifics. The full curriculum won’t be finalized until February 2014, though you can take a look at draft versions here. In the meantime, our own College Board’s 2011 overview of international arts education standards found Australia’s curriculum “exemplary in the breadth of its scope, the considerable attention to defining its own language, and the lengths it goes to in recognizing the differences in abilities and learning opportunities at the different age/grade levels.” This sample chart gives you the idea (click through for better resolution):

ACARA states each school should determine how to teach the arts, and how much time to devote to each discipline. Its general guidelines (see page 4 of this document), outline a minimum of 100-120 hours of the arts per year through primary school, increasing to 160 hours in secondary school as students gravitate toward a specialty.

As great as these guidelines may sound, not all segments of Australia’s arts education community are excited about them. ACARA’s goal for students to study all five arts disciplines throughout elementary school has met some backlash in arts education circles, particularly those focused on visual art and music. Because some territorial governments invested heavily in those two disciplines already, they balk at the idea of “watering down” existing programs to make time for theater and dance. (This rad YouTube blog offers a performing arts student’s perspective on the issue.)

The irony of such squabbling is that the arts were originally entirely left out of the national curriculum, and were included as a result of heavy lobbying by a “united front” of all disciplines. As Ewing states,

One of the most significant things about the advocacy for inclusion of the arts education in this iteration of the Australian curriculum was a united stand by the various arts disciplines, which contrasted to the previous fragmented arguments for individual allocations for separate arts disciplines.  At the time of writing this review paper there is some re-emergence of that old fragmentation, with the assertion that some arts disciplines are more important than others.

Fragmentation in arts education communities deepens when resources are scant, and dedicated national funding streams for arts education in Australia are few and far between. The Australia Council for the Arts supports research on the effectiveness of partnerships between schools and the “professional arts sector,” and funds an Artists in Residence Program managed primarily by each state and territory’s arts council and education department. Arts funding in general has taken a squeeze recently. On October 15, Young People and the Arts, Australia’s national service organization representing arts education providers, lost its funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and announced staffing and operations would cease for at least the short term. Arts funding at the university level is getting trimmed as well.

Nonetheless, the country’s commitment to the arts as integral to Australia’s curriculum is impressive – and may provide us lessons for what to expect when (if?) we ever elaborate on that vague “arts” reference in ESEA.

Brazil

As in Australia, Brazil’s national education policies are undergoing big changes. Unlike Australia’s those changes don’t explicitly have a lot to do with the arts, but they dohave a lot to do with money and the affirmation of access to arts and culture as a basic human right.

In 2000 Brazil ranked dead last among more than forty countries that participated in the PISA. Since then it’s committed to overhauling its education system, and the effort appears to be having an impact on the country’s performance on international tests. The backbone of that overhaul is a recently approved National Plan for Education (PNE) that will structure education policy for the next decade. The plan emphasizes committing resources to education, eradicating illiteracy, and increasing access to elementary and lower secondary school. (To give you a sense of where things stand right now, according to this recent article, students in some rural areas of the country spend little more than 3 hours a day in school, oftentimes without teachers present.)

One of the PNE’s many goals is to expand “mandatory” basic education, currently required of students aged 7-14, to include ages 4-17 by 2016. Doing that requires building schools, raising teacher salaries, professionalizing the teaching industry and finding a whole lot of money. A major sticking point (and victory) of the PNE is that it raises Brazil’s spending on education to a whopping 10% of GDP – nearly twice the rate of our spending.

Where do the arts fall into all of this? While the national government defined the arts as compulsory in 1972, it provides few guidelines for which disciplines to include at which grade levels, or who should teach them. (According to this overview of arts education practice, few arts specialists are in primary classrooms.) The PNE, framed as a “guarantee” of financial and material resources to support the country’s educational infrastructure, doesn’t get into specifics about what should happen in the classroom. It does, however, indicate that all students have a right to the arts and culture. Here is one of the strategies it lists regarding the arts (with apologies for the clunky Google translation):

Promote the list of schools with institutions and culture movements, [to] ensure the regular supply of cultural activities for the free enjoyment of students inside and outside of school spaces, ensuring that even schools become centers of cultural creation and dissemination.

Universal access to arts and culture is listed alongside access to clean water and sanitation as goals of the PNE. This vision aligns with Brazil’s 2010 National Culture Plan and established around the principles of “culture as a right of citizenship,” “culture as symbolic expression,” and “culture as potential for economic development.” With the assistance of the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture is also developing a National Policy for Integrating Education and Culture focused on training teachers, establishing partnerships between cultural organizations and schools and creating an asset map of schools in relation to cultural spaces. The Ministry of Education, meanwhile, has a Mais Educação (More Education) program funding schools to work with cultural groups.

Brazil will be a country to watch over the next decade. Brazilian educators Augusto Boal and Paolo Freire, who used the arts to galvanize political expression in the 1960s and 70s, strongly influenced arts education in the United States. As Brazil’s education infrastructure expands and stabilizes its translation of cultural rights into education policy may well influence us again.

Canada

Most countries in this survey, including our own, place a heavy emphasis on test scores and are leaning toward standardizing their education systems. Our friendly neighbor to the north is a glaring exception. “National” education policy does not exist in Canada; it does not have a national ministry or department of education, and policies from primary grades through high school are set, implemented, funded and monitored exclusively at the provincial level.

Thanks to this, getting a comprehensive overview of arts education across Canada is a little tricky. Canada’s national universities don’t have any admission requirements related to arts education, and only five of ten provinces require some arts credits to graduate high school. According to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, the arts are considered core subjects in “many” provinces, but all arts disciplines tend to be grouped under one program.

This doesn’t mean that arts education policies don’t exist, of course – just that they vary greatly from province to province. By extension, the quality and content of curricula vary as well. Compare, for example, Ontario and Alberta. Ontario requires full day kindergarten programs and English-language schools to provide “the arts” across all grades, though how much art is needed to fulfill that requirement is unclear. The only specific mandate is that students taken one arts credit to graduate high school. Ontario does, however, have a fairly robust arts curriculum that covers dance, drama, music and visual art in grades 1-8. As the College Board notes, “Unusual among the countries studied [in its international comparison of standards], [Ontario’s] curriculum provides … specific examples of possible demonstrations of standardized skills and knowledge [and]… teacher ‘prompts’ in the form of questions.”

By contrast, Alberta defines “fine arts” as an element of its core curriculum through grade 6, but its standards (in visual art, music and theater) date back to the 1980s. They are up for revision and in 2009 Alberta’s Ministry of Education identified certain issues for consideration in its Arts Education Curriculum Consultation Report:

• the ramifications of renaming “fine arts education” as “arts education” (interestingly, most educators opposed to the change, fearing the “integrity of disciplines” would erode)
• a near-universal commitment to include dance in any revision
• a recognition that while flawed, the existing standards allow for creativity and flexibility that might wither if policies became more concrete

The timeline for updating the curriculum and standards is up in the air; while a draft framework was released in 2009, according to the Ministry of Education’s Web site, “revision of Fine Arts programs has been slowed to ensure alignment with current changes underway in education… the implementation of an inclusive education system, and other ministry initiatives.”

While the two provinces contrast in their arts curricula and requirements, their dedicated funding streams – or lack of them – are similar. According to Statistics Canada,  provincial governments allocated less than 5% of their arts and cultural budgets to arts education. Neither province’s Ministry of Education appears to have specific allocations for arts education, though their individual Arts Councils include funding for artist-in-residence programs (an overview of Ontario’s is here and Alberta’s here).

National arts and culture funders, meanwhile, seem to hold arts education at arm’s length even though Canadian citizens value government investment in the arts. Canada’s Department of Heritage supports programs to increase audience engagement and train arts workers, but does not seem to support arts in schools directly.  The Canada Council for the Arts lumps arts education with audience engagement and states that while “there are challenges to equitable and sustained arts education and access for youth and children… the Canada Council is not directly implicated in the development of arts education curriculum.”

In place of formal government infrastructure for arts education, Canada has a number of initiatives supporting K-12 arts learning across the country. The most prominent is ArtsSmarts, a pan-Canadian nonprofit that attempts to reduce disparities between “have” and “have not” provinces by partnering with like-minded organizations and provincial ministries to advance creative process and artistic inquiry in classrooms. It is also plays an active role in national research and dialogue on arts education through conferences like its recent Knowledge Exchange. A very young nonprofit called the Canadian Network for Arts and Learning also hopes to establish a national presence, with an emphasis on research about arts’ impact on learning.

So if our department of education were abruptly disbanded – not a completely farfetched idea, depending on which way political winds are blowing – would arts education efforts suffer a major setback? Not necessarily: despite its decentralized system, Canada performs well on international education metrics and isn’t leaping onto the testing bandwagon that so often “crowds out” arts learning. At the same time, efforts like that of ArtsSmarts make clear that regional governments feel they need broad-scale support, collaboration and exchange to enhance their arts education efforts.

China

With its rising economic prominence and “remarkable” performance on the PISA, China spurs the majority of our fretting over how to prepare students for a global marketplace. It is also occasionally held up as an example for the need to promote arts education in the United States; Chinese students may kick our butts on standardized tests, some argue, but they aren’t taught to be as creative and flexible as ours.

Such anxiety and pride are both justified. China is an enormous and rapidly modernizing country that has made huge strides in educating swaths of its population in a relatively short period of time. It is also aware of the advantages of our higher education system and its liberal arts ethos.

For the past few decades China’s education policies have focused on reducing disparities between its rural and urban populations. It declared nine years of education compulsory for all children in 1986 and has since put much energy toward ensuring that basic mandate is fulfilled. Despite significant progress, according to UNESCO’s overview of current policies in the country, “by the end of 2007, there were still 42 counties in the west of China which had not fulfilled the ‘two basics,’ e.g. universalizing the nine-year compulsory education and eliminating illiteracy among young people and adults.”

Concurrent with the nine-year mandate, China overhauled its higher education infrastructure from a “free” system to one in which students compete for government scholarships through a notoriously difficult national exam called the gaokao. The gaokao is central to education in China and according to one student is “responsible for killing ninety percent of the creativity” in the country. The exam’s approach has an inverse effect on the amount of arts learning students receive: the closer the exam, the less the arts are emphasized.

China’s elementary curriculum was revised in 2001 with a number of goals, including to “highlight the requirements on the innovative spirit and practical abilities of students, attach more attention to cultivation of their initiatives, encourage their creative thinking… and foster their curiosity and aspiration to knowledge.” Accordingly, visual art and music appear in the curriculum, with standards that seem to place a heavy emphasis on cultivating early interest and enjoyment of the arts, which are linked to character, integrity, spirit of patriotism, and optimism. (Caveat: a thorough translation of the standards is difficult to find, though the College Board provides a rough overview here.)

According to UNESCO, music and fine art are required for two hours a week in elementary school, down to one hour a week in junior secondary school. The first two grades of senior secondary school (e.g. high school) offer one hour a week of “art appreciation.” Based on my conversations with several students from China, those courses are more in line with what we think of as “art history” than in-depth studio courses; not a lot of emphasis is placed on students creating works of art themselves. Those students also stressed that most classes are taught as lectures, with teachers taking very few questions. Not surprisingly, then, dance and drama have very little presence in schools, though after-school programs are available to students in urban areas.

To most Western observers the country’s emphasis on rote memorization is a problem the country will need to tackle eventually, especially as the country considers reforming its higher education institutions to resemble our liberal arts universities. (In fact, some universities are explicitly designed around a liberal arts agenda.) The arts may play a more central role in China’s schools if and when significant university reforms move ahead.

Germany

We’ve touched on what might happen to arts education if we didn’t have a national body overseeing schools and student learning. What might happen if we had a bigger one – or, even better, several of them?

Judging by the German model, we’d have more money – or at least an easier time tracking it. While most countries have few government offices concerned with arts education, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education & Research has an entire division devoted to it. Per this fantastic 2010 issue of UNESCO Today, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth has one too. Not to be outdone, the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media oversees an annual award program of €60,000 (roughly $80,000) to “acknowledge the importance of exemplary cultural education projects.”

Just as in the United States, Australia and Canada, education in Germany is considered a state responsibility. The country moved, however, toward more nationalization in response to its poor performance on (what else?) the 2000 PISA. Among other reforms, national standards and curriculum frameworks for primary grades were adopted in 2003.  As far as I can gather, the arts were not included in that effort.

Nevertheless, by all external appearances Germany is doing such a bang-up job of providing support systems for arts education that untangling them is a daunting proposition.  Luckily, two intrepid academics, Susanne Keuchel and Dominic Larue, beat me to it with a graphic titled “Arts education as a cross-sectional task in German federalism”:

 Thanks to Keuchel and Larue’s analysis (and a 2008 parliamentary mandate to track this spending), Germany is the only country for which I could ballpark discrete national investment in arts education. Between 2001 and 2007, the Ministries of Education and Family Affairs doled out €9.5-10.5 million ($12.6-$14 million) annually for the arts. Taking current federally-funded initiatives into consideration, one can assume those numbers increased in the last 5 years. The current initiatives include researching Jeden Kind ein Instrument, a pilot program in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia that provides instruments to students ages 6-10, and the recently announced “Educational Alliances to Reduce Educational Deprivation,” which has the Ministry of Education supporting after-school cultural education programs to the tune of €30 million ($40 million) a year.

In short, national support for arts education is abundant and complex. With so many arts-friendly policies in place, do all students in Germany get more arts education during the school day than we might expect in the United States?

The surprising answer is no. How much arts education a student receives depends on how he or she is tracked. All students receive the same basic education (grundschule) from roughly age six through nine. After those first four years, students are divided into one of three programs:

• Haptschule, designed for students perceived as having lower academic skills. The program lasts approximately five years and culminates in a vocational certificate.
• Realschule, designed for students perceived as having some academic skills. This program lasts six years, and prepares students for middle-management positions.
• Gymnasium, for students perceived as the most academically adept and “suited” for university. Gymnasium lasts through what we would consider high school, but is more challenging than the typical high school in the United States.

Visual art and music are included in all tracks, but the recommended allotments of time vary:

• Grundschule:  85 hours per year
• Hautpschule: 56 hours per year in grades 5-6, zero beyond that
• Realschule: 141 hours in grade 5, 113 in grade 6, 56 in 7-9, zero in grade 10
• Gymnasium: 113 hours year in grades 5-7, 56 in grades 8-10, zero in 11-12 (though electives are available)

We can’t glean much from these numbers (are the content and structure of art offerings the same in all tracks?), but a few things stand out. All students are not expected to learn or have access to the same things, but arts education seems to be universally valued. To quote Keuchel and Larue again,

 “If ten years ago in Germany the need and the importance of arts education were still stressed, today the accents have shifted: one does not ask any more whether arts education is good, but checks upon the quality of arts educational projects in particular cases.”

Even the Germans don’t think they have everything figured out – three years ago, the Enquête Commission of Culture in Germany issued a series of recommendations (summarized here starting page 22) to advance arts education.  Those recommendations include:

• adding the arts to the Arbitur (the college entrance exam issued to Gymnasium students), probably to address concerns that the arts are “squeezed out” as students prepare for the Big Test
• developing national standards for cultural education
• funding more competitions and awards for cultural education
• developing partnership networks between schools and arts organizations

Germany’s model implies that a country can make a sustained, direct investment in arts education with admirable results. It also implies that the age-old tension between quality and equity does not necessarily go away with increased resources.

South Africa

As the United States reacts against No Child Left Behind’s narrowed curriculum with the Common Core, South Africa reacts against a flexible system with a return to “the 3 Rs.” Spurred by an “education crisis” and “national disgrace,” the country is in the middle of a massive reform that retains the arts as core in its curriculum while adopting the most large-scale, standardized system profiled here.

South Africa spends more money on education (more than 5% of GDP) than any other country on the continent, and by most accounts is getting a poor return on its investment.  With the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, education was made compulsory for all students through grade 9, though the legacies of apartheid and language barriers (South Africa has 11 official tongues) have hampered the country’s quest to provide equal access to education for all its young people.

The first education reform in newly democratic South Africa was “Outcomes Based Education” (OBE). Intended to support a holistic approach to learning that allowed students to demonstrate understanding in a variety of ways, OBE provided few guidelines to teachers. Since many teachers were poorly trained under apartheid, they were ill equipped to deliver instruction through an open-ended system. OBE was scrapped in 2010, with little complaint:

“In theory, at least, OBE turn[ed] the educational process away from a rigid top-down system to one that … let[s] students demonstrate they “know and are able to do” things derived from their growing understanding and mastery of material.  Too often, however… OBE became a treadmill for teachers to create their own student study materials, evaluate a stream of student projects and deal with the administrative tasks and documentation that absorbed hours, even in the poorest schools.”

OBE was replaced by “Schooling 2025,” which outlines a much more rigid and uniform curriculum – driven at the national level and consistent across the entire country — with specific breakdowns of how much time teachers should be spending on each topic, and little choice in what should be taught when, or how. (For an example of how it addresses the arts, see this National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement.) Based on conversation with Yvette Hardie, a theater educator, producer and director in South Africa involved with the curriculum process, textbooks are similarly prescriptive, designed to “teach teachers how to teach” rather than supplement instruction.

Schooling 2025 standardizes assessments and workbooks, and “collapses” certain curriculum areas to ease the burden on teachers. Hence, in grades K-6, the arts are included in a broader subject called “life skills.” Life skills “aims to develop learners through three different, but interrelated study areas, that is, personal and social well-being, physical education and creative arts.” The creative arts include four arts disciplines to be “studied in two parallel and complementary streams – visual arts and performing arts (dance, drama, and music).” As a subject area, “life skills” is typically taught by oneinstructor who, similar to the generalist elementary teacher in the United States, does not have a great deal of arts training.

K-3 students receive six hours of life skills per week, with the arts allocated two of those hours. In grades 4-6, allocations are reduced to 4 and 1.5 hours, respectively. Students receive two hours a week of discrete “creative arts” in grades 7-9, and pick from arts electives in grades 10-12. Schools choose which elective disciplines to offer based on the availability of qualified staff and the “abilities, talents and preferences” of their students. Distinct Curriculum and Assessment Policy Documents have been developed for each discrete arts discipline at those upper three grades.

Only grades 4 and 10 are using the new curriculum so far, though policy documents are complete for all grades. It is too early to tell what the impact of Schooling 2025 on the arts will be. On the one hand, including arts in the standardized curriculum may ensure all students get a basic level of instruction. On the other, the system, designed to scaffold the most poorly trained teachers, is so prescriptive it may prove stifling in the long term.

Implications

Amidst this maze of education reforms, priorities, policies and national/state structures, a few themes leap out as relevant to our national dialogue around arts education.

First and foremost, assessments matter. As much as we bemoan the “drill and kill” culture associated with large-scale, standardized testing, all countries (except Canada) are motivated by test scores, whether issued via the PISA or internal metrics. We are also not the only country to see the arts de-emphasized in favor of what is on a test. We do seem to be unique in:

• When that de-emphasis takes place. China’s gaokao and Germany’s Arbitur are at the end of high school, whereas testing under NCLB focuses on elementary grades. In China and Germany arts learning requirements diminish as students prepare for the test; in the United States, more high schools than elementary schools report teaching art subjects.
• The scale of testing (the Arbitur is given only to students graduating Gymnasium, which is approximately one-quarter of the student population; the gaokao is technically optional).

As the Common Core is implemented in the United States, the content and structure of its corresponding assessments will impact how much attention is paid to the arts. States participating in the Common Core choose to participate in one of two testing “consortia” – Smarter Balanced or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Both had planned on assessments that would include  complex performance-based tasks alongside multiple choice questions – which seemed to provide an opening for more arts integration. Smarter Balanced’s recent decision to scale down the number of performance tasks is disheartening, but the truth is that we know very little about what the “testing” climate in the United States will look like in the next few years.

Secondly, including the arts as “core” is important, and defining them as “arts” has weaknesses AND strengths. To many of us, the victory of “arts as core” under ESEA was muted by a sense that the definition should be more specific. Vagueness has its drawbacks: I’ve had numerous people – including museum educators – express surprise that my work in “arts education” includes theater. Seeking validation of each specific art form through our definition of “arts” is understandable. Australia, as the only country to name five arts disciplines in its curriculum, recognizes this. The country should be lauded for its goal to provide all students instruction in five art forms, but the discipline in-fighting leading up to and resulting from Australia’s policy changes is instructive. Even if we extend school days across our country, we have to acknowledge the trade-off between breadth and depth of experience. Requiring students to participate in many arts disciplines within the school environment prevents them from gaining a lot of experience in any one.

Similarly, a strong national arts education “mandate” can be a double-edged sword. Enacting pan-Canadian arts education policy is difficult, if not impossible, without a central body overseeing education. Nonetheless, Canada isn’t clamoring for a department of education (maybe because despite its de-centralized system, its PISA scores are pretty high). Australia’s ambitious national requirements around the arts in schools, meanwhile, leave some states grousing the new curriculum doesn’t honor or acknowledge quality work that has already taken place.

Germany occupies an interesting middle ground between these two, in that the federal government issues few distinct arts education policies, but does invest a great deal in support of arts education. (Brazil will be interesting to watch for a similar, non-arts-specific reason – its current education plan provides few specifics for how things should happen in a classroom, but a whole lot of resources to give that “how” breathing room.) Beyond providing financial resources, Germany’s national ministries lend visibility to the intersections of arts and education, and assert that the arts play a central role in the country’s identity despite the fact that all students are not provided them equally.

More arts-education friendly policies in the United States might not mandate that all children learn x, y and z. They may instead continue to affirm “arts” as core, while supporting assessments that accurately capture student gains without overburdening schools. With the Common Core on the horizon, we have a lot to learn about whether something resembling a national curriculum is even viable. As we do, the models above, for all of their strengths and challenges, provide hints of where we may wind up.

(The author would like to thank the following individuals who  assisted in the research of this piece by answering questions, sharing resources and expertise, and/or providing connections to people who could: Octavio Camargo, Agnieszka Chalas, Yvette Hardie, Volker Langbehn, Kate Li, Jessica Litwin, Christopher Madden, Jennifer Marsh, Tom McKenzie, Ian David Moss, Scott Ruescher, Jason van Eyk, Shannon Wilkins and Yang Yan.)

The big news last month was the campaign for and passage of a millage (property tax) in Detroit to support the beleaguered Detroit Institute of the Arts. Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer and ARTSBlog’s Kim Kober are celebrating the new legislation, which passed easily in Wayne and Oakland counties but only by a hair in suburban Macomb. The DIA took the campaign very seriously, spending an astonishing $2.5 million on raising awareness and getting out the vote, despite facing little organized opposition. It’s clearly a victory for hard-nosed arts advocacy, but I only wish that victory (and the resulting tax revenue) could have paid dividends for the entire arts community rather than a single institution, as it does in places like San Francisco, Denver and Cleveland. If other arts institutions follow suit, as Terry Teachout suggests, we could end up with an extremely unhelpful patchwork of government support for the arts whose lack of flexibility is written into the law. On the other hand, the voters in Detroit and environs have spoken, and it’s a meaningful testament to the DIA’s community relevance that this measure was able to pass. Indeed, attendance at the museum has jumped (at least temporarily) since the vote was taken. (Nina Simon, Diane Ragsdale, and Maria Vlachou have more.)

The first draft of the much-ballyhooed 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan has been unveiled. Conducted by Lord Cultural Resources for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the plan contains a mind-bogglingly ambitious raft of recommendations for the city’s next few decades, based on participation by about citizens in four town halls, about 20 “neighborhood cultural conversations,” meetings, interviews, and online. All in all, about 3,000 people have participated, according to the draft. This extensive process produced 36 recommendations and hundreds of potential initiatives, which, if collectively adopted, would add tens of millions of dollars to the city’s annual investment in the arts. The reaction so far has mostly focused on this level of ambition – as Chris Jones writes in the Chicago Tribune, “if half of the recommendations in the draft of the Chicago Cultural Plan — heck, even 5 percent of the recommendations — were implemented, Chicago would become an artistic nirvana without global peer.” It seems obvious that the initiatives are not intended to be implemented all together – but it seems like an effective plan would prioritize specific actions in a clear sequence, not just present a gigantic brain dump of options. There are other criticisms as well – most notably, the Chicago Reader points out that “nine of the ten priorities and 33 of the 36 recommendations are updates or restatements of items in the original Chicago Cultural Plan, commissioned in 1985.” The final version of the plan is due to be released this fall. There’s more reaction and commentary – not all of it negative – from Kelly Kleiman, Elysabeth Alfano, Tanveer Ali, and Philip Hartigan.

In other local news, the Fort Worth (TX) Arts Council has had its budget cut by 25% as a result of recent financial issues for the city.  By contrast, there’s not much going on at the state and federal level. But remember the Kansas Arts Foundation, the nonprofit that was supposed to replace the Kansas Arts Commission after the latter’s budget was zeroed out by Governor Sam Brownback? Well, it ended up raising $105,000, but surprise surprise, has not made any grants.

INTERNATIONAL

The real action these past few months has taken place outside of the United States, and unfortunately most of the news has been bad. Europe’s financial instability is not surprisingly having an effect on government support for culture in countries suffering from high debt, particularly Greece, Spain, and Italy. Greece’s spending has dropped 35% since 2009, and in Italy,

[T]he Uffizi Gallery in Florence is renting itself out for fashion shows, and Rome’s MAXXI Museum has been placed under state receivership. The building opened just two years ago and was feted internationally for its splashy design by architect Zaha Hadid, but after its €7-million ($8.7-million) subsidy shrank by 43 per cent, the museum could barely cover staff wages.

In Spain, the Fundación Caja Madrid has closed 48 cultural centers around the country, and analysts fear thousands of creative sector jobs are at stake. The arts are feeling the pinch in some of Europe’s richer countries as well. After suffering through a cut of 25% last year, the Netherlands culture budget is looking at potentially losing another up to another 16 million euros to meet EU debt targets, and even Finland of all places is tightening its belt (while increasing funding for sports clubs).

In the South Pacific, Australia is in the midst of a major upheaval to its arts funding system. Following a review by two “corporate advisors,” the Australia Council for the Arts is restructuring many of its programs and considering doing away with its discipline-based peer review system that mirrors in many respects that of the National Endowment for the Arts. And speaking of transition, the UK is changing culture ministers (who apparently won’t be missed) and chairmen of Arts Council England (the new guy’s claim to fame is bringing the TV show Big Brother to the Brits). Just two years after sustaining substantial cuts, Arts Council England is facing the prospect of having its administrative structure decimated, resulting in the loss of up to 150 staff members by next July. But hey, at least ACE is pioneering a new program to help encourage more paid internships in the arts!

Meanwhile, the past couple of months have featured more than their share of repression of artistic statements by conservative governments. The recent cause celebre of free speech advocates has been the all-female Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years in a forced labor camp for staging a 45-second guerrilla art performance at an Orthodox church. Coverage of the initial sentencing was extensive, but Jillian Steinhauer has been keeping a close eye on the aftermath of the decision. Meanwhile, officials in the island nation of the Maldives have banned mixed-gender dancing altogether and discouraged any singing and dancing at government-sponsored events, deeming such activities contrary to Islamic values. And the right-wing leadership of Hungary has actually gone the opposite route, co-opting the government-controlled Budapest New Theater so as to promote performances of an anti-Semitic play.

Finally, three very sad stories from Africa and the Middle East show how art can be grievously impacted by the absence of a functioning government. First, in Mali, a gang of Islamic fundamentalists has wreaked havoc on the historic treasures of Timbuktu. In Somalia, a comedian (yes, a comedian) was assassinated by members of an extremist group in retaliation for his biting satire of said group. And in war-torn Syria, many museums, monuments, and historical treasures are either at grave risk or are already lost, recalling the disaster that befell Iraq’s cultural heritage following the American invasion in 2003. These tragedies may seem far away, but referring to the upheaval in Timbuktu, Delali Ayivor puts it in starker terms: “Imagine a group of people who make no apologies for desecrating your history, who revel in the destruction of your identity. Envision then, the sense of helplessness, the horror as you watch them dismantle the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, The Alamo, Ground Zero, as they set fire to Yosemite, set off a blast that decimates the Grand Canyon.” Yikes.

Sorry to be depressing! I wish I could tell you that there was some good news for arts funding coming out of the international arts community during this period, but there seems to be precious little to celebrate. Just one of those accidents of history, I guess.