• Sadly, this is what passes for a victory in arts funding these days: the NEA survived the 2012 budget appropriations process with only a 6% cut from last year. This represents full funding of President Obama’s request; yes, that’s right folks, our fearless leader demonstrated his steadfast support of the arts this year by proposing a $9 million cut to a budget that his own handpicked agency head has already described as “pathetic.” The arts in education budget from the Department of Education survived, despite a proposal by the administration to consolidate the program. Other federal cultural agencies, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian, saw their funding hold steady or increase slightly.
• Grantmakers in the Arts is launching a new Arts Education Funders’ Coalition that “will work with an education policy firm in Washington DC to develop opportunities and policies that will enhance arts education at the federal level.”
• A bill has been introduced in Congress that would impose a new royalty in the amount of 7% of any sales of artwork over $10,000 by living artists or other works not yet in the public domain. The royalty would apply to sales at auction houses and the proceeds would be split evenly between the artist (or his or her heirs) and a new federally-administered fund that will help museums purchase works by living artists. To date, I’ve mostly read arguments against the proposed legislation, some of which are more compelling than others, but I still think the best reason to oppose it is that it seems most likely to help established names at the expense of emerging artists.
• The passage of a constitutional amendment in Minnesota tripling the state’s arts funding was heralded at the time as unmitigated good news. But since then, the additional funds have brought their own set of headaches with them.
• Jan Brennan writes about Denver’s newly merged cultural affairs agency, Arts & Venues Denver.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• More on the recently-announced €1.8 billion “Creative Europe” funding program.
• Emilya Cachapero reports on the aftereffects of Palestine’s entry into UNESCO, and the United States’ legislatively-mandated decision to stop funding the agency as a retaliatory action. The funding cut amounts to $35 million annually, or 22% of UNESCO’s budget.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The director of the program that awards the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grants, Daniel Socolow, is set to retire.
• Daniel Kertzner, arts program officer for the Rhode Island Foundation, has been promoted to Vice President of Grant Programs for the community foundation.
• The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance has a new executive director, Jeannie Howe. Former director Buck Jabaily is leaving to become co-founder of Baltimore Open Theatre, which sounds pretty cool.
• Also in Baltimore, Ben Stone is the new executive director of the city’s Station North cultural district.
• Theatre Bay Area has a new managing director, Dana Harrison, who formerly played a key role in managing the Burning Man festival.

IN THE FIELD

• The Fayetteville (NC) Museum of Art is shutting down.
• The contract dispute between the New York City Opera and its musicians is getting ugly.
• With Occupy Wall Street in the rear view mirror, the local musicians’ union in New York City is reviving its Justice for Jazz Artists campaign, which I reported on back in 2009. Two years later, the union has not met with any success in convincing owners of the major jazz clubs in NYC to honor verbal agreements to pass the proceeds from a tax break (which was passed five years ago with lobbying help from the clubs in question) to a musicians’ pension fund.

BIG IDEAS

• The cultural equity conversation continues over at GIA. Barry Hessenius says it’s all about boards of directors. Arlene Goldbard offers her response, and a not-so-modest proposal to shake things up from the very foundations (so to speak).
• Tech toys: this video shows progress in 2011 on Arena Stage’s New Play Map.
• The Emerging Ideas series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council continues with Letitia Ivins’s Pop-Ups for the Populi.
• Minnesota’s Walker Art Center has a new website and it is apparently a trip.
• This has got to be the most epic liveblog I’ve ever seen – one post covering four days of madness at the Doris Duke-funded Continuing Innovation Convening last week in New York City, complete with pics, video, you name it. Karina Mangu-Ward has just declared herself a blogger to watch at EMCArts’s new portal ArtsFwd, which is well worth checking out.

PHILANTHROPY WORLD

• “The typical foundation provides just 22% of its grantees with assistance securing funding from other sources.” I’m actually surprised this number isn’t lower. However, about half of the total is accounted for by simply suggesting other prospects to the grantee, a form of assistance that grantees say doesn’t help all that much.
• GiveWell explains how it chose between its top two recommended charities.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Judith H. Dobrzynski reports on the new Art & Finance Report from Deloitte Luxembourg and ArtTactic.

ETC.

• Andrew Taylor points us to a cool story about the role that South African taxi cab drivers played in curating music consumption in the 1990s.
• Off-topic, but…it’s ludicrous that the penny is still around. I remember calls for them to disappear back when I was a teenager. Can we get some movement on this, finally?
• I named Craige Hoover’s YourTownPerforms.com one of the top 5 new arts blogs in 2010, and the thanks I get is that he disappears for over a year. Luckily, he’s back, hopefully for good this time.

In 2002, after almost a decade of precarious under-the-radar loft living — Watson cites the time her leg went through the floor, as well as the drawbacks of sharing space with a peanut roaster — she found six partners, scraped together $170,000 and bought a 66,000-square-foot factory once used to make Venetian blinds, in the rough neighborhood behind the train station. The area has since been christened the Station North Arts and Entertainment District.

The partners now rent studios to something like 25 artists. And that still leaves room for Watson, who is 41, to store her 1948 Chevy truck in a gymnasium-size room where she and her artist-husband weld their sculptures.

[…]

All this mixing of bohemian and sober, of art and music and theater and film, suggests another possibility: that it’s the scene itself, in all its fascinating complexity, that is the true work of art in Baltimore. These days, the idea of counting “life” as “art” has the grand name of “relational aesthetics,” and it’s a bit of a Baltimore specialty. Last year’s Sondheim winner was a collective whose “works” included a community garden in east Baltimore, as well as a scruffy little pavilion outside the BMA that came with an open invitation for groups to hold events in it.

“I like to think that the definition of art is expansive enough that the community could exist as the artwork,” says Hileman.

Even more interesting to me, however, was Anne Midgette’s story on what appears to be a thriving menu of operatic offerings in Charm City. You might remember that the 58-year-old Baltimore Opera was among the first arts-related casualties of the Great Recession, and at the time there was much gnashing of teeth over how many more established institutions would bite the dust and how many cities would become artistic orphans as a result. Merely 18 months later, however, there are “at least seven opera companies, maybe more,” of which “more than half…started this season.”

They offer young local singers, nontraditional stagings and in some cases unusual repertory — such as the stripped-down adaptation of “Madame Butterfly” for prepared piano and electric gamelan orchestra that American Opera Theater will present on a double bill with Messiaen’s “Harawi” in 2010-11. And they are definitely playing to a new audience.

“The growth has been in unexpected areas,” says Tim Nelson, who founded American Opera Theater in 2002. “Twenty-five-to-40-year-olds; people from less affluent, less educated backgrounds.”

“We took a survey at our second-to-last show,” says Beth Stewart, a soprano who founded Chesapeake Concert Opera, which performs in a church in Bolton Hill. “Tons of people said, ‘We weren’t really into opera before. Now we are.’ “

As Midgette points out, most of the new companies are run on a shoestring, and their success to date is to some degree possible only because it’s so damn hard for singers to make it anywhere but Baltimore, ensuring that the local talent pool remains high-quality. Caveats aside, though, I think this is a good lesson to remember when we worry about the impact the recession may be having on specific organizations. Change is always difficult, and certainly is not always for the best. But in this case it appears that the void left by the dissolution of the Baltimore Opera was quickly filled by at least four new companies collectively boasting more innovative programming and performances with appeal to a more diverse audience than ever before. Which raises the question: was the existence of the Baltimore Opera actually standing in the way of that innovation the whole time?

It’s an important thought to consider as we ponder how to offer stewardship to the arts community as a whole. As scary and depressing as the recession can be, sometimes starting all over again is the right thing to do.

• ‘Tis the time of the season when states start figuring out their budget situations, and all early signs are pointing to another tough year for state-level support of the arts. Following the previously-reported proposed cuts to New York’s state arts agency, word comes that the governor of Rhode Island wants to gut the Ocean State’s public art, discretionary grant, and film tax credit programs, amounting to a 58% drop in total appropriations for the arts. Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts is on the case.
• Speaking of government, this is what happens when people don’t value public goods enough to pay for them.
• Drexel arts administration professor and new ArtsJournal blogger James Undercofler has made a splash this week with a broadside against the limitations of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit form for the arts. It’s a familiar complaint in “emerging leader” circles, but it’s notable to me to see someone of Jim’s generation and pedigree come to the same conclusions. The point about the form being equally inappropriate for large institutions is also interesting, though I’m not sure what Undercofler has up his sleeve in terms of alternatives. (Adam Thurman responds and says the problem is not the organizational form, it’s us, and Andrew Taylor agrees. I think there are valuable lessons to be understood from both perspectives.) I know Jim from my days working at the American Music  Center, when he was on the board, and am glad to welcome him to our little pajamas-wearing blogger community.
• Speaking of emerging leaders in the arts, major kudos to the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations for jointly awarding nearly three-quarters of a million bucks to grassroots arts leadership development efforts in California. I especially love that the two foundations clearly coordinated their support with each other for maximum effectiveness. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this in the coming months, I suspect.
• Would love to see more of this: local government holds public meeting about legislation of importance to the arts; arts blogger attends meeting and writes about the experience.
• Scott Walters is just hell-bent on stirring up trouble. With fellow blogger Tom McLoughlin, he’s started yet another blog with a funny acronym, this one called TACT (Theatre Arts Curriculum Transformation). It’s about reforming the broken system of professional training for the theater from the inside, and the Prof’s last two posts are particularly thought-provoking: one examines the geographical breakdown of those auditioning for slots in college theater programs in North Carolina, and the other is a somewhat radical proposal (he likes those) to tie theater professors’ incomes to their students’ subsequent financial success.
• Michael Rushton reports on some new research examining the relationship between choir singing and civic engagement (a topic explored somewhat controversially last year by Chorus America):
  

  In particular, he finds that choirs, through the frequency of rehearsals, and the active participation of members, seem to lead to more opportunities for civic engagement than groups that are expressly formed as politically- and service-oriented groups.

• Intriguing audience development strategy going down in Baltimore: Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony are welcoming amateur musicians for some face time with the starting lineup and charging audiences $10 a pop to see it.
• Look out, Mark Kramer is in the house at Intrepid Philanthropist. If you don’t know Kramer, he’s, uh, only one of the most famous thinkers (along with his Harvard Business School colleague, Michael Porter) in social innovation history [said in best Comic Book Guy voice]. Also this week, Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Vice President Kevin Bolduc is holding forth at the CEP Blog, focusing on qualitative assessment of foundations through grantee comments.
• All hail the new legal models for social entrepreneurship, L3C and B Corp…wait, now there’s an H Corporation too?
• Tim Kane of Growthology surveys leading economics bloggers (including, umm, himself) and finds that the folks who are paid to understand large-scale economic trends yet by and large failed to see the recession coming don’t agree on much, other than hating labor unions.
• Wow, this seems, uh…important: Marginal Revolution passes on word that researchers doing independent checks of 2000 Census data found significant errors in how the survey counted Americans aged 65 and over. And it seems the problem is not just a simple matter of correct and move on, either. This information has formed the backbone of countless studies, policy papers, and political analyses since it was published nearly a decade ago.
• Yeah, what this guy said:

Another tendency I’ve noticed in broader discussions about nonprofits and philanthropy, whether they’re happening online, at conferences, or in the classroom, is that the arts all too often get lost in the shadows. […] That’s why I’m really excited that GreatNonprofits has partnered with Guidestar and Intersection for the Arts to launch the 2010 Arts Appreciation Campaign. It seems the good folks at GreatNonprofits recognized that there weren’t enough arts organizations represented on the site through reviews, and is now specifically reaching out to the arts community to rectify the situation.

• If you’re in New England (or even if you’re not) and at all interested in creative economy issues, you should come to this Connecting New England’s Creative Communities shindig next month in my lovely temporary hometown of Providence, RI. I attended a meeting for this event this evening and there are some really great speakers lined up as well as interesting panel ideas. Plus, registration is a total bargain at $60. I’ll be attending and blogging the conference for Fractured Atlas, so if you show up please say hello!

• Seems the New Music Bake Sale was only the beginning: Greenpoint hipsters borrow fundraising tactics from the sustainable food movement, raise money for the arts.
• The Cultural Data Project has a new website.
• Are performance competitions festering cesspools of corruption? Jessica Duchen thinks so.
• Fascinating story from Baltimore: the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra got together and decided to forgo $1 million in salary increases and other benefits promised in their 2009-10 contract in order to help the orchestra stay afloat.
  

  The donation was presented in the form of a challenge grant. The initiative “Music Matters: Play Your Part” will attempt to raise $2 million from the public. The effort has already raised $675,000, including $50,000 from the orchestra’s music director, Marin Alsop.

  It’s a remarkable show of solidarity from an orchestra that used to be famous for its acerbic relations with management. “We have a management that treats us as an equal partner,” says Laurie Sokoloff, a piccolo player who is the chair of the players’ committee. “With that comes responsibility.” Sokoloff has been in the orchestra for 40 years and knows very well that it wasn’t always like this. “We used to go on strike every other contract,” says Sokoloff, who adds: “Those days are over for us.” She says that it took remarkably little convincing to get players on board with the plan, because of the trust that the current administration has created with its musicians.

  This is all kind of amazing given the very public labor relations nastiness that has gone on in the orchestra field the last couple of years. BSO chief Paul Meecham deserves a lot of credit for creating the conditions that allowed this to happen. And I love the fact that the musicians made it a challenge grant – way to take responsibility for the situation AND put some public pressure on management to do its job. The players come out of this looking great. Given that they may well have been asked to accept cuts one way or another, I think this was a really smart move on their part to take control of the agenda.

• Isaac Butler asks whether the 501(c)(3) itself is really broken, or if it’s just that people treat the law in certain ways that are broken. Great question. I am taking a clinic in nonprofit law right now and I’m not even sure I can answer this. But if I had to choose, I would probably go with the latter.
• While on the subject, the founder of the DC Central Kitchen pens an op-ed entitled “‘Nonprofits’ are businesses.” He doesn’t really take this argument as far as he could, but I’m glad that someone is pushing this line. It might be tempting to think something along the lines of “how can a business be creating value if it doesn’t pay for itself?” But nonprofits are really not as different from private sector firms as a lot of people think. The major distinction is that a lot of (but certainly not all of) nonprofits’ “customers” are willing to pay for the organizations’ services even if they don’t benefit from them directly. But they’re still paying, just like you and I pay the phone company for our wireless bill. From an economic standpoint it really doesn’t matter why people pay for something. It just matters that they do, and do so voluntarily. So nonprofits can create value, yes, economic value, just like for-profits can. And of course that includes arts organizations.
• As of today, Richard Florida has a new blog on the website of The Atlantic. The first entry is on mega-regions and high-speed rail. Other “correspondents” include Harry Shearer of The Simpsons fame.
• Friends doing well department: Darcy James Argue, fresh off a long Newsweek profile, is nominated in three categories for the Jazz Journalists Association. A bunch of his friends were profiled in a New York Times article about a couple of musicians’ havens in the Prospect Park neighborhood in Brooklyn. And his CD release party is this Saturday Friday at Galapagos. Not a bad two weeks!