• 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.

• Americans for the Arts hosted a blog salon last month on the Common Core State Standards (“the next big thing in education”) and what they mean for arts education. I particularly enjoyed former colleague Richard Kessler’s “Steal This Blog” entry.
• Quite interesting analysis from Barry Hessenius of possible future directions for local arts agencies.
• Burning Man is in danger of losing its longtime home due to new county regulations seemingly aimed at pushing the arts festival out, including prohibiting nudity. The county had previously hit Burning Man with an $800,000 bill for police services, a nearly fivefold increase over last year.
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports on the two candidates for President and their positions on issues of concern to nonprofits.
• B Corporations, those hybrid entities that pursue both profit and social purpose, have apparently become wrapped up in a Tea Party conspiracy theory. Because they are mentioned in a United Nations report ominously (to conservatives) titled “Agenda 21,” legislation to create B Corporations in North Carolina was recently stonewalled.
• The government of Turkey is pursuing a particularly aggressive campaign to recover its antiquities from museums around the world.

IN THE FIELD

• The New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts is the anchor attraction for a new residential development in economically challenged Newark called One Theater Square. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is cited as a model.
• The Pacific Standard Time art festival in Los Angeles, organized by the Getty Foundation, was a big success in terms of drawing national media attention to LA and its 20th-century artists. But in terms of driving attendance to the participating museums? Not so much.
• The Baltimore Symphony’s “Rusty Musicians” program has become a poster child of sorts for institutional programs that welcome adult audience members as participants. The New York Times‘s Dan Wakin embedded himself among the amateur musicians over the summer, and offers an entertaining account of the experience.
• Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge CEO Derek Gordon passed away last month at the age of 57.

BIG IDEAS

• Very interesting: Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution blog, after talking up the coming sea change in online education, are getting in on the act with their own resource entitled MRUniversity; their first course covers developmental economics. Cowen and Tabarrok are themselves professors at the bricks-and-mortar George Mason University.
• Is it already backlash time for collective impact? Silicon Valley Community Foundation CEO Emmet Carson plays the devil’s advocate; FSG’s Emily Gorin Malenfant offers a defense.
• Roberto Bedoya has an important critique of creative placemaking in a new online journal entitled Arts in a Changing America published by former LINC collaborator Maribel Alvarez. Bedoya argues that in their zeal to refashion America’s communities, creative placemaking advocates have ignored “history, critical racial theory, and [the] politics…of belonging and dis-belonging” at the expense of economic development and urban planning technocracy. On the one hand, I think Bedoya’s right to call attention to the creative placemaking movement’s tendency at times to blithely dismiss hot-button cultural tensions like gentrification and social inequality. It’s something I’ve noticed and commented upon here as well, though only in passing so far. At the same time, I don’t want creative placemaking to get bogged down in academic “discourses” that delight in problematizing status-quo practices without, in my estimation, offering much in the way of practical solutions. As much as I agree with aspects of Bedoya’s critique, I found myself wishing by the end of it that I had a better sense for what kinds of arts grantmaking or programming practices promote his desired sense of belonging.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Warhol Foundation is planning to sell off its collection of the artist’s work, boosting its endowment by nearly half.
• David Byrne’s new book offers a “radically transparent” view into the economics of the music industry, through his own experiences.
• It turns out that one of New York City’s most significant institutional funders of the arts, arguably, is one you’ve likely never heard of. Arts Brookfield is the cultural programming and presentation arm of Brookfield Office Properties, managers of several high-profile buildings including the World Financial Center. Run by Deborah Simon, Arts Brookfield spends $1 million directly presenting performances and exhibitions in the public spaces of its properties each year. The article includes this money quote: “Brookfield executives say that for them art is an investment in the core business that pays off in a better class of tenants and higher rents.” In an ironic twist, Brookfield Office Properties is perhaps better known to artists as the owners of Zuccotti Park, made famous as the staging ground of the Occupy Wall Street protests. OWS and Brookfield tussled in the press and the courts for months last year as the latter tried to evict protesters from their de facto headquarters. Perhaps strangest of all is to see Judd Greenstein, a ringleader of the Occupy Musicians offshoot of OWS (and friend of this blog), quoted in the Times article singing the praises of Brookfield now that he is curating a concert series for them: “’They have been really open-minded and flexible….You can talk to them about the power of an idea, and that’s really liberating.” Sometimes the world is very weird.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Kudos to the Foundation Center for coming clean about published mistakes in recent research about multiyear giving patterns.
• One of the tragic consequences of our field’s fragmented funding infrastructure is that support for the arts tends to be concentrated in large urban metros. While especially apparent in funding for art projects themselves, it applies equally to research about the arts, which means that creative activities in rural areas fly even further under the radar than they would otherwise. A new project called the “Rural Arts and Culture Map” aims to do something about this by crowdsourcing stories, media, and video testimonials about art in the boonies.

ETC.

• A panoply of established leaders in the arts share the wisdom they have learned over the years. A highly personal and at times touching collection of lessons.

• Really scary stuff about political meddling in editorial content at the Alabama public television network. Seems like one of the underreported stories of the year.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Randy Engstrom on his appointment as interim director of the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, replacing Vincent Kitch who left abruptly in August. Engstrom won the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Award a few years back for his pioneering work with the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in Seattle.

IN THE FIELD

• Victor Kuo offers a good overview of FSG Social Impact Advisors’ work in Cincinnati to develop shared outcomes across a range of funders and help build “backbone organizations” in the region.  Kuo will be presenting with ArtsWave’s Mary McCullough-Hudson and me at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference later this month.
• Is crowdfunding a good fit for museums? The recent experience of the Hirshhorn and Contemporary Art Museum Houston suggest not. On the other hand, with the help of superstar web cartoonist The Oatmeal, a campaign to build a museum honoring the inventor Nikola Tesla has raised over $1.35 million on Indiegogo.
• What it’s like to (not) make a living as a poet.

THE MYSTIQUE OF CITIES

• Diana Lind on the revitalization of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood: “It becomes harder to complain about gentrification when investment returns to the community the benefits of street lights, restored facades, new trees and eyes on the street.”
• Burning Man is not just an inspiration for artists – according to this article by burner Jessica Reeder in Utne Reader, it also could be a model for city planners. A well-written, thought-provoking piece.

THE (NOT SO?) DISMAL SCIENCE

• Interesting list of economists who support, or are practitioners of, the arts. Be sure to read the comments too.
• Check out this super fascinating interview with young economists about the future of their field. Some quotes of note:
  

  Although we have accumulated considerable evidence showing that people do not always behave rationally, we do not have as good a sense of how they actually do behave and what this means for policy.

  [W]e are far from a unified, versatile, believable alternative to the rational-actor model.  I am hopeful, though, that this might be overcome—in part because of progress in the sister disciplines (psychology and neuroscience) and basic modeling, and also because empirical anomalies are forcing the economic profession to be more open-minded.  Contributions by computer scientists and physicists will help inject new perspectives into economics.

  In his famous 1945 article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” F. A. Hayek argued that despite their inequity and inefficiency, free markets were necessary in order to allow the incorporation of information held by dispersed individuals into social decisions.  No central planner could hope to collect and process all the information necessary for social decisions; only markets allowed and provided the incentives for disaggregated information processing.  Yet, increasingly, information technology is leading individuals to delegate their most “private” decisions to automated processing systems.

  Economics is in the midst of a massive and radical change.  It used to be that we had little data, and no computing power, so the role of economic theory was to “fill in” for where facts were missing.  Today, every interaction we have in our lives leaves behind a trail of data….The tools of economics will continue to evolve and become more empirical.  Economic theory will become a tool we use to structure our investigation of the data.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Cool visualization of the top-selling artworks from the past four years. I recommend checking out the “men / women” view.
• Lots of people are talking about Walk Score, but some users (including me) find its ratings a bit unreliable in practice. Urbanist Steve Mouzon thinks it’s because Walk Score misses the crucial point that some places are simply much more pleasant to look at than others, and that affects how far people are willing to walk. Two adjacent suburban strip malls might have lots of amenities clustered in one place, but no one wants to walk from one to the other, because walking through parking lots is soul-destroying. So Mouzon has developed the interesting concept of Walk Appeal as a potential next-generation index of walkability/livability.
• Amazon releases its book sales data in the context of an interesting political “heat map,” which suggests that GOP voters buy more politically tinged books, proportionally speaking, than their Democratic counterparts do.
• Michael Hickey is examining the details of nonprofit arts organization budgets in New York City in a multipart series for his new blog, Man About Town. In his first post, he finds that four institutions (which he doesn’t name, but I’m guessing are the Met Museum, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall) received nearly half of all the dollars granted by the city to arts organizations in 2010. His next entry discusses the mysterious “Other Earned Revenue” budget category that accounts for more than 20% of earned income across all organizations. A third includes testimony to the NY City Council on the impact of the arts on small businesses and community vitality. And finally, Hickey makes a passionate argument for data aggregation tools for New York City (hmm, that sounds familiar). The Municipal Arts Society of New York (which absorbed the research functions of the Alliance for the Arts after the latter organization dissolved last year, and for which Hickey has done some consulting) has a new report out exploring some of these topics in more depth.

ETC.

• Cool story from Michael Kaiser about getting fathers involved in their kids’ ballet dancing.
• Great, hilarious taxonomy of jazz musician career archetypes. One of the categories is simply called “The Industry,” which includes this definition of the “arts administrator”: “This well-fed, parasitic middleman—typically a jealous amateur musician formally trained in non-profit business administration—may work either directly for the government or for a government-funded non- profit presenting agency. Either way, he or she enjoys a salary and accompanying benefits unthinkable for a working jazz artist.”

Burning Man 2010. Photo by Robert Scales.

Burning Man is an arts event like no other. During the week prior to Labor Day, thousands of people collectively produce an alternative society in the Nevada desert, one driven by ten principles, such as radical inclusion of all attendees and their lifestyles, anti-corporate decommodification, and participation in cultural production. Thousands of artists spend much of the year producing interactive performances, fire art, and large-scale sculptural projects for their theme camps, the creative communities at the heart of the event. The all-volunteer Department of Public Works (DPW) arrives on the desert playa weeks in advance to implement the Black Rock City plan, complete with roads, lighting, sanitation systems, and an airport. The DPW also builds the wooden Man, which stands 50 to 100 feet tall at the center of the camp before it is ritually burned on the second-to-last night of the event. Repeat attendees—also known as “burners”—return time and again to have life-changing, inspirational experiences and otherwise participate in the community.

Burning Man has seen growth that would make many arts nonprofits green with envy: attendance more than doubled from 25,400 in 2000 to nearly 54,000 in 2011, and last year, for the first time in its 25-year history, the event sold out. (The U.S. Bureau of Land Management limits attendance each year as part of its permitting process, and the limits change.) Cultural and structural changes arrived with Burning Man’s popularity, reflected in its evolution into a favorite retreat for Silicon Valley techies, transition to official nonprofit status, and switch to a controversial ticket lottery. It’s easy to see Burning Man’s growth as evidence of its success, but its conversion from grassroots art community to arts institution has led many to ask a familiar question: can Burning Man go mainstream with its values intact?

Black Rock City from above in 2011. Photo by Simone Paddock.

Arguably, the answer is no. Burning Man’s overwhelming success has, at the very least, challenged its principles of radical inclusion and decommodification. The most recent controversy erupted when the sold-out 2011 event forced a change in the ticketing structure for 2012. Burning Man replaced its first-come, first-serve system with enough space for all with a lottery system that limited attendance to the lucky or cunning. Scalpers who put in multiple lottery entries quickly popped up selling tickets for up to $5,000, and organizers were left scrambling to find a solution that inhibited those who would profit from the event. In an attempt to help preserve Burning Man’s unique art theme camps, extra post-lottery tickets were distributed to key members who weren’t fortunate enough to receive tickets in the early rounds. Despite the Bureau of Land Management’s allowance of an extra 10,000 attendees in June, the fact that the ticketing debacle created a hierarchical attendance system has left the community scarred, and wondering what will happen in 2013. The news that Krug Champagne staged a marketing photo shoot at the 2011 event just made matters worse, and points ominously to the potential for further corporate exploitation.

A Burning Man ticket from 2010. Photo by Flickr user Stargazer 95050.

In another sense, though, Burning Man is stronger than ever, with attendees taking its participation principle to new heights beyond the boundaries of Black Rock City. Like Occupy Wall Street, Burning Man encourages creative participation in all its forms, and attendees are free to remix its governing principles in their daily lives. Aside from the massive number of self-organized, regional Burning Man gatherings that take place each year, a cursory scan of cultural events strongly influenced by Burning Man include: FIGMENT, a participatory arts festival in six U.S. cities; the Lost Horizon Night Market, a one night-only presentation of installations in rented trucks; the Post-Yule Pyre, a massive, annual fire fueled by discarded Christmas trees; Balsa Man, a tongue-in-cheek, tiny version of Burning Man created as an independent homage to the original; and countless other events large and small.

The tiny Balsa Man burns in 2011. Photo by Flickr user foxgrrl.

What sets Burning Man’s evolution apart from other parables of expansion is the strength of its community even as it moves into the mainstream. Though scattered throughout the world, burners seem to place a premium on remaining connected to one another, and it is in this communal space that Burning Man really lives. In this way, the decentralization of the Burning Man community and their independently-run projects reinforce the relevance of its core ideas and the central event even as it evolves. Interestingly, this potency seems at least partly based in the same combination of hyper-local, temporary space and globalized Internet communications that powered Occupy Wall Street in its early days. (It’s no accident that several live streams of Burning Man exist, and that volunteers often provide their own wi-fi, despite the event’s other emphases on disconnecting from mainstream culture.) Without a similar risk of eviction from Black Rock City, attendees can continue to use Burning Man itself as a touchstone for continued expansion beyond the reach of any single event.