Entry to the Kennedy Center for the Arts. Photo courtesy of Adam Fagen.

While living in China, I befriended a Japanese classmate who spoke no English. I spoke no Japanese, but we both spoke Chinese—and more importantly, we both played guitar.  Our connection to music served as the foundation of friendship. She taught me to play Japanese rock songs, and I memorized the lyrics to harmonize with her.  Years later, I stayed with her family in Hiroshima and learned Japanese well enough to correspond with her via email. Along the way, I also amassed nearly 24 hours of Japanese music which I share with others every chance I get.

This was one of my many experiences with informal international cultural exchange since first venturing abroad after college. International arts exchanges reflect centuries of artistic exploration and the possibilities of an increasingly interconnected world. They can come in a variety of forms: formal or informal, undertaken by individuals or organizations, funded by private foundations or the government. This article examines how the more formal of those models have come to exist and the ways they are supported. (Note: while not all cultural exchanges can be considered arts exchange, for the purposes of this article I will use the terms interchangeably.)

Funding and Context for International Exchange

International cultural exchange’s long history is intertwined with the history of trade and conflict. Since the end of World War II, formal exchange initiatives and policies in the United States have been directly tied to the prevention of and recovery from international conflict.

In 1945, Senator J. William Fulbright proposed that surplus from the sale of war property be used to support educational, cultural, and scientific exchange, arguing nothing could better humanize international relations and promote goodwill among countries. The Fulbright Program, the State Department’s flagship international educational exchange program for students, scholars, professionals and teachers, was born a year later. The program was designed to promote mutual understanding between countries and work toward meeting shared needs. In 1961, the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act led to the creation of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (BECA) under the US Department of State to oversee government funded international exchange programs. Today, the Cultural Programs Division of BECA awards grants to individuals and organizations through 46 discrete grant programs, about a third of which are related to the arts such as DanceMotion USA, American Music Abroad, and smART power. Grantee organizations may also solicit funds from the BECA directly for international project expenses, or seek funding from an independent nonprofit whose pool of money for funding exchange comes from the US government.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, government funding for cultural diplomacy weakened. But a decade later, shaken out of a false sense of amity by 9/11, the federal government reaffirmed the diplomatic value of international exchange by nearly tripling BECA’s budget from $233 million in 2001 to $600 million in 2011.

Source: US Department of State
Figure 1 Government support for international educational and cultural exchange from 2001 to 2011

As government support for international exchange has waxed and waned since the end of World War II, so has private foundation investment, which has declined in recent years. The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation’s 2008 look at trends in international arts exchange giving shows a drop in foundation support from the heyday of the 1990s, when arts exchange funding made up 1% of total arts giving by major funders.

Despite inconsistent funding streams, a number of factors make international exchange programs more relevant today than ever before. Demographics are changing and international partnerships may help arts organizations engage new audiences. As the arts sector around the world professionalizes, we can learn from international counterparts’ approach to their work and vice versa. New learning theories and a better understanding of the creative process leave us primed to grow by crossing national and intellectual borders. To top it off, technology has made exchange across disparate parts of the globe easier. If a 21^st-century citizen is a global citizen, arts organizations must begin to see how their work can and does transcend their immediate surroundings and seek integration into a larger, richer community.

This doesn’t mean they have to send staff on the next available flight to India to bring back tablas for inner city youth. International exchange is only meaningful insofar as it aligns with organizational mission. With exchange encompassing a seemingly limitless range of activities, examining what’s being done and done well can offer valuable lessons. The examples below offer a sampling of approaches to international exchange, with varying objectives, lengths, and target audiences.

Models

International Collaboration as Mission

Some organizations’ missions give preeminence to international exchange and build all activities around it. The Silk Road Project, for example, has international collaboration written into its DNA. Musicians from over 20 countries perform with and compose for the Silk Road Ensemble. Blending musical traditions from different cultures, they experiment with the creation of new music for their unique makeup of instruments and engage artists and audiences in the United States and abroad by raising awareness of different musical traditions around the world. With funding from corporations, the government, foundations, and even Sony Music, Silk Road’s education programs extend the benefits of their multinational and multicultural focus to provide “a gateway to greater understanding of the world” for youth.

International Youth/Artist Collaboration

I first heard of the Battery Dance Company when the ensemble was in Bangkok last year working with young hip-hop dancers as part of the Dancing to Connect (DtC) program, sponsored by the US Embassy in Bangkok through funding from the Department of State. Through DtC, Battery Dance Company teaching artists travel overseas to work with young dancers for a week, collaborating on original modern dance choreography that culminates in a joint public performance. DtC has put on programs in 25 countries to date, and trains outside teaching artists in its methodologies through the Dancing to Connect Institute. International work has become so central to its work that the company is putting together a resource on cultural diplomacy. Funding sources for DtC vary, with the Battery Dance Company often receiving in-kind corporate sponsorship for airfare or accommodations.

International Community/Community Collaboration

While DtC asks professional dancers to work with amateurs, Museums Connect asks museums to facilitate exchange between their peer communities. A BECA grant program administered by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Museums Connect brings together museum audiences with similar interests in disparate communities using a matchmaking tool provided by AAM. The process is reminiscent of online dating: museums first submit an organizational profile and collaborative project ideas to AAM. All profiles are posted online, allowing each museum’s project coordinator to browse for institutions with similar or intriguing project ideas, missions, or audiences. Project coordinators then reach out to prospective partner museums; if both sides agree to the “match,” they craft a grant proposal focused on connecting their respective audiences around a topic of common interest. If funded, proposed collaborations play out through a range of practices carried out by the participants in pre-identified groups from within the museum’s larger community that include but are not limited to travel, shared online prompts to spur artistic work, conference calls, and virtual exhibits. After the infrastructure for collaboration is set up, the communities take over the project.

The matchmaking process is critical to Museums Connect’s success, as these ambitious projects, which typically run over the course of a year, could easily stress institutions with limited capacity, particularly those in foreign countries.

International Institution/Institution Collaboration

One standout example that seeks to build capacity and inspire creativity over a longer period of time comes from the Netherlands’s Tropenmuseum and Indonesia’s Gajda Mada University. The Tropenmuseum’s parent organization and main source of funding, the Royal Tropical Institute, specializes in international and intercultural cooperation, leaving the museum well poised to take on a number of international partnerships. In the case of Gajda Mada University, the Tropenmuseum is helping to establish a graduate museum studies program, not by building a satellite museum, or committing staff as permanent full-time lecturers, but by building local capacity. Dutch museum staff and local Indonesian professors collaborate over five years, with Indonesians taking increasing ownership of the program over time. The strength of this model is its potential to add value to cultural institutions across Indonesia. The Tropenmuseum’s extended engagement allows its staff to build long-term relationships in Indonesia and tailor its support to local needs.  

Considerations

We all feel we’re better musicians as a result of the Silk Road Project. We were taken to musical areas we didn’t know well, and have widened our own musical worlds. We have more tools with which to express ourselves. Most importantly, I feel more human, more connected to others. – Yo-Yo Ma

These examples offer entry points for even small organizations to mobilize themselves toward international work or think more globally in the creation of programs. In moving forward, arts organizations should keep a number of things in mind:

• Design exchanges with an eye toward mutual success. In order for exchanges to work, both parties must be able to clearly articulate how they benefit from the arrangement.
• Exchange requires resources. Any articulation of benefit requires a realistic picture of the level of engagement appropriate for each organization. Existing available time and capacity must be taken into account for fear of compromising quality.
• The impact of the exchange may not be uniform. Because partner communities and organizations start at different point from which “progress” is measured, each side may define impact differently.
• No matter how sexy the opportunity, exchange must align with mission. Underestimating the importance of institutional fit can derail even the most interesting programs.

The kinds of exchanges possible today extend far beyond the goodwill-building for conflict resolution and avoidance imagined post-World War II. As noted in the Rapporteur’s report on the 2012 Salzburg Global Seminar on public and private cultural exchange-based diplomacy,

 The more autonomous and intertwined global cultural discourse of our day [is one in which] exchanges are not a corollary of state power, however soft and benign, but where transnational cultural interactions can constitute a “third space” of vibrant creativity—a realm of curiosity, meaning, collaboration, enterprise, and learning that is not directly beholden to either political or commercial interests.

“Never Heard of ‘Em”: Why Citizen Curators (not Daddy’s Money) Should Decide Who Gets to Be an Artist

For the past few months, you’ve probably been besieged with emails and Facebook posts asking you to convince our politicians not to cut public funding for the arts. Often these appeals will include a link to some news story about how the arts will suffer if government grants are reduced. And if you click through and read the comments, invariably you’ll come across something like this:

The government—at whatever level—has no business funding the arts, especially so, when much of that art is mediocre or worst. Why should my tax dollars go to fund the fun of someone who thinks himself or herself the next Picasso? Exceptional art will find funding, as it always has.

In my arts policy coverage, I find this argument comes up a lot, and there’s a good reason—it’s difficult to parry.

Our first response to such arguments is usually to talk about the value of the arts. But note that the commenter is not saying that art itself doesn’t have value. The dispute is about the value of subsidy to the arts. The commenter claims, and quite rightly so, that art would still happen if the government didn’t help pay for it. In fact, that’s exactly what took place in this country for the first 175 years or so of its existence, before a real infrastructure for government arts funding came into being.

So why would we want to subsidize the arts anyway? I mean, if the deli on the corner is losing customers because its meats are stale and the service is slow, we don’t say that the government should subsidize the corner deli. We say good riddance! So is it really such a big deal if the arts are left to fare for themselves?

The way I see it, there are basically two reasons to subsidize the arts:

1. To give us cool art that the market wouldn’t otherwise support
2. To give access to the arts to people who wouldn’t otherwise have it

Each of these reasons assumes a market failure when it comes to the arts. The first suggests that, while the market can determine which art or entertainment makes people happy in the here and now, it is bad at judging the long-term value of art. It’s pretty easy to come up with examples of people who we now consider to be Great Artists who were not recognized as such in their day. The only reason their work has survived until now is sheer luck. Often, an artist’s real value to society comes not so much from the direct experiences that audiences have of his or her work, but rather from the profound influence that the artist has on other artists, some of whom may eventually reach a wider public.

The second reason is a straight-up class argument. Just as with many other services, because art has value, people shouldn’t be denied access to art just because they are poor, or happen to live in a rural area, or are confined to a nursing home or mental institution. The same argument applies to kids – just because their parents can’t afford to provide them with access to art, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have it.

I’m going to focus most of this talk on the first argument: that it’s important to subsidize art because the commercial marketplace is not good at judging art’s long-term value to society and future generations.

So we are agreed that the commercial marketplace is not so good at judging the long-term value of artistic product. But if you’re not going to let the marketplace decide who succeeds and who fails in the arts, then who should decide?

To be honest, I don’t have a great answer to this question. But the best that I can come up with is that I would want the people deciding to really know their shit. I expect that someone who has studied the arts, or even better, my specific discipline, or better yet, my specific genre and subgenre within my specific discipline, will have a better idea of the long-term value of my work to society than some schmoe off the street. That’s not elitism, that’s just common sense.

But you know, art is still a matter of taste. And people always have personal agendas, scores to settle, and so on. One of the really nice things about the commercial marketplace is that no one person really has that much power to determine what happens on their own. But the problem with the commercial marketplace is that most of the people in it are not the experts we want judging the long-term value of the work.

What we need is something I call an artistic marketplace: a system of buying and selling artistic products and services in which the currency is not money, but instead the respect of experts. In which success is determined not by how many butts in seats you have, or how many records you can sell, but by the extent to which your work impresses people who really know their shit.

So who are these people? They are anyone who experiences a lot more art than the average person, and thus has a basis for informed opinion. Professional critics are probably the most obvious exemplar of this category. But it also includes anyone who judges artistic work samples for a living: publishers, artistic directors, booking agents, record company execs, gallery curators, and the list goes on. It even includes, I would argue, people like this guy. [Slide: grocery store clerk who’s watched and ranked over 7000 movies] These people collectively form the demand curve within the artistic marketplace.

As we said earlier, the currency of the artistic marketplace is the respect and endorsement of experts. The problem is this: that respect does not exchange properly with the currency of the commercial marketplace: money.

This is important because the whole purpose of subsidy is to make that exchange possible. Remember, with subsidy we are actively intervening in the commercial marketplace because we don’t agree with the choices it is making about which artists and institutions should stand the test of time. And yet I am sure that any of us in this room, or any of us watching, can point to examples of brilliant artists working today, who are well-recognized by their peers, who nevertheless struggle to make ends meet. This wouldn’t happen if the artistic marketplace were functioning the way it’s supposed to.

So why is it that philanthropic subsidy isn’t more effective at helping critically acclaimed artists make a living? Well, for one thing, we can’t talk about this phenomenon without mentioning the intense competition for attention between artists of all stripes. I don’t need to tell you that the past 20 years have completely revolutionized our society’s level of access to art of all kinds. Production costs have fallen drastically, making it possible for amateur creators and performers to use equipment that only professionals could have taken advantage of a generation ago. And because of the internet, distribution costs have nearly disappeared entirely, particularly for film and electronic media, recorded music, and writing. Finally, storage costs – with the transfer of so much information to digital format and hard drive capacities metastasizing every year – are dropping through the floor as well. The net result of all of these changes is that it’s easier than ever before for people to create art that can “pass” for professional; it’s easier than ever before for these amateur artists to enter the public sphere by distributing their works to the world; and those works get preserved in the public sphere, accessible by anyone at any time, rather than languishing in the attic or in the creator’s imagination.

Bottom line: a lot more people are entering the artistic (and commercial) marketplaces on the supply side—they engage in personal creation or performance for public consumption. And because the same technological innovations apply to retired artists – even deceased artists!—not only does each new playwright or composer or painter have to compete with all of her peers, she must also compete with every artist who came before her. Unfortunately, she cannot similarly count on dead audience members to be a part of her fan base.

So there is a tremendous amount of competition in the artistic marketplace—a marketplace in which the currency is respect. But in order to get respect, one of the “experts” in the artistic marketplace has to give you their attention – which means they have to give you their time. They have to listen to your piece, read your play, look at your slides, be present at your audition. And time is becoming – for all of us – a really, really scarce resource. Our lives are being filled up – not least by all of this content that we are bombarded with every day. In fact, we are producing so much art in this world these days that we are overwhelming the human capacity to evaluate it all. Let’s say you are a music fan. If you decided you wanted to listen to all of the albums released in the United States in a given year – say, 2008 – you could put your headphones on for every hour of every day of every week of the year – and you still wouldn’t get through more than an eighth of them! So now it’s 2009, and you have seven-eighths of the previous year to listen to – plus all the albums from 2007, and the albums from 2006, and you get the picture. Or let’s say you enjoy hunting for videos on YouTube. Guess what: there are 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s the equivalent of 176,000 full-length Hollywood movies every week!

So you see what I mean when I say that we don’t have the capacity to evaluate it all. And more to the point, those experts in the artistic marketplace don’t have time to evaluate it either. So they triage. They take some shortcuts.

Let’s take an example – an example from music, since that’s the world I know best. If you review the rosters of major classical music presenters around the country, you will start to see a lot of the same names over and over and over again. The fact is, the first instinct of anyone awarding a high-profile gig will be to choose proven commodities: names that audience members are familiar with, excited by, and motivated to buy tickets for. There is a powerful incentive for these curators to make that choice: it’s called earned revenue! Even though presenters operate in the artistic marketplace, they also operate in the commercial marketplace, and the commercial marketplace demands that one take advantage of star power.

But let’s say that in this particular case, a presenter has decided to take a chance on a chamber ensemble that is not so well-known – in fact, it’s the first gig they’ve ever had at this level. But are they really unknown? For that programming decision to happen, the work of those musicians has to be brought to the attention of whoever is doing the artistic programming for the presenter. I’m telling you right now that it didn’t happen because that person was reviewing unsolicited work samples that came in through the mail or over the internet. The tidal wave of submissions is in all likelihood so massive that they can’t possibly give their full attention to each one. So what do they do instead? They are probably plugged in to the next level down of presenting opportunities, and may get out and see shows on a regular basis. They monitor what their peers are saying in their local community and around the country about particular artists, keeping an ear out for those that are generating buzz. And it is on this basis – career momentum, essentially – that programming of “new” artists actually happens.

So for an unknown chamber ensemble to get a major opportunity like this, they have to already be generating buzz and getting smaller performance opportunities. Here’s where it gets tricky. Those smaller performance opportunities don’t really pay the bills. Maybe the musicians are self-presenting, and thus sees their income swallowed up in production costs. Maybe they’re doing a lot of unpaid gigs as favors just to get exposure. They might even be doing club shows where the payout at the end of the night is $50 per musician if they are lucky. That doesn’t go very far toward paying for instruments, practice space, or the van rental if they’re on tour.

And how did they get those smaller gigs anyway? It certainly helps if they had a killer demo – the kind that it takes money to record. It helps if they had a lot of time to practice together, which means they have a dedicated rehearsal space. These things cost money.

And finally, in all likelihood, those musicians paid a lot of money for conservatory training, at the bachelor’s and possibly the master’s level. And during that time when they were getting trained, they probably weren’t making money either.

So we’ve just outlined a number of problems standing in the way of an unknown artist or group of artists getting a gig that pays them enough money to live on.

• There’s the problem of profile: in order to get that gig, people have to already know who you are.
• The problem of curatorial capacity: in order for people to know who you are and to stand out from the crowd, you need some career momentum.
• The problem of presentation: in order to get that career momentum, you need public showings and documentation of your work which you have to either pay for or subsidize.
• And there’s the problem of uncompensated time: in order to get and make those presentation opportunities successful, you need to spend thousands of hours in training and practice, which are thousands of hours that you’re not earning a living.

Do you see where I’m going with this? This process of getting attention presents us with a HUGE class issue. Is it any mystery why our arts organizations have trouble connecting with less affluent members of society? It’s not because they can’t afford the tickets. It’s not because they can’t get to the venue easily. It’s not because the genre as a whole isn’t “relevant” to them. Okay, I lied – it is all of those things. But I don’t think any of them are the main reason. I think the main reason is because these less affluent populations don’t know anyone in their communities who is a professional artist with those organizations. Because how could you be, if you grew up poor and couldn’t afford conservatory training and weren’t given lessons in school and anyway now you have to work two jobs to put food on the table and feed the kids? We talk a lot about cultural equity in the arts, and we typically frame it in terms of audience access: who has the opportunity to see one of these amazing artists perform, or witness their creations? But as more and more of us turn to creative expression as a way of affirming our identities in an increasingly connected world, I think the most important cultural equity issue of our time isn’t who gets to see the amazing artist, it’s who gets to be the amazing artist.

I’ve almost reached the end of my time, but I want to leave you with a few thoughts about where to go from here.

One of the big problems with the current system is that, of all the “experts” we identified way back in the beginning of this talk, only a few of them can back up their opinions with more than token amounts of money. I gave you the example of a presenter earlier, and others, such as grantmakers and some artistic directors, share this privilege. But that leaves out most critics, booking agents, and radio station programmers. It leaves out superfans and aficionados. Doesn’t their opinion count too? Apparently not, if you follow the money.

What we need to do is pretty clear. First, because supply in the artistic marketplace is increasing so dramatically, we need to bolster the demand curve to meet it, by getting more people who really know their shit to evaluate unknown artists. This will address the problem of capacity. And second, we need to do a better job of making sure that people who know their shit can back their opinions up with money, so that those who succeed in the artistic marketplace can also succeed in the economy more generally.

In “Audiences at the Gate,” an article published in Edward Clapp’s 20UNDER40 anthology last year, Daniel Reid and I discuss a model that aims to accomplish both of these goals. We suggest that one or more foundations could funnel some of the money that they give to the arts each year through a community of citizen curators who interact with each other via a web-based platform. These citizen curators could be anyone, really, but their influence on the foundations’ decisions – and thus their ability to direct the flow of philanthropic capital – would depend on their ability to build a reputation among their colleagues for knowledgeable, fair, and thorough evaluations of artistic proposals and work samples uploaded to the site.

This approach increases the number of people participating on the demand side of the artistic marketplace, and it explicitly directs philanthropic subsidy into the hands of experts. And there’s a third advantage as well: by consolidating discussions about which artists to support into one place, the model transforms curation into a team effort, avoiding needless duplication and saving everyone precious time.

I’m sure there are other approaches that might work too. But I do fervently believe we need to do something. As it stands, because the artistic marketplace isn’t functional, less affluent individuals get shut out, and we don’t get a chance as a society to benefit from their talents or perspectives. Thus, the first goal of artistic subsidy—cool art that we wouldn’t otherwise get to experience—is not fully met.

But if you’ll recall, the second purpose of artistic subsidy is to give people access to the arts who wouldn’t normally have it. And we’ve just said that access isn’t just about experiencing art as an audience member, it’s about getting to be in the show as well.

So if we can someday reform the artistic marketplace, we’ll actually be serving both goals of artistic subsidy at once – not to mention addressing the most important cultural equity issue of our time. Not bad, right? Let’s just hope that our government funding survives until then.

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Image by Flickr user Mordac

(This article originally appeared in 20UNDER40 anthologyⁱ edited by Edward P. Clapp, and has been republished with permission.)

Spurred on by major technological advances, the number of aspiring professional artists in the United States has reached unprecedented levels and will only continue to grow. The arts’ current system of philanthropic support is woefully underequipped to evaluate this explosion of content and nurture its most promising elements—but we believe that the solution to the crisis is sitting right in front of us. Philanthropic institutions, in their efforts to provide stewardship to a thriving arts community, have largely overlooked perhaps the single most valuable resource at their disposal: audience members.

We contend that by harnessing the talents of the arts’ most knowledgeable, committed, and ethical citizens and distributing funds according to the principles of what we have termed guided crowdsourcing, grantmaking institutions can increase public investment in and engagement with the arts, increase the diversity and vibrancy of art accessible to consumers, and ensure a more meritocratic distribution of resources. We envision an online platform by which a foundation may crowdsource philanthropic decisions across a wide-ranging network of aficionados, aspiring critics, artists, and curious minds, bolstering its capacity to give fair consideration to the full range of artistic talent available and ensure that the most promising voices are heard.

* * *

I. Choking on the Fire Hose: The Arts’ Capacity Catastrophe

In 2009, a play I directed off-off-Broadway was one of the best reviewed shows in New York at any level. It got the kind of reception that you’re told means your career will start to take off. The talent pool is so huge and the number of spots for artists so small, though, that even my really well reviewed, lines-around-the-block show doesn’t really help. I got paid $250 for six weeks of work on that show, and I made one connection with [an off-Broadway theatre]. If I am lucky (and that means really lucky, they have a lot of artists who they develop), in 3-5 years they will produce a show of mine. If they do, my pay for whatever mythical show that might be would probably be between three and five thousand dollars, and it would be for a project I had probably been working on and off on for several years. I’m in the process of leaving pursuing professional theatre to only focus on projects I care about because both the financial realities and the lifestyle created by those realities is not one I want to subject myself, my upcoming marriage, or my (a couple years down the road) child to.¹

—Theater Director, age 30

An Embarrassment of Riches

The muse works feverishly in the 21st century. In the United States, more than 2 million working artists identify their primary occupation as an arts job, and another 300,000 or so earn secondary income from the arts.² Yet those numbers only hint at a far bigger phenomenon: the ranks of those who create art, whether or not they earn any money from it, have ballooned to some 20 million adults in 2008.³ Many of those in this latter category fall under the rubric of what Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller have called “Pro-Ams,” serious amateurs and quasi-professionals who “have a strong sense of vocation; use recognized public standards to assess performance; …[and] produce non-commodity products and services” while “spend[ing] a large share of their disposable income supporting their pastimes.”⁴ Thanks to historically inexpensive production and distribution technology, more artistic products can reach more people more easily than ever before: as of January 2009, for example, users were uploading the equivalent of 86,000 full-length movies to YouTube every week.

The human brain—not to mention the human lifespan—simply cannot accommodate a considered appreciation for so many contenders for its attention. Even if a music lover kept his headphones on for every minute of every day for an entire year, he wouldn’t be able to listen to more than an eighth of the 115,000 albums that were released just in the United States in 2008.⁵ Because we do not possess the capacity to give equal time to every artistic product that might come our way, we must rely on shortcuts. We may look for reviews and ratings of the latest movies before we decide which ones we’d like to see. We often let personal relationships guide our decisions about what art we allow into our lives. And we continually rely on the distribution systems through which we experience art—museums, galleries, radio stations, television networks, record labels, publishing houses, etc.—to narrow the field of possibilities for us so that we don’t have to spend all of our energies searching for the next great thing.

Every time we outsource these curatorial faculties to someone else, we are making a rational and perfectly defensible choice. And yet every time we do so, we contribute to a system in which those who have already cornered the market in the attention economy are the only ones in a position to reap its rewards.

The Arts’ Dirty Secret

We regard the market’s lack of capacity to evaluate all the available art as a systemic and rapidly worsening problem in the arts today. Artists take time to learn their craft and capture attention; while the market may support an “up-and-coming” artist to maturity if she is lucky, making the transition to “up-and-coming” requires nurturing that the market will not provide. Before an artist becomes well known, the “market” she encounters is not the market of consumers but rather the market for access to consumers. This market is controlled by a small number of gatekeepers—e.g., agents, journalists, literary managers, venue owners—who each face the same capacity problems described above. Even the most dedicated and hardworking individuals could not possibly keep up with the sheer volume of material demanding to be evaluated.

This tremendous competition for gatekeepers’ attention frequently forces aspiring artists into a position of having to assume considerable financial risk to have even a shot at being noticed. An increasing number are receiving pre-professional training in their work; degrees awarded in the visual and performing arts jumped an astonishing 51% between 1998 and 2007.⁶ Others are starting their own organizations; the number of registered 501(c)(3) arts and culture nonprofits rose 42% in the past ten years.⁷

Yet all of this increased training and activity comes at a steep price, one all too often borne by the artist herself. Master’s degrees at top institutions can set her back as much as $50,000 per year; internships that could provide key industry connections are frequently unpaid. Artists in the field have been known to incur crippling consumer debt in pursuit of their dreams; the award-winning film documentary Spellbound, for example, was made possible because the co-creators maxed out some 14 credit cards to finance production. Indeed, a daunting investment of direct expense and thousands of hours of time not spent earning a living are virtual requirements to develop the portfolio and reputation necessary to translate ability into success. However one defines artistic talent, it is clear that talent alone is not enough to enable an artist to support herself through her work.

It’s not just those with education debt that have a hard time being a full-time artist, but really anyone without a safety net. I know I can count on one hand the number of composers I know in our age bracket whose parents didn’t pay for their undergraduate education (at least the vast majority of it).⁸

—Composer, age 27

If traditional gatekeepers lack the capacity to identify and provide critical early support to artistic entrepreneurs with little pedigree but plenty of potential, there is a real concern that to compete for serious and ongoing recognition in the arts is an entitlement of the already privileged. For a sector of society that often justifies philanthropic and public subsidy by purporting to celebrate diverse voices and build bridges between people who see the world in very different ways, this is a grave problem.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Grantee

Grantmaking institutions have a critical role to play in the market for access. Grants represent a very different kind of support from sales of tickets, stories, or sculptures. They may prove crucial for demonstrating proof-of-concept for a new venture—or simply for the development of a style, portfolio, and audience. Most important, they provide a temporary financial cushion that can allow the artist-entrepreneur to manifest her true vision rather than see it continually undermined by scarcity of equipment, materials, staffing, or time. They can make the difference in production values that ensures a serious reception from critical eyes and ears, and allow the artist an opportunity to use time that might otherwise need to be spent earning income to perfect and promote her work. In short, grants are a seemingly ideal vehicle through which to address the fundamental inequities created by the pinched market for access.

Sonically, anything you do is going to be compared to established artists whose studio budget has more zeros on the end of it than yours. And the sonic quality of the recording itself is often the first thing critics (and listeners) hear and respond to.⁹

—Jazz Musician, age 34

Sadly, the lack of evaluative capacity biases the philanthropic market for the arts just as it skews the commercial market. In a perfect world, foundation and agency employees would have the time and money to find grantees by continually seeking out and experiencing art in its natural habitat. In the real world, a notoriously small number of staffers at a given foundation or panel of experts from the community is often hard pressed simply to review all of the art that comes through the door.

Not surprisingly, then, grantmakers take defensive measures to protect against being overwhelmed by an inundation of requests. First, they explicitly narrow their scope through eligibility restrictions. Nearly half of foundations that support the arts refuse to accept unsolicited applications at all, and even those that do frequently consider applications only for particular art forms, geographic regions, types of artist, or types of projects.¹⁰ Until 2009, to cite an especially dramatic example, the Judith Rothschild Foundation in New York only made “grants to present, preserve, or interpret work of the highest aesthetic merit by lesser-known, recently deceased American [visual] artists.” Many grant programs additionally refuse to consider organizations without a minimum performance history or a minimum budget level, and a majority will not award monies directly to individuals, for-profit entities, or unincorporated groups.

Funders also narrow their scope implicitly through their selection process. The selection is usually made by some combination of the institution’s staff, its board of directors, and outside experts called in for the purpose (often in the form of grant panels).  Because so few individuals are involved in the decision-making process, triage strategies are unavoidable. Application reading may be divided up among the panel or staff, with the result that only one person ever reads any given organization’s entire proposal. When work samples are involved, artists’ fates can be altered forever on the basis of a five-minute (or shorter) reception of their work.

These coping mechanisms are perfectly understandable, given the sheer volume of art produced and imagined. But the unfortunate result is that institutional money is distributed with hardly more fairness than commercial money—and this is especially troublesome because of institutional grantmakers’ power beyond their purses as outsourced curators of other funding streams.  After all, for most individual donors and consumers alike, the art that they even have a chance to encounter is likely to be art that has already passed the muster of multiple professional gatekeepers. The capacity problem that hampers grantmakers’ ability to choose the most promising artists in an equitable way thus compounds itself as it reverberates through the rest of the artistic ecosystem.

The shortage of capacity and its consequences on the diversity, liveliness, and brilliance of the arts world are not going away. With the proliferation of digital distribution networks making it easier than ever to put creative work in the public eye, the defensive mechanisms that funders employ to limit intake are only going to become more and more strained. A solution is needed, fast. Fortunately, there is a cheap, practical, and responsible way for institutions to better cope with their lack of evaluative capacity: they can use crowdsourcing to harness the passion and expertise of a broader range of people dedicated to the arts.

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II. Calling for Backup: Crowdsourcing (to) the Rescue

Typically, institutions select the members of their staffs and grant panels on the basis of passion for and experience with the arts, on the theory that these qualities promote discerning judgments about the merit of applicants. But such traits are by no means limited to this narrow group. Tapping the thousands of dedicated and knowledgeable devotees of specific art forms who engage in robust discussion of the arts every day would allow foundations and agencies to go a long way towards addressing their own capacity problems—and towards opening the distribution of arts philanthropy to a broader range of deserving artists.

Our proposal draws inspiration from the phenomenon of crowdsourcing, which is the practice of outsourcing some function to the public or a significant part of it. Crowdsourcing has its roots in the open-source software movement, which designed and built complex software through the collaboration of anyone with the time, interest, and ability to contribute to a project. The best known example of this practice may be Wikipedia, which draws on the knowledge and editorial acumen of a huge pool of often anonymous volunteers to create a crowdsourced encyclopedia. Rather than relying on a handful of experts, crowdsourcing enlists dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people to do the work—and, in its purest form, to ensure the quality of the end result. The following pages explore some of the ways the commercial and philanthropic sectors have deployed crowdsourcing to direct money to worthy causes, to harness dispersed talent, and to build community.

Directing Donations

Online philanthropy markets that allow individual donors to contribute to charitable causes and micro-entrepreneurs around the world—websites like Kiva, DonorsChoose, Modest Needs, and GlobalGiving—illustrate the practice of crowdsourcing funding decisions across a large number of donors acting independently. Some of these websites aggregate small donations to fund larger projects using a mechanism for voting with dollars. For example, at Modest Needs, donors purchase points that can be allocated to specific, prequalified projects described on the site (such as the cost of a replacement water heater for a single mother). When a project has received enough donor points, the amount requested is sent to the applicant.

Similar online giving models have been employed at a smaller scale in the arts. For example, ArtistShare allows “fans to show appreciation for their favorite [musical] artist by funding their recording projects in exchange for access to the creative process, limited edition recordings, VIP access to recording sessions, and even credit listing on the CD.” Kickstarter allows individual donors to make pledges to creative projects—in the arts, journalism, design, and technology—with defined funding targets and timing. If enough pledges are received by the deadline, the project is funded; otherwise, the funds are returned to the donor.

These online mini-markets facilitate individual support for artists by providing donors more direct access to the artistic process and environment. In cases where the projects funded can be appreciated online, supporting them is not so different from buying a ticket. An alternative model of crowdsourced philanthropy that has gained more recent prominence allows individuals to exert influence on how other people’s philanthropic contributions are spent. Two recent major initiatives by corporate foundations employ this “voting without dollars” concept. JP Morgan Chase’s Chase Community Giving program gave away $5 million in early 2010 to nonprofit organizations based primarily on the votes of Facebook users. Similarly, PepsiCo diverted the $20 million it might have spent on ads during the 2010 Super Bowl to the Pepsi Refresh Project, a new monthly initiative that invites “ideas that will have a positive impact” to compete for grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. Visitors to the site vote to determine the grant winners.

Aggregating Ability

In the examples above, the “crowd” need have no particular expertise to participate fully. (Indeed, one frequent criticism of these models is that a “one person, one vote” or social-network-based approach to philanthropy can all too easily degenerate into a popularity contest with little connection to the merit of the potential recipients.) But crowdsourcing has also proved very effective at harnessing dispersed talent. In the for-profit design world, Threadless, an online T-shirt company, produces designs created and voted on by users of the website. The winning designers receive cash prizes, and the shirts nearly always sell out, generating $17 million in revenue for Threadless in 2006.¹¹

Philanthropic foundations, too, have begun to take advantage of the expertise of passionate people from across the country and the world. Philoptima allows would-be donors to offer “design prizes” to anyone who proposes an innovative solution to a problem chosen by the donor, and “implementation prizes” to any non-profit that submits a promising plan to carry out the solution in its community. (The first design prize on this young site was offered by a new grantmaker seeking to create “a discipline-wide typology of the environmental sector.”) Since 2006, InnoCentive has partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to give global development organizations access to high-quality R&D resources; Rockefeller selects the nonprofits and contributes award money to a network of scientists to solve a specific “challenge” posed by the nonprofit.

Building Community

By engaging and connecting a broad cross-section of individuals, crowdsourcing also has the potential to create a robust community and locus for lively discussion. The Yelp Elite Squad, chosen by Yelp employees from among the popular local search site’s most active contributors, benefit from invitations to exclusive offline events in addition to greater exposure for their reviews. In the nonprofit sector, several websites that make grants emphasize the creation of a forum for the discussion of social issues. Ashoka’s Changemakers initiative is a “community of action” that collaborates on solutions through discussion forums, issue groups, and competitions that reward innovative problem solving. Another site, Netsquared, connects nonprofits, grant-makers, and individual social entrepreneurs both on- and offline to foster social change. The organization sponsors in-person meetings for social innovators and engages its community in a grants program for social action projects. The finalists of its grant-making challenges are shaped by these discussions and chosen by community vote.

Putting it All Together: Guided Crowdsourcing

The very best examples of crowdsourced community—the models that illustrate the potential of the concept at its fullest—augment the tools of crowdsourcing with just enough top-down hierarchy to promote an environment of shared opportunity and responsibility. We call this model guided crowdsourcing. So far, this technique has not been explored in depth by foundations, arts-focused or otherwise, but it has been developed robustly elsewhere.

As mentioned above, Wikipedia is perhaps the oldest and most famous large-scale example of crowdsourcing on the web. While the site is most often identified with the crowdsourced labor used to generate its principal product, some 14 million encyclopedia entries in 272 languages, Wikipedia is also home to a fiercely dedicated user community that has self-organized into a meritocracy. Though the site is open to editing and revision by anyone, a small army of experienced volunteer “administrators” boast additional powers, such as the ability to make edits about living people. These users are chosen by “bureaucrats,” who themselves are selected by community consensus, and disputes among editors are resolved by a volunteer-run Arbitration Committee. These responsibilities not only keep the community’s most passionate members fully engaged; it also puts them to work to improve the community and its project.

Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign used guided crowdsourcing to establish a seamless continuum between motivated volunteers and professional staff. As part of routine campaign operations, professional field organizers would assign new volunteers, who had been recruited online, progressively more difficult tasks to test their fitness for roles carrying greater responsibility. As the campaign progressed, many early volunteers rose to full-time staff positions, providing a clear path of upward mobility for the most dedicated and effective community members. This fusing of top-down leadership with grassroots openness enabled the campaign to achieve its own capacity breakthrough by establishing a viable presence in districts, towns, and whole states that had been considered off-limits by previous Democratic contenders for executive office.

Taking its cue from these successful efforts to shape a broad-based grassroots effort with gentle guidance from the top, a foundation could invent an entirely new model of arts philanthropy—one that matches the explosion of artistic content with an explosion of critical acumen to evaluate it.

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III. Philanthropy’s Finest: The Pro-Am Program Officer Paradigm

We propose that a grantmaking institution supplement its work with guided crowdsourcing by creating an online grants management platform that will also serve as a social network, multimedia showcase, and marketplace for individual donors. By redirecting some portion of its grantmaking budget through this website, the foundation or agency can leverage the critical faculties of passionate and thoughtful arts lovers to address its capacity problem. A sophisticated set of algorithms will empower the website’s community to identify the most qualified and dedicated voices among its own ranks and elevate them to increased levels of influence on a continually renewing basis. In this way, those whose artistic judgments carry the most weight will have earned that status from their peers and colleagues.

How It Works

The process begins when an artist or artist-driven organization (nonprofit or otherwise) applies for a general operating support grant from the sponsoring foundation’s arts program—all forms of art are welcome. Rather than being sent to a program officer for review, the applicant’s materials—proposal narrative, samples of the artist’s work, a list of upcoming events or classes open to the public—will be posted online. This information will be incorporated into each applicant’s public profile on the site.

Members of the public will also be invited to create and maintain profiles. Once registered, they can view materials submitted by grant contenders and share reactions ranging from one-line comments to in-depth critiques. In order to jumpstart the conversation, ensure an initial critical mass of reviewers, and strike a constructive and intelligent tone, the foundation should reach out in advance to knowledgeable arts citizens (perhaps including some of the very gatekeepers mentioned above who might otherwise serve on grant panels) to encourage their participation on the site. The goal is to engage a broad range of art lovers in a robust conversation about the proposals under review—and about the arts more generally—thereby ensuring a better-considered distribution of grant money.

Of course, not all commentators will make equally valuable contributions to the discussion. Just like art, providing critical analysis and consistently thoughtful, informed, and credible feedback requires considerable skill and practice. In short, we want to be able to open up the process to anyone without having to open it to everyone. What qualities would we desire in those who influence resource allocation decisions in the arts? Certainly we would ask that our critics be knowledgeable in the field they review. We would also want them to be fair—not holding ideological grudges against artists or letting personal vendettas influence their judgment. We’d want them to be open-minded, not afraid to dive into unfamiliar or challenging territory when the time comes. And finally, we’d want them to be thoughtful: able and willing to appreciate nuance, and mindful of how what they are experiencing fits into a larger whole.

Technology now allows us to systematically identify and reward these qualities in a reviewer. On the website, a reviewer increases her “reputation score” by winning the respect of the community. Each user can rate individual comments and reviews based on the qualities outlined above; higher ratings increase a reviewer’s standing. To keep the conversation current and make room for new voices, the ratings of older reviews and comments will count for less over time. The reputation algorithm can also reward seeking out unreviewed proposals and commenting on a breadth of submissions. A strict honor code will require users to disclose any personal or professional connections to a project they review, with expulsion the penalty for violators. Reviews suspected of being at odds with this policy can be flagged for investigation by any site user, and the site’s administrators will take action where deemed appropriate.

Every quarter, the professional staff of the foundation will review the reputation scores of community members and choose a crop of users to elevate to Curator status. Selection will be based primarily on peer reviews, but the staff will have final say and responsibility over who is given this privilege. A clear set of guiding principles will be developed and shared to ensure that the choice is as fair and transparent as possible. Curators receive an allowance of “points” to distribute to various projects on the site, usually limited to the discipline or area of the Curator’s expertise. Curators are identified by (real) name to other users so as to foster a sense of accountability, and their profiles show how they have chosen to distribute their points. So long as a Curator maintains a minimum reputation score by contributing new high-quality reviews, he will continue to receive new points each quarter.

As a project accumulates points from Curators, it receives more prominent attention on the site. It might show up earlier in search results, appear in lists of recommendations presented to users who have written reviews of similar projects, or be highlighted on the home page. But since Curators maintain their reputation (and aspiring Curators gain their reputation) in part by reviewing proposals that have failed to attract comments from others, the attention never becomes too concentrated on a lucky few.

When it comes time to award the grants each quarter, the collective judgment of the Curators is used as the groundwork for the decision-making process. This approach ensures that organizations cannot win awards simply by bombarding their mailing lists with requests for votes, because the crowd exerts its influence indirectly through Curators selected on the basis of sustained, high-quality contributions. While it is still ultimately the responsibility of the foundation’s board of directors to choose recipients, we anticipate that adjustments will be made only in exceptional cases—that, essentially, the heavy lifting will have been done by the crowd.

Meanwhile, the very best contributors—the stars of the site—may be engaged by the foundation as paid Editors. Editors are part-time, contract employees who are sent out on assignment to see and review specific public events in their area associated with proposals on the site. Their reviews are highlighted prominently to give their expert work maximum exposure. This system allows the foundation to send trusted reviewers to distant events without having to pay exorbitant travel costs; meanwhile, the writer receives a financial incentive for exceptional ongoing service to the site and the arts community.

Of course, artists, administrators, and contributors won’t be the site’s only audience. Since work samples will represent an important part of many applications, the platform will also be a convenient way for the public to discover new artists and ensembles, guided by the judgments of a myriad of devotees. Each proposal uploaded will give passersby the opportunity to contribute their own money in addition to any comments they may have. As such, the site has the potential to become the first effective online donor marketplace for the arts. The sponsoring foundation could even give donors the option of tacking on a small “tip” to each donation to help defray the site’s (minimal) operating costs.

It is worth emphasizing that, despite the many roles website users will play in the grant process, they will not replace the foundation staff. One or more program officers will need to be in charge of the website and accountable to the board of directors for its successful operation. They will oversee the website to ensure that the ongoing discussion remains frank, thoughtful, and passionate—but not vicious or counterproductive. Such a desirable culture will not develop automatically; fostering it will mean setting and continually revising rules and procedures, reminding users of the funding priorities established by the foundation and engaging in dialogue about those priorities when appropriate, selecting Curators wisely on the basis of peer reviews, expelling users who violate the standards of the community, and developing a method to evaluate and report on the grants made through the site, both to the board and back to the users. Furthermore, we do not anticipate that this model would or should supplant a foundation’s or the field’s traditional grantmaking entirely. “Leadership”-level awards to major service organizations or institutions with a national profile do not face the same kinds of capacity challenges as grants to smaller producing and presenting entities or individual artists, and may require a greater level of expertise in evaluating factors such as financial health and long-term sustainability than a nonprofessional program officer may be able to provide. Thus, we see this approach as one element in a broader portfolio of strategies to optimally support the arts.

Few good ideas come to fruition without resources, and this one is no exception. The platform should be sponsored by a major foundation or institution with a substantial initial investment (we suggest at least $1 million) to signal seriousness of purpose and ensure a meaningful level of support to the artists and organizations involved. Although it would be possible to pilot the system in a limited geographical area or with only certain disciplines at first, the concept can only reach its true potential if a certain critical mass is achieved—enough to make it worth artists’ while to ensure representation on the site and worth reviewers’ while to contribute their time and curiosity to making it thrive.

We anticipate that this system will be highly sustainable. Once the infrastructure is in place, the website will be inexpensive to maintain, and may well prove cheaper than more traditional methods of distributing funds. The powerful incentives provided to both artists (access to a source of funding coupled with real-time feedback on their proposals) and reviewers (the opportunity to gain notoriety, influence, and even material compensation for doing something they love) should be sufficient to maintain interest on all sides.

Finally, the greatest beauty of the site is that there is ample opportunity to experiment with various approaches until just the right formula is found. If the original algorithm for calculating reputation scores turns out to be ineffective, it can be changed. If the rules against reviewing the work of friends turn out to be too draconian, they can be adjusted. If the foundation decides it wants to give Curators actual dollars to distribute instead of abstract points, that is an easy fix. Meanwhile, if the system proves successful, the sponsoring foundation could invite other funders to contribute their resources to the pool, making even deeper impact possible.

Figure I: Program theory for a guided crowdsourcing platform for the arts.

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Summing Up

Our guided crowdsourcing model is designed to integrate many virtues of existing crowdsourcing concepts: giving small-scale projects access to new pools of capital; aggregating the expertise and labor of users; and creating a social space for strangers who share a common interest. When combined and applied to the arts, this triple crowdsourcing carries several special advantages:

• First, it addresses the lack of evaluative capacity in the philanthropic market, enabling a more meritocratic distribution of grants and thus a more vibrant and socioeconomically diverse artistic community.
• Second, because of the structural role of grantmaking institutions, the website indirectly addresses the lack of capacity in the commercial market: the path to commercial success will be made a little less arbitrary through the work of our volunteer curators.
• Third, the robust community we hope to facilitate will double as a feedback mechanism for artists and artist-driven organizations, enhancing the production of art even before grants are awarded.
• Fourth, the site will serve as an incubator for critical talent, identifying and empowering new commentators who can establish a reputation as informed adjudicators, while providing a new outlet for more experienced voices at a time when the job market for critics is rapidly shrinking.
• Fifth, by rewarding contributions that can serve as examples of critical analysis at its best, the site will encourage a more thoughtful and articulate public conversation about the arts. In so doing, it facilitates the establishment of a new breed of Pro-Am curators to match the convergence of amateur and professional in artistic creation and performance.

We expect that, if successful, this model will result in a more equitable distribution of philanthropic funds that always takes into account the actual work product rather than reputation alone; be based on the opinions of acknowledged leaders in the community who continually earn their standing among their peers; and fairly consider the efforts of far more artists and artist-driven organizations than would ever be possible otherwise. If really successful, the model could actually increase the size of the philanthropic market by providing what amounts to the first functioning donor marketplace for artists and arts organizations.

While guided crowdsourcing cannot guarantee all aspiring artists a living, by empowering a new and unprecedentedly large group of thoughtful consumers of the arts to help decide whose dreams deserve to be transformed into reality, it can provide more equality of opportunity than could ever be possible under the current status quo—and guarantee the rest of us richer artistic offerings than ever before.

It’s time to appoint the next generation of arts program officers: us.

* * *

NOTES:

i. Clapp, E. P., ed. 20UNDER40: Re-Inventing the Arts and Arts Education for the 21st Century. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010: 81-97.

1. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 21, 2010. All of the individuals whose views appear in this article are critically acclaimed emerging artists under 40 years of age, and are quoted with permission.

2. Gaquin, D. Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2008: 1; See also National Endowment for the Arts. Artists in a Year of Recession. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009, and; Davis, J. A. & Smith, T. W. General Social Surveys: 1972-2008. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 2009.

3. Williams, K. & Keen, D. 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009: 43.

4. Leadbeater, C. & Miller, P. The Pro-Am Revolution. London: DEMOS, 2004: 21-22.

5. This calculation is based on a conservative estimate of 40 minutes in length per album.

6. Kusher, R. J. & Cohen, R. National Arts Index 2009. Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts, 2009: 62.

7. Ibid: 49.

8. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 20, 2010.

9. Anonymous. Personal communication. February 22, 2010.

10. Foundation Center. “Foundation Directory Online” (n.d.). As of April 2010, only 1.3% of arts funders in the database accept applications with no geographic restrictions.

11. Howe, J. “Join the Crowd.” The Independent (London), (September 2, 2008): 2.

• McKinsey has an interesting report out on philanthropic prizes. (pdf)
• WolfBrown has been rather on fire lately with systematic arts analysis. First, this cultural action plan for the Richmond, VA region is a comprehensive policy prescription for creative vitality. I hope to accomplish something similar, though on a smaller scale, for the New Haven region as the final project for one of my independent studies. The Richmond plan itself (skip the exec summary, it misses much of the good stuff) is a wonderfully thorough document, with specific time frames, cost estimates, and model examples included with every recommendation. It’s an impressive achievement and one can only hope that it will find a receptive audience with the appropriate decisionmakers. The other publication of note is the Philadelphia-based Cultural Engagement Index, which measures various types of community participation in the arts over time. The CEI was commissioned by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, which apparently plans to do one of these every year (or at least regularly) until 2020, with the goal of doubling arts participation in the region by that time. More on the CEI at smArts and Artful Manager.
• Social entrepreneurship in the arts? The Yale School of Music has established an unusual grant fund for alums who have started music-related projects or nonprofit organizations. The first-round winners include Createquity reader Tina Lee Hadari, with whom I had a lovely conversation a few weeks ago about her string quartet and music mentoring program called Music Haven.
• Missed this last time around, but Allison Fine wrote a follow-up to her arts and social capital post from a couple weeks back.
• Might the Fed help with nonprofit capacity building? Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus want to do just that:
  

  The Senate Finance Committee’s top two members — Democrat Max Baucus and Republican Charles E. Grassley — teamed up today to introduce legislation that would provide money to help small and medium-sized charities get training and management assistance.

  The legislation, introduced as an amendment to a national-service bill now being debated by the Senate, would provide $25-million over five years to a “Nonprofit Capacity Building Program” within the Corporation for National and Community Service.

  The amendment would “strengthen small charities around our country, especially where resources are scarce,” Senator Baucus of Montana, who chairs the finance committee, told his colleagues on the Senate floor. He said it would allow groups to get training, for example, in how to manage their finances, raise money, fill out tax forms, work with new technology, or plan long-term budgets.

  UPDATE: And it looks like it’s passed, as of today. Woohoo! See here and here.

• There’s now such a thing called a city’s Walk Score, measuring how easy it is to access life’s amenities without sticking the key in the ignition. Though the methodology has issues, it’s still an interesting exercise. What I find most interesting is that the list of top 10 cities for walkability bears an absolutely uncanny resemblance to the cities with the most active and interesting arts scenes:
  

  1. San Francisco
  2. New York
  3. Boston
  4. Chicago
  5. Philadelphia
  6. Seattle
  7. Washington, D.C.
  8. Long Beach, Calif.
  9. Los Angeles
  10. Portland

  Switch out Long Beach for Minneapolis, and that list packs a formidable punch.

• Barry Hessenius has a nice interview with Janet Brown, new executive director of Grantmakers in the Arts.
• This is what the future of journalism looks like.
• I’ve been writing recently about executive compensation in the nonprofit sector, and as if on cue, so does the Wall Street Journal.
• Speaking of leadership in the sector, should board members be actively recruited by search firms? Frankly, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea, considering what an important role board members play in a nonprofit organization and how difficult it is to engage them properly.
• Ever wanted to figure out how to make cool graphics without too much effort? Seth Godin has some tips for you.
• Two people whose writings on the NEA I criticized last month, Greg Sandow and Leonard Jacobs, are back at it (see: Exhibit A, Exhibit B). Now that I read them more carefully, I am struck by how they are taking diametrically opposite positions from each other. Leonard says we should rely exclusively on economic arguments for supporting the arts, because “there will be a backlash against artists and arts funding coming from the right-wing and it’s going to be as intense as it was during the NEA wars of the early 1990s.” Greg says don’t sweat the wingers, they’re never going to be convinced anyway; instead, focus on the people in the middle, and the way to do that is by pushing arts’ intrinsic value. (Or at least, that’s what I think he’s going to say; he hasn’t gotten to the good stuff yet.) Frankly, I don’t understand why it has to be an either/or proposition. I’ve felt for a while that the separation between intrinsic and instrumental arts benefits is a little artificial. Why not accept and own them both, and tailor our arguments according to the specific group — or even person — we’re trying to reach? With due respect to Greg, I can tell you from personal experience that the analytically-focused people in my program are a lot more receptive to economic arguments about the arts than they are to wishy-washy expressions of “well, don’t you see, they’re just great!” But on the other hand, I do think it’s possible, to a degree, to measure intrinsic reactions to the arts — and there, I think, we can get somewhere with people who are less receptive to the economic arguments. (As for the right wing, I think that the best way to ballast against the hypothesized coming storm is to put the arts in as strong a position as we can, now, while we have the chance. And if the storm never comes, then so much the better.)
• Yale SOM’s former Dean Joel Podolny weighs in on whether business schools should bear some responsibility for the financial crisis. A very interesting column, but this comment from Aaron James is what rocked my world (emphasis mine):
  

  Business schools teach us that goods and services are good for society, that when people buy and sell things they increase their personal utility. The notion comes from basic economic theory and it finds its way into every business discipline. It justifies commerce by identifying a social contribution: value created through trade. In this convenient theory, every transaction makes the world better; every profitable business contributes to society simply by virtue of its existence.

  Economists will tell you that this theory is too simple, that it ignores externalities like pollution and omnipresent realities like government regulation. But somehow these complications don’t find their way into dominant business logic or core business curricula. Somehow MBAs get stuck with a remedial economics that ignores environmental and social costs and regards regulation with disdain.

  Is it any wonder that managers seek unregulated markets and pursue them blind to the consequences? Is it any wonder that leaders act purely in their own self-interest? They’ve been taught that doing so is the best way to contribute to society. They’ve been taught that doing so is their job.

  This crisis will not be solved by the addition of ethics courses. Too often, such courses perpetuate the same logic described above. If we are serious about teaching responsibility in business education, we need a curriculum that reflects the real world context in which business operates, including its social and environmental consequences and the necessity of regulation for maintaining competitive and transparent markets. Instead of training MBA’s to lead in a hypothetical world of simplistic economic theory, let’s train them to lead in our world. It’s time to get real.