ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• This is pretty much the most creative cultural tourism gambit ever.
• The Michigan House approved a plan to contribute $195 million in state money to the “grand bargain” to save the Detroit Institute of Arts from the city’s creditors; this money would join the $366 million pledged by foundations, $100 million pledged by the museum itself, and possible funding from union groups. Some creditors still reject the deal, although the judge overseeing the proceedings has refused their request to remove and appraise every painting in the collection.
• “National and local governments don’t take decisions about arts funding based on evidence, however convincing it is.” The Guardian argues that our only hope for better public funding is to create “the kind of solid public support that makes cuts politically dangerous or, even better, unthinkable” through closer ties to local communities.
• Score one victory for the arts lobby: after a vigorous campaign by organizations such as the League of American Orchestras, the Obama administration has carved out an exception for musical instruments in its new ivory regulations.
• Meanwhile, the FCC is accepting public comments on its latest proposed net neutrality rules, which would seem to allow internet providers to strike deals with content sites for faster service – deals akin to those that already exist with tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Given the Commission’s recent flip-flopping, there’s no telling where this will lead, and we may not know until after the next election. One thing we do know: the idea of America itself is at stake.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Handler will be the new executive director of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, sponsor of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Handler is currently the program director at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
• Moy Eng, former director of both the Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program and Palo Alto’s Community School of Music and Arts, has been announced as the first executive director of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a real estate services provider for artists and arts organizations.
• John Horn, of the Los Angeles Times, will be the new host for an arts an entertainment program on KPCC, Southern California Public Radio.

IN THE FIELD

• Just a year after losing its highly respected director Deborah Cullinan to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts has just announced a major restructuring that will result in the closure of several programs and the layoffs of key staff. And NPR is cancelling “Tell Me More,” a little-heard daily talk show aimed at minority audiences, and eliminating 28 jobs. The National Association of Black Journalists blames lackluster promotion efforts.
• The San Diego Opera lives! But along with a full 2015 season, the company has announced layoffs including 13 full-time staff. And now the auditor is calling.
• New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning to gut-renovate its modern and contemporary wing to make room for a major gift of Cubist paintings and potentially create a new entrance from Central Park. Is this another case of museum hubris?
• The plan to dissolve the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been finalized, with the collection going to the National Gallery of Art and other museums it chooses and the building and design school going to George Washington University.
• When you think of St. Louis, do you think of jazz? A $10 million expansion to Jazz St. Louis—to be called the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz—hopes to make the two synonymous, establishing St. Louis as one of the top hubs for jazz in the world.
• Lower Manhattan is home to a new performing arts school. Thanks to three years of significant growth, Pace University’s performing arts program will become a school within Pace’s liberal arts college.
• Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Jonathan Safran Foer on behalf of all of those without enough to read, Chipotle cups will now be adorned with short texts by literary luminaries. Not everyone is enthusiastic.
• Those Colorado Symphony mile-high marijuana concerts are now invitation-only, due to an overlooked regulation banning toking up in public. The Denver Post’s music critic went and got blasted – I mean, had a blast.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• AT&T announced that it intends to buy DirecTV. The “media chessboard is moving more than it has in the past decade,” with Comcast’s February purchase of Time Warner cable and Sprint’s overtures to T-Mobile…
• … and reports that Apple is planning a major new foray into streaming music with an acquisition of Beats Audio and of co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, though something is holding up the deal.
• Nearly four years after announcing a name change, a new mission, and a new grantmaking strategy focused on impact, Cincinnati’s ArtsWave (formerly the Fine Arts Fund) seems to be seeing results. The united arts fund raised a record $12 million for its annual campaign this year, helped catalyze last year’s creation of a new multidisciplinary arts festival drawing national attention, and is starting to form strategic partnerships with non-arts funders. Retiring CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson deserves a lot of credit for seeing this transformation through.
• The Hewlett Foundation’s Fay Twersky defends the decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative as data-driven in the face of William Schambra’s accusation that a leadership change was the primary driver. Let’s hope this public debate doesn’t dissuade grantmakers from following Hewlett’s lead on transparency.
• The Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund has announced a new capitalization program, including its largest-ever grant of $200,000 to the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. The Fund created the program in response to research showing that even many of the city’s strongest arts groups were constrained by having only three months of financial cushion.

BIG IDEAS

• Is it time for foundations to embrace partisan politics instead of trying to remain above the fray? Writers for the Stanford Social Innovation Review think so. “Partisan conflict is not an external factor that advocates can work around,” they write. “It is the defining axis of American politics today, and funders must be unafraid to reckon with it.”
• The expansion of the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge – a promise to give away at least half of one’s fortune – to include billionaires from around the world raises questions about different cultural attitudes toward philanthropy (in China, public or transparent giving is eschewed) and about the relative merits of the Big Philanthropy model vs the more distributed community foundation model of giving.
• Arts entrepreneurship aficionados, look out: Barry’s Blog has a stellar lineup, uh, lined up for a weeklong blogathon on the topic starting…today!

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Academy of Sciences has hard numbers that show students learn better through hands-on activities than through lectures – at least when it comes to the sciences.
• Philanthropy Northwest reports on a year-long peer-learning project on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts involving 10 foundation CEOs in the region.
• Corporate giving is up again, according to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s annual tally.
• South Arts has released two research reports on arts education in the South. The first, a survey of nearly a third of all principals in the region, found among other things that Southern students have less access to visual arts and music than other American students but greater access to dance – with significant variation among Southern states. The second, case studies of nine strong arts education programs, found that the successful schools cultivated a shared vision of the arts, incorporated the arts into the core curriculum driven by state and national standards, and exposed students to working artists.
• Bringing the ability to make snazzy charts and tables to the masses, evaluators Stephanie Evergreen and Ann K. Emery have developed a data visualization checklist for the graphically challenged among us.
• In case you ever wondered about the correlation between per capita consumption of cheese and the number of people who die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets, Tyler Vigen has you covered.

• The New York Times reports on the state of Rhode Island’s disastrous investment in former Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios. Little Rhody gave Schilling a $75 million loan as an incentive to locate in the Ocean State, as part of a new Knowledge District in downtown Providence. Just two years later, 38 Studios went bankrupt and the state (for now) is left holding the bag. It’s a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to believe that investing in the creative economy is any kind of magic bullet – as with any investment opportunity, strong leadership and close oversight are paramount.
• The number of nonprofit organizations just continues to spiral out of control, and – wait, what? They actually dropped in 2012, for the second year in a row? Must…resist…pre-existing…narrative….

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• A little late on this one, but attorney and nonprofit executive Melissa Beck is the new CEO at the Educational Foundation of America. EFA has funded creative placemaking efforts around the country for the past few years.
• Barry Hessenius scores an interview with former ArtPlace director – and new Knight Foundation VP – Carol Coletta. I think this exchange encapsulates things well:
  

  Barry: What are your one or two big takeaway lessons from your stint at ArtPlace?

  Carol: …There is a piece of communication wisdom that I believe in deeply: Say one thing. Say it simply. Say it over and over.

  We tried our best to do that. People didn’t always like it, but we stuck to the path we originally carved out.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Great Woodruff Arts Center Million-Dollar Embezzlement Mystery has been solved. Amazingly, the perp was a maintenance worker.
• Dance music acts are getting paid royalties at a lower rate than other genres in the UK, according to The Guardian.
• I found this observation from Michael Kaiser’s weekly column of note: “I do believe that there will need to be some adjustment to cost structures, especially for the highest priced talent like guest soloists, conductors, choreographers, etc. I am already witnessing a softening in the fee demands of all but the most famous artists. (Not coincidentally, these fee reductions are coming at a time when European arts organizations are losing large amounts of their government funding and cannot afford to pay high fees either.)” Kaiser runs DC’s Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s largest performing arts presenters.

IN THE FIELD

• NPR’s All Things Considered ran a three-part series on arts education last week. The first story covers the Presidential Committee on the Arts and Humanities’s Turnaround Arts Initiative; the second examines James Catterall’s efforts to study creativity; and the third reports on Life Pieces, an after-school arts program in Washington, DC.
• National Arts Strategies has a 20-minute “video case study” with Springboard for the Arts regarding the latter’s Irrigate creative placemaking project.
• Boise dance company Trey McIntyre Project has begun selling its creative process to corporate clients. (Note that Pilobolus has been doing similar things for years.)
• Three Chicago performing ensembles are trying out a shared fundraising structure. The new group is called Creative Partners, and will spend a quarter of its time raising money for each constituent group and the last quarter pounding the pavement for the entire collaboration.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• If you missed Theatre Communications Group’s Audience (R)Evolution Learning Convening in Philadelphia earlier this year, Jim O’Quinn has a massive wrap-up for you (with pictures!).
• Steven Dawson shares his notes from the 2013 Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium at American University, and Efrain Gutierrez does the same for the Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy National Conference in Chicago.

RESEARCH CORNER

• I’m not exactly sure why Pacific Standard journalist Tom Jacobs seems to be doing a gigantic literature review of research on music and psychology (maybe he’s prepping for a book?), but I’m grateful for it. Here, he analyzes a study of anxiety and depression rates among college students who listen to heavy metal. In a related item, a Boston College study finds an association between after school arts activities and depression in teenagers. “Further widening the jock-artist divide, the study found that the teens least likely to become depressed are those involved exclusively in sports activities.” The usual causation vs. correlation caveats apply, of course.
• The NEA has announced its latest round of research grants, as well as a book coming out of last May’s arts and economic development convening that was organized in collaboration with the Brookings Institution.
• Grantmakers in the Art’s Janet Brown: “We’ve done an analysis of the financial health of arts groups in the twelve cities where we’ve presented our funders’ capitalization workshop…In some cities, mid-sized and major organizations have, on average, negative liquid net assets. This means, they don’t have a dime to pay the electric bill should money stop coming in the door today.”
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund, which helped GIA initially with its capitalization work, conducts an annual State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey. Rebecca Thomas analyzes the 2013 edition from an arts perspective.
• FSG has published a list of 27 indicators with which to track the project of so-called “backbone” organizations involved with Collective Impact efforts.
• The Ford Foundation has released the results of its 2012 Grantee Perception Report.

On Tuesday this week, Boston reawakened, with locals and visitors standing in support of one another after the tragic events at the Boston Marathon. Many beautiful things happened on Monday and Tuesday – people opened their homes to strangers who needed a place to stay, rushed to donate blood to Mass General Hospital, and joined forces to make sure everyone could contact their loved ones. Professional rescuers of all kinds did their jobs splendidly. People and businesses did their best to bring people together and offer them reassurance. I know of one bakery that handed out free cupcakes.

Both the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art opened free to the public on Tuesday. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which is not open on Tuesdays, was free on Wednesday. Each of them released a statement expressing sympathy for all those impacted by Monday’s events, but the MFA put it most succinctly: “MFA admission will be free today. We hope the Museum will be a place of respite for our community.” Interestingly, all three museums made more of an announcement on social media than their websites, and appear to have taken down the announcement on their websites at the day’s end. Their Facebook and Twitter followers responded with very appreciative comments, affirming the idea that people do seek solace in museums. One commenter said, “thank you for giving us a sanctuary.”

ICA by Vanderlin on Flickr

I don’t want to take advantage of a bad situation to make a point. If you are not comfortable reading about the administrative side of the response to the tragedy, here are some articles you may prefer: USA Today’s sampling of the kind things people did, a comedian’s serious response to what happened, and Boston.com’s list of ways to help.

For those still reading, I wanted to share one thing on my mind: making a museum free for a day is not free for the museum. While only about seven percent of the MFA’s revenue comes from admissions, adult tickets to the MFA are $25 per person, and that adds up. On average, the institution brings in $18,880 in ticket sales per day ($6,79700 in admissions revenue for 2013 /360 open days per year – data from their 2012 annual report). While museum visitation tends to vary highly by season, April is likely to be the midpoint, so an “average” day is probably more or less representative of what they would have made on April 16 if they had charged admission. The MFA essentially made a $19k donation to the city of Boston and to the community visiting for the marathon. Comparable data is not available for the ICA or the Gardner, because they report their ticket and program income together, but adult tickets are $15 at each institution, and that adds up too.

To me, the fact that these institutions opened their doors for free is a powerful argument that running nonprofits well cannot be done on a shoestring, break-even budget. While skeptics, and some funders, feel that lean budgets ensure that nonprofits are responsible with their money, nonprofits are actually more able to be responsible members of their communities when they have a robust budget. The institutions that offered free admission, with no way to have planned for Monday’s events, must have enough wiggle room in their budgets to withstand an unexpected loss in revenues, either permanently or until a donor or several respond with their own generosity. They may find that the goodwill they built was a good economic investment, or it may always be a loss on the balance sheet, but they did it anyway. The money may have come from risk capital or from building extra room in their budgets for seasonal ups and downs. Regardless of the mechanism, an institution constrained by a “lean” budget that constantly watching the bottom line would not have been able to afford to offer a spontaneous free day without its leaders wondering if it would jeopardize their ability to make payroll at some point down the road.

Whatever else you may say about how nonprofits run their finances, what the MFA, ICA, and Gardner did was commendable. They participated in a community effort to support everyone affected by the events, directly and indirectly, and gave people a place to go be with their neighbors and reflect on the beauty in the world.

Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium | photo by Just_Bryan

The U.S. has now entered an era of extremely expensive sports stadiums: the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY cost a cool billion dollars for example,while the new Vikings stadium in Minneapolis, MN is anticipated to be similarly priced. While reading up on the professional sports billion dollar building boom I couldn’t help but notice a number of parallels to the building boom in the arts from 1994 to 2008, as studied and documented by the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center.

But does new and big automatically lead to better for an organization and its patrons? For a large renovation or construction project to succeed, certain parameters and rationales have to be put in place from the beginning, such as a clear connection to the mission of the organization and strong, continuous leadership throughout the life of the project. Yet time and time again, it seems that these large capital campaign projects are launched without any adherence to methodologies that have previously led to success.

As Dane Stangler points out at Growthology, renovations to old stadiums or the construction of brand new stadiums often result in more costs than benefits for the communities in which they are housed. These new, large-scale projects come with promises of low real expenses  to local governments, as with the stadium in Indianapolis which officials promised could be paid for through a negligible tax hike. In fact, cities often construct generous, even risky, debt structures in order to help underwrite these structures, despite the fact that there is not a definite assurance of profit, or even repayment. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that “unrealistic revenue projections and the skyrocketing construction cost of sports stadiums, especially football behemoths, is making it increasingly hard for the facilities to generate enough cash to keep pace with expenses, namely debt service.” This can result in higher ticket prices, higher taxes, and depleted services for consumers and non-consumers alike. Stangler notes that public subsidization of stadiums often shifts costs from wealthy owners and players to visitors and tourists, who may not even be visiting the city for sports-related reasons.

In spite of the obvious negatives, legislators and franchise owners argue, perhaps rightfully so, that they need state-of-the-art space to attract talent and remain competitive. That argument sounds awfully similar to those made by nonprofit arts organizations when they decide to undertake expansion projects. New buildings, like Taubman Museum of Art’s new facility, come with enormous costs and can force already cash-strapped organizations to take on more debt and risk the sustainability of the entire organization.

During the boom years, many museums and cultural institutions wanted to take advantage of the deep pockets of their big donors and take on large infrastructure projects. According to the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center study cited above, this led to significant “overinvestment during the building boom—especially when coupled with the number of organizations that experienced financial difficulties post-building.” Much like their for-profit counterparts, cultural institutions were overly optimistic about the positive returns their efforts would have—yet four-fifths of the projects studied ran over budget, often by significant amounts. This type of development will often alter the business plan for the expanded institution to pay for the increasing expenditures and higher operating cost.  However, the consequences for arts organizations that overextend themselves are often much more dire than for NFL teams that generate billions of dollars in revenue. When is the last time you heard of a sports franchise closing up shop because it was no longer able to sustain itself?

That said, there are examples of cultural institutions that manage an expensive physical expansion and resulting fundraising campaign in ways that not only benefited the organization by helping it to further execute its mission and better serve its constituents. One example cited by the Nonprofit Finance Fund is the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, IL. Part of the reason the Steppenwolf has been able to sustain itself in spite of a large real estate purchase is that the institution understood that the real estate itself would not be the main income generator. Instead, as the organization grew physically, it sought out diverse revenue streams, from individual contributions to corporate giving, in order to support this expansion.

At the end of the day, professional sports generate a huge amount of revenue from a variety of sources (broadcast rights, apparel sales, concessions, ticket sales, etc) and public officials are dazzled by the dollar signs–in 2012, professional sports leagues generated roughly $24.7 billion in revenue. That is with one league being on strike (the National Hockey League) and not playing games for most of a season. Many are desperate to get a piece of that fiduciary pie by whatever means necessary. By contrast, the power dynamic is flipped when it comes to cultural institutions; they have to pitch the value of investment and advertising to their funders, not the other way around. I believe this is why cultural institutions are often left “holding the bag,” scrambling to cover the cost of ambitious expansions as opposed to sports franchises, who are often able to walk away from fiscal disasters of their own making.

I wasn’t about to stay silent about the conference, since I blog therefore I am; but instead of the mammoth undertaking of writing up every single session I attended, this post will instead pick and choose the speakers and sessions I found most interesting and attempt to tie it all up into a bow of meaningful themes.

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To the extent that any topic dominated conversation at the conference this year, it was the National Capitalization Project report commissioned by GIA, guided by a steering committee consisting of program personnel at some of the nation’s largest arts funders, and written by staff at TDC, a nonprofit consulting firm based in Boston. The report proposed a “common set of practices” for grantmakers designed to improve the financial condition of arts nonprofits, including:

• Encourage surpluses and operating reserves
• Take the long view and embed capitalization principles in conversations
• Encourage organizations to right-size
• Offer general operating support
• Project funding should be tied to core mission and fully funded
• Be clear about the structure and timeline of grants

One would think that these recommendations, and the force of the consensus and voices behind them, would be music to arts nonprofits’ ears. Several, like the focus on general operating support and operating reserves, have been embraced by more progressive funders for years. Others, like the recommendation to encourage operating surpluses as opposed to just balanced budgets, are fairly new ideas in the field (even though that one was called out by Adam Huttler years ago). What nearly all of the proposals have in common, though, is that they lend themselves toward treating grantees well. (What a concept, right?) That is, aligning investments with organizations’ core mission and programs, trusting them to do great work, and taking responsibility for the gravitational pull that an infusion of money can have on an organization’s operations.

The report has managed to draw some controversy, but not for the reasons you might expect. There was no cry of support for starving nonprofits of administrative costs or directing donations exclusively to specific programs. Instead, it was language like this that set off alarm bells for me and many others at the conference:

But, the economy is not the only factor that urges us to act. Another important factor is the changing behaviors of arts patrons, particularly their level of demand. At a time of flattening demand there is increasing supply, as noted above, in terms of both the sheer number of organizations and the supply of product. Neither the audience nor the public or philanthropic sector can support this level of oversupply.

The problem with this description is not that it is untrue (the existence of hypercompetition in the arts and many other industries involving content creation is indisputable), but rather that its overly simplistic dichotomy of supply and demand ignores the increasingly blurry distinction between the two. I think words like “oversupply” are very dangerous terms for arts managers to be using when, in the same breath, we like to talk about how important “audience engagement” is and how today’s patrons (and especially youth) want to “curate their experiences.” The path from curation to creation is a short one, after all – and once a creator, the urge to share one’s creations with the world is rarely far behind. We might as well get used to it: oversupply is our future, and a few targeted investments toward working capital or operating reserves here and there is going to do absolutely nothing to change that.

Seen in that context, the report’s recommendations begin to appear more problematic, mainly in that they seem to require either a noticeable increase in the pool of subsidy funds available to the arts or (far more likely at this point in time) the funneling of more resources to fewer organizations. Rightly or wrongly, this implication, as well as the choice to focus on “capitalization” in the first place, was read by many at the conference as a signal of support for the largest, best established institutions rather than the myriad of community-based and artist-led organizations that tend to struggle with smaller budgets. I am not sure that this is what either the steering committee or the report authors themselves intended (I heard several admonishments that “different organizations require different capital structures” and the like), but nevertheless that is how it came across.

Meanwhile, my colleague Anna Campbell made an excellent point in one of the sessions: all of this talk of capitalization means little if we are not thinking about where artists themselves fit in and how they benefit. In a field where already so little of the money subsidizing the arts actually ends up in artists’ pockets, such concerns are of no less relevance to them. One of the most important lessons I learned in business school was that our tendency to focus on income in conversations about socioeconomic disparities is misguided. Assets are far more important. If you have a million dollars, the decision to lose $50,000 a year while pursuing a full-time graduate degree in the performing or visual arts in a quixotic, risky quest for hipster glory doesn’t seem nearly so stupid as it would if you were broke. Effective capitalization, when applied to individuals, in a very real way enables risks and adventures that would either be impossible or impossibly misguided without it. Yet most artists never receive this opportunity unless they are born into it, and there is real question in my mind at least about whether better capitalization of institutions would make much of a difference for the rest.

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Another noticeable theme, albeit driven in part by which sessions I chose to attend, was innovation and a search for what’s next. Last year’s conference really only had one panel that was explicitly devoted to new ideas: Marc Vogl’s memorable session on the final day that included Adam Huttler, Ebony McKinney, Heather Cohn, and Nicole Derse from the Obama campaign. This one, by contrast, had several: a panel on innovative models of support for artists and arts organizations that featured one of the founders of Kickstarter; a breakfast roundtable on innovation in the field; an afternoon-long session on artistic entrepreneurship with Dennis Scholl, the VP of Arts for the Knight Foundation; even a semi-“closed” session on intergenerational dialogue in grantmaking that was primarily aimed at the under-35 set. And of course, there was a keynote from venture capitalist and CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito, during which Ito sang the praises of agile software development, risk-taking, interoperability, failing cheaply, and serendipity, to a generally receptive audience. As he said, “the more you plan, the less lucky you are.”

So innovation, next-generation thinking, and entrepreneurship seem to be trending topics, so to speak, in the grantmaking field. Yet there was still plenty of room for more familiar conversations on arts education, social justice, cultural exchange, evaluation/assessment, and various offshoots thereof. I recognized a number of both panelists and themes from Brooklyn. The danger with such things, I guess, is that one can easily imagine people and ideas becoming balkanized into their own little corners of the room – the silos waiting to matter. Last year’s conference ended with a forceful closing speech from Ben Cameron that did a great job of weaving together the big questions at the forefront of everyone’s minds as the dawn of a new decade approached: demographic change and social equity, technology and the generation gap, increasing globalization, and the blurring between amateur and professional arts participation. This year, no such unifying threads were in evidence; instead, I got the sense that now that the Great Recession has stabilized and the specter of imminent, drastic change is (for the time being) averted, grantmakers were feeling once again the lure of more comfortable territory. Indeed, this year’s closing keynote by folk singer and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie (who, I must confess, I had never heard of prior to this conference) was met with a veritable avalanche of nostalgia from the largely Baby Boomer crowd. With so many directions that the conversation could go, we will have to work ever harder to focus it in ways that both advance the field and include as many people as possible. We will need more “truckers” (just visit the link) to step up and connect the various communities of practice to each other and to the larger discourse, so that we can all benefit meaningfully from each other’s work.

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Many thanks to everyone who made the conference possible, as well as all of those I met and met again in Chicago. See you next year!

• Not surprising, but still worrisome: Nonprofit Finance Fund says America’s nonprofits are in trouble. More than half of respondents expect the current situation to have a long-term (2+ years) or permanent economic impairment to their organizations.
• NFF (whose Renee Jacob, a Yale SOM grad, gave an excellent presentation here over the weekend covering some of these topics) is also quoted in this NY Times story indicating that many arts organizations with fancy new spaces are now having trouble paying the bills.
• Easy to pay the bills when they’re free, though! smArts & Culture alerts Philly artists to a great opportunity for free space on South Street. (Incidentally, I lived half a block away on Rodman for about nine months right after college.)
• Future of Music Coalition just published some principles for compensation of musicians in new business models.
• Nate Silver takes on unimaginative neoclassical economist thinking like a pro. It amazes me that there are well-respected social “scientists” out there that continue to insist on this kind of ex-post-facto, non-empirically-based logical reasoning.
• Hey, why am I not on this list? In all seriousness, it’s unfortunate that all of the “art” blogs are actually about visual arts and not other kinds of art, but two of the sites on the Createquity blogroll are represented (Tactical Philanthropy and the GiveWell Blog), along with Give & Take (the Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s blog) and soon-to-be-added Seth’s Blog.
• Great post from Lucy Bernholz celebrating how far the conversation about shared metrics and platforms has moved forward and giving specific examples of projects of note.
• The IRS is supposedly going to rule on the L3C before the year is out. (thanks @tactphil)
• Say what you want about Bloomberg, but he gets nonprofits (and the arts). Behold his thorough prescription for helping NYC nonprofit organizations get through the recession.
• Check out these new “buzz maps” from researchers at UCLA and Columbia University. It looks like they’ve kind of backed into creating an interesting cultural asset map, though the accompanying article jumps to some conclusions that aren’t warranted (just because activity at high-profile cultural and entertainment institutions is more visible doesn’t make it hipper). Not to mention that using photographs from Getty Images as your primary data source is likely to introduce certain biases in that direction.
• Really fine quality piece here from David Brewster dissecting Seattle’s arts scene and its current budget troubles. He goes at it from an ecosystem perspective and doesn’t shy away from the numbers or the politics. More fodder for my New Haven analysis to come at the end of the semester.