• As you know, there was an election last week, and Barack Obama won it. Thankfully this means that Barry Hessenius’s worst fears about the NEA likely won’t be realized, but Barry does have some useful advocacy advice that is worth a read regardless of the outcome. Ted Johnson has a helpful pre-election analysis of issues relevant to Hollywood in the election. Americans for the Arts has been active too: Jay Dick offers a post-election advocacy to-do list, and the Arts Action Fund offers a thorough roundup of the election results and their implications. Among the lesser-known developments include the fact that many moderate Republican legislators in Kansas who stood up for arts funding in that state lost their primaries to more conservative challengers; similarly, several pro-arts Republicans in Congress have either retired or lost their seats, further polarizing the parties in their orientation toward arts funding. On the plus side, two cities – Portland, OR and Austin, TX – passed pro-arts ballot measures.
• The final version of the Chicago Cultural Plan has been released – with a new arts education plan for Chicago Public Schools to boot.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• RIP Walter Carsen, one of Canada’s most prominent arts philanthropists.
• This is a truly thorough overview of the arts funding ecosystem in metropolitan Atlanta, both past and present. A must-read if you have any plans to work in the arts there.
• The Knight Foundation is stepping up its commitment in Detroit with a $20 million round of grantmaking.
• If you work for an arts funder and you’re reading this, can you do me and the entire world a giant favor and make sure your organization is giving the Foundation Center your grants data? They are making it easier and easier to participate, and it ultimately helps researchers like me make sense of the arts funding landscape. You can help them refine their grants taxonomy as well.

IN THE FIELD

• Orchestral musician labor disputes are in the news again, and nowhere is the hotbed hotter than in freezing Minnesota, where both the Minnesota and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras face work stoppages. Eric Nilsson says neither side is fully accepting reality, and even the Minneapolis City Council is getting involved. Both groups have canceled performances through the end of 2012, and musicians are starting to look for jobs elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Spokane (WA) Symphony is on strike and canceling performances.
• I’m intrigued by this announcement of SphinxCon, a new diversity summit organized by Sphinx, a Detroit-based organization dedicated to cultivating more musicians of color in classical music. Aaron Dworkin and company have managed to pull together a pretty incredible speaker list pairing (mostly white) arts service organization leaders with a largely non-white group of artists, academics, and other perspectives. Who knows if it’ll lead to anything, but it seems like the ingredients for a real conversation are there.

BIG IDEAS

• I can’t emphasize enough how important this 282-word blog post from Adam Thurman is. Adam has a gift for concision, and his three-part distinction between making art, making money doing art, and making a living from art is essential for artists and policymakers alike. And speaking of Adam’s genius, this post on arts marketing (featuring the memorable quotes, “[Y]ou are probably ok with whatever you did last night.  Maybe you watched TV, maybe you read a book, maybe you got drunk and did lines of cocaine.  Whatever you did, you were ok with it.” and “The reality is that if these [new] audiences never come your way they will be fine.  You, on the other hand, will be in serious trouble.”) is well worth a read too.
• Stephanie N. Stallings thinks jazz could use some binders full of women and speculates that hip-hop has overtaken it as America’s greatest cultural diplomacy tool.
• Over at Next American City, Neeraj Mehta considers the “who” of creative placemaking (as in, “who benefits?”).
• So Google’s getting into the virtual museum business now?
• Online higher education banned in Minnesota, then reinstated.
• Chad Bauman writes eloquently on the symbiosis between an arts community and its local newspaper – and what it means that so many of those newspapers seem to be hanging on by a thread.
• Eric Booth submits a lengthy dispatch from the first international Teaching Artist Conference in Oslo.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new report from Emerson College’s Center for the Theater Commons, authored by Diane Ragsdale, examines the relationship between nonprofit and commercial theater.
• Chorus America has released its Choral Operations Survey Report for 2012.
• I’m looking forward to seeing the results of what looks like a very strong study being undertaken by the LA Philharmonic, USC, and Heart of Los Angeles to investigate the impact of early childhood music training. Meanwhile, a just-released report from Carnegie Hall and WolfBrown examines the potential for music to make a difference in the juvenile justice system.
• If you’ve ever doubted me that logic models matter, check out this analysis of the difficulties faced by One Laptop Per Child, a hugely ambitious, billion-dollar initiative to develop and distribute low-cost laptops to schoolchildren in developing countries. The passage below is an eloquent depiction of how failing to think through the details of a strategy can mean its doom:
  

  Doing an end-run around lousy infrastructure and poorly-trained teachers might actually work with the right support to guide the child’s learning. Unfortunately, Negroponte has also stated that you actually can give a kid a laptop and walk away.

  According to Jeff Patzer, a former OLPC intern, that’s precisely what they did in Peru. Hardware degraded faster than expected, and OLPC allowed Peru to build its own branch of the system software that was incompatible with patches. Interns were not prepared to educate teachers, and teachers were not prepared to use the XO to teach students.

  “The only thing that happens is the laptops get opened, turned on, kids and teachers get frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don’t understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner.” Patzer explained.

ETC.

• Joe Queenan on having read more than 6000 books. My favorite part of this column is the fact that, because it’s in the Wall Street Journal, his offhand mention of Williams Sonoma is accompanied by its latest stock quote.

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

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

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

INTERNATIONAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEDERAL

The House of Representatives passed a budget resolution based on Paul Ryan’s FY13 budget blueprint that hews closely to conservative thinking on a number of fronts. Included in the document is the following statement on arts funding:

Encourage Private Funding for Cultural Agencies.  Federal subsidies for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can no longer be justified.  The activities and content funded by these agencies go beyond the core mission of the Federal Government and they are generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.  These agencies can raise funds from private-sector patrons, which will also free them from any risk of political interference.

I find it completely amazing that conservatives actually have the chutzpah to make this argument. They are such valiant defenders of the poor that they actually deign to give a rat’s ass about the welfare of our nation’s downtrodden when there’s an opportunity to save them a couple of pennies by eliminating the National Endowment of the Arts. Oh wait, what’s that you say? The poor don’t pay income taxes? So they’re not subsidizing the NEA, or any other government agency for that matter? Which means your argument is full of shit? Got it.

STATE

Poor Kansas is still looking for ways to get back some of what it lost last year when Governor Sam Brownback vetoed the entire budget of the state’s arts commission. The House passed a bill that would add an option to Kansas tax forms that would allow taxpayers to voluntarily contribute to the Kansas Arts Commission. Given that a similar initiative in California raises only 0.4 cents per capita, I doubt that will prove an effective means of resurrecting the agency.

Utah has passed legislation that will put a question on the November ballot asking voters to consider a statewide sales tax to fund cultural agencies as well as zoos and botanical gardens. Dedicated tax streams have proven one of the most lucrative and stable sources of arts funding around, so good luck to arts advocates in moving this one forward.

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies keeps a detailed and regularly updated list of relevant legislation and machinations by state at this link.

LOCAL

Chicago Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Michelle T. Boone sat down for her first interview on the job, talking through the merger with the city’s Office of Special Events, the ongoing citywide cultural plan, and other topics. The Commission’s budget declined by about 10%

Mayor Vincent Gray of Washington, DC is proposing a modest increase in local funding for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which saw its budget decimated last year primarily by cuts from Congress.

INTERNATIONAL

Most of the news this past month relates to fallout from cuts European governments implemented last year. In the UK, The Stage reports that more than one in nine of the 206 arts groups who lost all of their Arts Council England funding intend to close up shop; another 22% are at risk of closing. Groups in Wales were hit hard by budget cuts last year too, with the burden falling disproportionately on companies serving youth and specific geographic areas. The Netherlands’ decision to slash its cultural budget by 25% last year had previously been reported on Createquity, but I was surprised to learn via the New York Times that Portugal has completely dropped its Ministry of Culture. The same article names Italy, Greece (not surprisingly), Hungary, Spain, and Ireland as other countries that have recently ripped their culture budgets a new one.

All of this is leading to some potentially nightmarish unintended consequences for U.S. arts organizations. Because European governments are so much more active in cultural life than that of the United States, arts institutions in those countries have never had the need or the desire to build up a strong base of private contributions. So now that new funds are needed, rather than start down the long path of cultivating that presently nonexistent generosity, organizations are looking for a quicker fix: American donors.

Europe isn’t the only one feeling the pinch; Ontario, in Canada, is too. But one government arts agency that’s doing well is Brazil’s SESC, which is financed by a unique model involving a 1.5% payroll tax that has helped the entity’s budget double approximately every six years. SESC’s budget is $600 million, rivaling some of the wealthiest European nations, but its broad mandate includes recreational activities and even health clinics in addition to arts organizations.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Congress has agreed to put aside consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) through the end of the year, but the bill isn’t necessarily dead. Arts and technology commentators have begun to be more vocal in their criticism of the bill, which would, among other things, sanction pre-emptive takedown requests for intellectual property infringement, create an “intermediary liability” for website hosts, and essentially hand over enforcement for all of this to the entertainment industry. It’s that last provision which creeps me out the most; I’m not a copyright anarchist, but I am most definitely against the foxes running the henhouse.
• More on droit de suite legislation, which took effect in the UK on January 1. The policy compensates artists whose works are sold by future owners. As reported last month, similar legislation is under consideration by the United States Congress.
• Interesting interview with the head of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, an intermediary organization based in Lebanon that is funded by the Ford and Open Society Foundations as well as donors in Kuwait and the Netherlands.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Leveraging Investments in Creativity has hired Candace Jackson, an arts consultant, as its managing director. LINC is heading into its final phase of operation, and its concluding work will focus on evaluating its grants and putting out additional research publications.
• The Urban Institute (which has a notable track record of research in the arts) has a new president, Sarah Rosen Wartell.
• Arena Stage’s New Play Institute is splitting up, with two key staff members leaving the organization and taking the program’s media and technology projects to Boston’s Emerson College. More on the transition from David Dower.
• Some strange staffing shenanigans are afoot at the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, but if the article is to be believed, they will be hiring a deputy commissioner and five program directors among other positions.

IN THE FIELD

• An heir to the Walmart fortune has opened the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a community of 35,000 people located two hours away from the nearest large city. The museum apparently has amassed nearly a billion dollars in assets in just five years, mostly funded by the Walton Family Foundation. It offers free admission to the public and is located within walking distance of downtown Bentonville, which happens to be the location of the world headquarters of Walmart. The museum has raised eyebrows on the east coast for buying up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art for its collection and getting into a legal battle with the Georgia O’Keefe Museum over its attempts to purchase a 50% stake in a collection at the financially troubled Fisk University in Tennessee. But from where I sit, it’s a gigantic infusion of money for the arts in an extremely underserved part of the country…hard to argue too much with that.
• Opera Boston, the second-largest opera company in the region, is shutting down due to a $500,000 funding gap, mere months after it won a Pulitzer Prize with composer Zhou Long.
• Ballet San Jose has announced a unusual partnership with American Ballet Theatre that involves implementing ABT’s training curriculum in the local ballet school and performing works from ABT’s repertoire. Officials claim the arrangement is “not a merger,” however.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Blair Benjamin has published the results of his self-evaluation of the Assets for Artists program in Massachusetts. Speaking of Blair, his second annual “headlines you missed” feature is worth a laugh. My favorite: “Alice Walton’s Plan to Demolish and Replace Her Brand-New Museum with a ‘Super Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’ Promises Wider Selection and an Even More Unbeatable Admission Price”
• Robert Flanagan, a Stanford professor who wrote a report on the economic health of symphony orchestras back in 2008, has expanded that research into a book. Sarah Lutman has the details.
• I’ll sign on to this: “We need a national consensus policy to guide our research efforts into the decade.  As good as our research is, and as capable as our researchers are – it is basically piecemeal.  We need an over-arching policy as to what we need to know, on what timeline and to what purpose.  And we need at least some modicum of cooperation so we can pursue research in some linear pattern.  Somebody please convene a national summit to deal with our currently all over the map research efforts.  At least create ways  researchers (can and will) talk to each other on some regular basis.”

ON GIVING

• PhilanTopic has a thought-provoking roundup of predictions for 2012. A couple that stuck out for me:
  

  In fact, we’d be surprised if there isn’t at least one [Occupy Wall Street]-related protest at a high-profile philanthropic conference or event in 2012. (And the folks in Davos can pretty much count on it.)

  [E]xpect to see calls for greater accountability in philanthropy emerge as a movement in its own right in 2012. Adopting the slogan “private dollars for public good,” a social media-empowered generation of young Americans will use the cheap and ubiquitous tools at their disposal to push for more diversity on foundation boards, more transparency in foundation decision-making, and more democracy in the allocation of tax-advantaged philanthropic resources.

  I hope they’re right.

• AFTA’s Narric Rome shares the latest on how arts education has fared in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind) reauthorization, which Jennifer Kessler reported on earlier this year. Mostly good news, from what it sounds like.
• Looks like net neutrality advocates dodged a bullet when the Senate rejected an effort by Republicans to turn back regulations that were put in place last year.
• It’s official: the zero-budget Kansas Arts Commission will be receiving zero dollars in matching funds from the NEA. Kansas is now contemplating selling arts license plates a la the California Arts Council.
• Jonathan Arbabanel gives the insider scoop on what’s happening with the newly-merged Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
• Did you know that, by law, artists in California earn royalties from future sales of their work? It sounds like a great idea, but Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman make a compelling argument at the Freakonomics blog that it’s actually not good policy for most artists.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT: INTERNATIONAL

• Christopher Madden finds a strong relationship between cultural expenditures and cultural employment in Australia and New Zealand.
• Did you know that UNESCO has a Creative Cities Network? Or that the network has a conference coming up in Seoul, South Korea? I didn’t.

PRIVATE DOLLARS

• You’ve no doubt heard of the ArtPlace grant opportunity (letter of inquiry due today!), but the initiative offers just as much money in loan financing via the Nonprofit Finance Fund. There is a separate process to get in on that action, and the deadline is December 1.
• Mitch Nauffts reports on Bloomberg Philanthropies’s emergence as one of the nation’s top foundations.
• The Richard and Rhonda Goldman Foundation, a significant supporter of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, is spending down and has distributed its last set of grants.
• More on the Irvine Foundation’s new arts strategy, from arts program director Josephine Ramirez and foundation president Jim Canales.
• Whoa, I’d heard of composer Ann Southam via Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar, but I had no idea she was loaded.

IN THE FIELD

• Two Austin art museums, the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse, have merged.
• Yet another orchestra is facing significant financial troubles: this time, the Dallas Symphony. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, by contrast, is doing great under the strong leadership of Deborah Borda, with Walt Disney Concert Hall averaging 95% of capacity.
• Well, this is a novel negotiating tactic: the NYC Opera’s unions have offered to perform for free this season in exchange for health care and power over future venues. City Opera rejected the offer.
• Americans for the Arts’s Amanda Alef scored an interview with the collective voice that is the Occupy Wall Street Arts and Culture Committee.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Mandee Roberts takes issue with the fact that architects are included in the NEA’s recent report on artist professions and income.
• The NEA’s Sunil Iyengar takes on Holly Sidford’s report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” So does the League of American Orchestras’s Jesse Rosen, and Andrew Taylor.

THIS ECONOMY WE LIVE IN

• Applications for art and design college degrees in the UK are down 27% from last year, and officials worry that the rising cost of higher education is squeezing out lower-income students.
• As the cost of postsecondary education ratchets up ever higher, Cooper Union is considering charging tuition to undergraduates for the first time since 1902. (h/t Xenia via the Createquity Tipster)
• The value of the worldwide underground economy (broadly speaking, enterprises that are not registered or licensed and don’t pay taxes to the government) is approximately $10 trillion, according to an economist at Johannes Kepler University in Austria. If it were a country, it would be the second-largest economy in the world after the United States.

IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

• Farewell for now to Sean Stannard-Stockton, who is taking a sabbatical from his excellent blog Tactical Philanthropy. Hope we’ll see him back again soon.
• Chicago Artists Resource has a great behind-the-scenes interview with Thomas Cott of the celebrated email newsletter You’ve Cott Mail.

THOUGHT BUBBLES

• Congratulations to the folks at Animating Democracy for a fabulous blog salon at ARTSBlog, which took place over the past week. Doug Borwick makes a good point in noting the creeping influence of creative placemaking on the discussion there.
• Arlene Goldbard was also at the Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference, and she had some things to say about the WolfBrown white paper on participatory arts that was presented there.
• Speaking of conferences, the Independent Sector Conference (about which I’ll have a report here shortly) wasn’t the only social sector gathering that met recently. Bunmi Akinnusotu offers a brief but informative dispatch about the 2011 Net Impact Conference in Portland, OR.
• Imagine my surprise to find this article on the Fast Company website (h/t Mission Paradox) by a former classmate of mine from undergrad, Adrian Slywotzky. Adrian recounts a fascinating pro-bono study by consulting firm Oliver Wyman (in which he is a partner) called the Audience Growth Initiative that looked at audience churn at nine major symphony orchestras.
• Fantastic advice from Seth Godin on how to get hired at a small company (a term that describes virtually all arts organizations).
• Bad Culture has posted Part II of its interview with longtime Bay Area cultural policy wonk John Kreidler. (Part I is available here.)
• Is Wikipedia, arguably the most successful crowdsourcing experiment in history, running out of steam? I sure hope not, but the encyclopedia has a huge backlog of editorial work (adding sources to articles, etc.) that is apparently stretching the capacity of the site’s volunteer contributors.
• Thank you, Beth Kanter, for highlighting the fact that curation (of content or otherwise) is an art form all its own.
• Coolness: Life in a Day, the YouTube project showcasing user-uploaded video all recorded on July 24, 2010, is now available in its 90-minute entirety – on YouTube, of course.

• Remember that debate a while back about whether video games qualified as art? Well, the NEA just declared it over by including support for “digital games” in its new Art and Media program.
• To Scott Walters’s everlasting chagrin, however, the NEA is still providing funding to organizations in New York, LA, and Chicago disproportionate to the population level. Scott has more here and here. I think this is helpful and important analysis; the one thing to keep in mind is that it focuses only on grants in one discipline of one round of one the NEA’s grant programs.
• The Library of Congress, in partnership with Sony Music, has unveiled a “National Jukebox” of early sound recordings – and it got a million page views in the first 48 hours.
• Kudos to the Future of Music Coalition for staying on top of the potential implications of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger for artists. And speaking of mergers, don’t miss FMC’s collaboration with Fractured Atlas looking back at the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, one year later.
• A window into Finnish cultural policy.
• So now Congressmen want to micromanage the Smithsonian’s gift shops?

COMINGS AND GOINGS

• Rahm Emanuel has announced that Michelle T. Boone, formerly of the Joyce Foundation, will serve as the next Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
• Marc Vogl is out as program officer for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and in as executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition.
• Heather Hitchens has quit as director of the New York State Council on the Arts to take the top job at American Theatre Wing, which presents the Tony Awards. NYSCA’s budget has declined from $55 million to $35 million over the past four years.
• Blueprint Research + Design, a major consultant to foundations, is being bought out by Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors. As part of the transaction, Blueprint founder Lucy Bernholz will become a half-time managing director of Arabella, spending more time on writing and in her partnership with Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society.
• The Sloan Foundation, whose main focus is science and technology, is now getting into arts funding.

MULTI-PART BLOGSTRAVAGANZAS

• ARTSBlog has a great-looking discussion on tap this week about new business models, the 501(c)(3) legal form, and potential alternatives. The lineup of bloggers is stellar, including Diane Ragsdale, Adam Huttler, and Janet Brown.
• The indefatigable Barry Hessenius was blogging up a storm earlier this month at the 98th Arizona Town Hall focusing on arts and culture. The convening, which included addresses from Marian Godfrey and the suddenly ubiquitous Rocco Landesman, comes at a poignant moment for the state, given recent cutbacks in public funding for the arts in Arizona. Here are Barry’s reports from Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and the final wrap-up. There’s also a 268-page background report in case you’re looking for some further light reading.
• The staff at GiveWell, the charity rating agency, spent three months living and working in Mumbai last year. They have now posted thoughts and impressions from the visit, which provide an interesting check against their working assumptions going in. Here are the notes from staff members Holden Karnofsky, Elie Hassenfeld, and Natalie Stone, as well as thoughts on evaluating local charities in India.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The long-awaited Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) study has finally been published. The press release puts a positive spin on the findings, noting that 92% of alumni of arts training programs who responded to the survey have work (of any kind) and that two-thirds indicated that their first job after school was a close match for what they wanted. However, I’m more intrigued by the stat that only 57% of the over 13,500 respondents have ever been a professional artist, and only 41% currently are (keep in mind that most of the survey pool graduated within the past five years). We’ll be taking a closer look at this one.
• Meanwhile, last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the largest source of debt in the US.
• The NEA has a new research note applying data from the American Time Use Survey to the performing arts industry.
• At ARTSBlog, Lynne Kingsley reports on the unequal distribution of arts education programs by discipline (a lot more visual art and music than theater or dance). And Tim Mikulski shares recommendations from the new report on arts education from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
• The Alliance of Artist Communities has a new study on support for dance through artist residencies.
• Rosetta Thurman reports on a new study of perceptions of diversity in the nonprofit workplace.
• Americans for the Arts aren’t the only ones doing economic impact estimates. Google says that it benefits the American economy to the tune of $64 billion – in pure profits. Take that!

CONFERENCE CRANNY

• The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago has been on fire lately, and held a great-looking Emerging Practice Seminar last month. Materials from the session (including lots of video!) are available here.
• Matthew Guerrieri provides a dispatch from the Rethink Music Conference in Boston.
• Beth Kanter reports from the Center for Effective Philanthropy Conference.
• Trista Harris has video from the “Philanthropy On Trial” event at the Council on Foundations Conference.

TRENDWATCHING

• Wow. For the first time since 1992, the rate of television ownership in American households has declined. To 97%.
• Crowdfunding isn’t just for donations and loans anymore; MicroVentures is now taking tiny equity investments for new startup companies.
• The Daily Beast on Amazon.com and the future of book critics.
• Composer Jeff Harrington offers a personal history of his reliance on free content distribution as a career strategy, and relates it to the issue of class in the arts.

ETC.

• Really fascinating indictment of today’s urban planning field and the (unintended) legacy of Jane Jacobs.
• Barry Hessenius interviews Kristen Madsen, Vice President of the GRAMMY and MusiCares Foundations.
• I have to say (and no, I am not being paid for this), I am so glad I signed up for the free trial of the New York Times’s digital subscription service sponsored by Lincoln when I had the chance, and I will certainly be renewing when it runs out. Without it, I’d be missing out on great reporting like this piece on a “pop-up” restaurant that served a six-course lunch to a dozen passengers on the L train, and this exposé of some shady-sounding business practices on the part of Columbia Artists Management promoting foreign orchestras who aren’t what they seem.