“The Blue Marble,” by flickr user Chris Jupin

Every December since 2009, Createquity has compiled the Top Ten Arts Policy Stories of the Year, ranking the impact of key issues from a global perspective. With the end of this year coinciding with the last rays of Createquity’s sunset, we didn’t want to leave our loyal readers hanging – and so we’ve decided to do our traditional roundup looking back not just on 2017, but on the whole ten years that Createquity has been around!

It turns out that a lot can change in a decade. While selecting which stories are “most important” inherently involves some editorial guesswork, we have tried to use some semblance of a formal methodology, incorporating criteria like how many people were affected by a given story, how deeply, for how long, and how much of that impact was specific to the arts? Below is our selection of the Top Ten Arts Stories of the Decade, compiled by members of our editorial team with individual authorship indicated at the end of each item.

1. New tech and media swallow the world whole

When Apple founder Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he touted three key innovations: its blending of an iPod media player with a smartphone; its widescreen, multi-touch interface; and its internet friendliness. All three proved pivotal in the subsequent decade’s tech revolution. Apple’s iOS quickly stoked competition from Google’s Android OS to put the “internet in every pocket” of global citizens (now in 2 billion+ and counting), in turn catalyzing the hothouse growth of industries including audiobooks and podcasts and electronic games (while helping kill off others such as compact cameras). The proliferation of social media platforms – including Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Tumblr, and Instagram – transformed networking and distribution patterns for creative professionals and their audiences, dramatically reshaping how we access and filter information in our daily lives.

All the while, internet service providers have been keeping pace with phone and app makers in their quest to continually increase broadband speed and access. The result? A media-streaming revolution that has sparked its own race for consumer dollars between corporate giants including Netflix, Apple, Disney, 21st Century Fox, AT&T (via Amazon – wait – make that Time Warner) and Sony, each trying to outmaneuver each other in both content creation and consumer distribution. Depending on your view, the Peak TV phenomenon is a boon for watchers, an ominous power-grab, or a societal antidote to the arts themselves. But then, television is so 20th century. Enter the new tech art forms: virtual reality and augmented reality are competing among global users to enhance everything from ballet performances to gaming on the go.

All the above innovations are underscored by the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence itself. As machines show creative capabilities to rival those of humans, AI projects are demonstrating mastery of tasks ranging from besting champs at complex games to self-driving cars; from creating lip-syncing videos to teaching salsa lessons. Advances in AI now enable Google’s Translate service to crank out translations in literature that are almost indistinguishable from those of humans. The excitement of these developments is tempered by growing fears of rampant automation and machines displacing artists, even taking over the world.

Regardless of how it turns out, the ubiquity and scope of Silicon Valley’s wonders qualify as the single most impactful arts story of the past decade. Discourse on the intersection between technology and the arts has often tended toward the trite (remember how QR codes were supposed to revolutionize…something?), but we see the relationship as something far deeper and more fundamental to the human experience every day. For good or ill, the disruptions of New Tech – and the mysteries of where they are headed – remain on a path of constant acceleration. –Jack Crager

2. China rises as a global power in arts and entertainment  

In 2006, the Asia Times Online published an article lamenting that China, despite its ballooning economy, lacked influence in the cultural sphere. Today – thanks to that ballooning – the story is quite different: in fine art, film, gaming and even music, China has arrived. The country holds steady at third place worldwide in the global art market (behind the United States and the United Kingdom) with an 18% share. The surge in art collecting by mainland Chinese was first noted in 2011, and now that China has eclipsed the United States in its number of billionaires, the trend will surely continue upward, especially as younger collectors begin to take on the (art) world. In July 2016, the Taikang life insurance company (run by the founder of Guardian, China’s first government-run auction house) became Sotheby’s largest shareholder, augmenting China’s influence in this sphere. We’re not just talking the realm of the super-rich: Beijing’s National Museum was ranked the world’s most-visited museum in 2016. In fine art, trends have tacked toward consumption of imported works, but elsewhere China shows major gains in production of original content. On the silver screen, Ernst & Young’s 2012 predictions that China would be the world’s biggest film industry by 2020 seem to be manifesting ahead of schedule. In November, Chinese box office revenue surpassed $7.5 billion, and a nationalist, homegrown film – not a Hollywood export – fueled it: Wolf Warrior 2 is the second-highest grossing movie of all time in a single market (behind 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and we can expect to see more of the same, given China’s plans for a new $2 billion film studio in Chongqing and its recent history of buying up big players such as Dick Clark Productions and Legendary Entertainment. On smaller screens, in 2017 China overtook the U.S. as “gamer capital of the world,” with global revenues hitting $100 billion, thanks largely to smartphones. Especially notable is that 93% of all money spent by Chinese gamers go to titles developed by Chinese-based companies. Even China’s music market, which historically has been small, is showing robust growth in the world of streaming, and Western labels are looking to China as a new potential market. The Cultural Development Action Plan for 2016-2020, part of the Belt and Road initiative announced in 2013, was released earlier this year, providing further direction to these increased cultural opportunities.

So far China and the Trump administration have not been fast friends. Yet for U.S. companies, the allure of a untapped market is hard to resist: Nintendo, Google, Apple and Hollywood each have already made concessions to Chinese interests as they vie for a piece of the pie. Some in Congress are concerned, and for good reason: China ranks 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, and its airtight Great Firewall includes bans on most social media networks and news sites that reflect a negative image of the country. (Createquity has previously covered China’s repressive tactics including virtual borders, film regulations, and cultural censorship of television and the arts.) China is a country of 1.4 billion people – more than four times the population of the U.S. and twice that of Europe – and, yes, there is (a lot of) money to be made. But at what cost?

The implications of China’s growth will be felt first by China itself – we can expect a type of lost generation as it all comes to a head, especially considering that 40% of this socialist society currently lives on $5.50 a day. The implications for the rest of us will follow: the impact of China as a global force in entertainment will affect business models, jobs, language, tolerance for human rights – even creativity itself – in ways we cannot yet imagine. –Clara Inés Schuhmacher

3. Democracies around the world curb freedom of expression

Events of the last decade have demonstrated that free expression for artists and media is a critical indicator of the strength (and struggles) of a country’s democracy. In recent years we’ve seen an upward trend in the suppression of artistic freedom of expression throughout the world, with ostensibly democratic governments headed by authoritarian leaders attempting to exert tighter control of the media and use their roles as financial supporters of the arts to control the creation and content of various art forms, all as part of a broader strategy to consolidate and maintain power. Under the increasingly iron-fisted rule of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has forged a track record of suppressing free expression, including targeting cultural dissidents through state-run television. These trends will likely continue should Putin “win” his election as president for a fourth term extending to 2024, as is widely expected. Meanwhile in Turkey, a failed coup resulted in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shutting down 29 publishing houses and ramping up his jailing of journalists who are critical of the government. Erdoğan’s reaction to the coup continues an alarming trend toward authoritarian rule since his rise to national power in 2003 – further amplified last spring by his (contested) narrow victory in a national referendum granting the president new, sweeping powers.

Although Russia and Turkey are the clearest examples of democracies going down the drain over the past ten years, several other countries are veering gradually or rapidly in the same direction. In Hungary, the government has continued to place tighter restrictions on the media since right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s election in 2010. The Hungarian Academy of Art (MMA) became a state institution in 2011, exerting control over governmental support of the arts and other state-run cultural institutions. In 2016, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed new media laws giving his government the authority to appoint the heads of public television and radio (which has been met with various forms of resistance); the government has also tried to control the dominant narrative around historical events through its support of museums. Venezuela’s political and economic unrest has resulted in President Nicolas Maduro canceling a government-sponsored tour of the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gustavo Dudamel, a native Venezuelan musician trained through the country’s renowned El Sistema program. Dudamel had recently become more critical of the government’s repressive tactics, including the shooting of young Venezuelan violist Armando Cañizales. In Israel, Miri Regev continues to use her role as the Minister of Culture and Sports to support artists who demonstrate loyalty to her nationalist message (though she’s discovering the limits to the power of her office). Even in the U.S., the election of Donald Trump has triggered concerns that the president would use the office to intimidate political opponents, including artists and journalists, just after the previous two administrations amassed unprecedented powers to spy on American citizens. The lesson? Democracy is more fragile than we thought, and the voices of creators are crucial to keeping it intact. –Ruth Mercado-Zizzo

4. Artists and audiences get caught up in terrorism’s wake

During the past decade the global impact of terrorism by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or Dae’esh ‘داعش’) – as well as other groups including Boko Haram, TAK, Ansar Dine, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda, plus numerous far-right and lone-wolf actors – reverberated throughout the arts community, which has endured attacks on tangible cultural heritage, on free speech, and on artists and their fans. The destruction of antiquities has been particularly extensive and in many cases absolute, with 2015 being an especially tragic year for heritage crimes from Mosul Museum to Sabratha, Nimrud, Hatra, Palmyra, and beyond. The problem is complex and it extends beyond destruction: a 2015 report found that ISIS was taking 20% or more of the revenue (that’s hundreds of millions in USD) from the systematic resale of blood antiquities on the black market in the Western art trade (although some believe this is an overestimation.) The impact on Syria recalls similar attacks on cultural heritage in Iraq, Yemen, and Mali; in the later, a perpetrator pled guilty and was for the first time ever sentenced by the International Criminal Court for war crimes against cultural heritage. ISIS has even incorporated Hollywood-style screenwriting and cinematographic techniques to augment its recruitment tools. In response, it turns out that the world cares very much about its shared heritage: archaeologists are racing to digitize the Middle East’s historical sites before they are destroyed, and in 2016, France and the United Arab Emirates announced a $100 million Cultural Heritage protection fund. Most recently, CBS ordered the television series “Blood and Treasure” on the subject for summer 2019.

But terrorists’ crusades against free speech have extended well beyond archeological sites, directly targeting the lives of creators and their audiences. Aggressions have included the assassination of a Somalian comedian in 2012, the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in February 2015, and the 2016 murder of Amjad Sabri, one of Pakistan’s most famous and respected musicians. But it is the attacks on large groups people – enjoying themselves in cultural spaces – that have most shattered our sense of reality. The past few years have seen cultural venues joining sports stadiums, churches and mosques, open-air markets and transportation hubs as regular targets for terrorist attacks and other mass shootings around the world. Years of seemingly relentless attacks have taken place at the Shingar Cinema in India, a British cultural council in Afghanistan, the Century Aurora movie theater in Colorado, La Bataclan music hall in Paris, National Bardo Museum in Tunis, Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival in Las Vegas, and sadly more.

The world has responded in a couple of ways. One reaction has been to hunker down: train staff in crisis response, step up police presence at major museums, purchase Terrorism Risk Insurance, and hold international conferences on culture and terrorism. The alternative has been to open up. Following the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon, several local museums opened free as places of respite for the community. The Tunis museum reopened to the public just 12 days after the attack there and some of the looted museums in Yemen became shelters for displaced residents. Amidst and despite these acts of terror, artists and their institutions continue to gather and to create work – supporting the United Nations’ 2015 Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, and each of us. –Shawn Lent

5. The Great Recession wreaks havoc on the global economy

Though many of its most acute effects have now waned, the Great Recession cast a gloomy backdrop behind the other key news stories of the first half of the decade. Driven by fevered investment in questionable assets such as subprime mortgage loans, the money-making party stopped with the failure of financial giants such as Lehman Brothers, AIG, and others in the fall of 2008. The fallout slammed an abrupt correction on private investment and dampened funding for arts organizations in both nonprofit and for-profit sectors. During the downturn arts council funding in many states took a nosedive, and those in Kansas and South Carolina, among others, survived near-death experiences. To their credit, the arts and nonprofit sectors responded with a series of creative solutions and financial adaptations. And in many ways the recession is now past-tense, given the continuing U.S. economic recovery, the soaring stock market, downward-ticking unemployment, and the stabilizing effect of reforms. Yet other remnants of the downturn – such as the permalance labor market, the stagnation of wages, and ongoing fiscal battles – simply represent a “new normal.” Some experts point out that the recovery has been historically weak and sluggish and that recent unemployment figures actually reflect growing cultural disparity. Others warn that prevailing U.S. political priorities – namely the recently enacted Republican tax bill – portend reduced charity giving and cuts to housing for artists, while the specter of a ballooning deficit threatens the ability of the government to respond to the next economic downturn. Amid all the economic and political hoopla, one thing is clear: given the cyclic nature of history, there is no reason to believe that the Great Recession couldn’t happen again. –JC

6. Racial equity becomes a rallying cry for arts policy and philanthropy

The past ten years have produced a flurry of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the arts, prompted by the efforts of artists of color and the communities that support them. These efforts have gained significant ground thanks to grantmakers restructuring their criteria to address long-standing inequities in the arts ecosystem. Foundations and national agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Council England adopted new policies, resulting in organizations attempting to diversify their staffs and promote wider representation in race, cultural background, gender, and sexual orientation – onstage, backstage, and on screen. The results of these efforts can be hard to gauge: for example, despite Hollywood waking up to its “diversity problem” and an #oscarssowhite movement that contributed to the 2017 Academy Awards honoring the most diverse pool of contenders to date, there’s little evidence yet that it’s more than just a blip on the radar, and 2018 is predicted to be #oscarsstillsowhite. And it’s not just about the film industry: funding gaps continue to be a problem in rural areas and among communities of color across the arts sector. The increased interest in racial equity and social justice takes place against a backdrop of larger cultural shifts in the United States and worldwide: the past decade has witnessed both the election of first African-American president and a sharp increase in racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiment. In the U.S., the Black Lives Matter movement has strongly influenced conversations about racial equity, while in Canada and Australia that issue centers more on reconciliation with Indigenous populations – particularly prominent this year during a series of controversies surrounding cultural appropriation in publishing and journalism.

There’s still a long way to go, especially considering how growing nationalism impacts equity in the arts, and divergent views remain about what constitutes cultural equity based on the art produced or funded by any given organization or agency. But many artists, organizations, and policymakers seem to be ready to disrupt the status quo in ways that they did not ten years ago, with debates on equity in the blogosphere and funding policies for equity and inclusion marking a shift toward de-centering whiteness and acknowledging the schools of thought and traditions of culturally diverse arts practitioners. –Lauren Warnecke and Fari Nzinga

7. Asian governments make huge investments in cultural infrastructure

The past decade has seen substantial fluctuation in governmental arts funding around the world with developing countries, particularly throughout Asia, spending big on modern-day cultural palaces and sweeping public initiatives. New initiatives include a $27 billion mixed-use development in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; a $2.3 billion development of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong; the building of a $2 billion film studio in Chongqing, China; and a state-funded Artist Welfare program in South Korea, which insured nearly 24,000 resident artists. (Some of China’s other investments are discussed in item #2 above.) This largesse occurred against a backdrop of Great-Recession-induced cuts in arts funding in traditionally generous Western Europe; in particular, state arts appropriations in Holland and England were cut by 25% and 22% respectively, with other European countries following close behind. To the south, Australia cut 70% of grants to individual artists as part of a stressful period of upheaval in that country’s arts funding structure, and Brazil got rid of its Ministry of Culture altogether, albeit briefly. One contrasting bright spot is Canada, which saw a doubling of its Arts Council funding to $1.9 billion from 2016 to 2021 under the administration of Justin Trudeau.

Many governments have turned to unique funding initiatives to ensure that their tightened purses are being spent appropriately (see Italy and Brazil’s voucher programs and the United Kingdom’s much-debated Quality Metrics program). It should also be noted that declaring winners and losers based on national arts funding alone tells an incomplete story, as some of the new heavy hitters have been accused of inhumane labor practices and harsh government crackdowns while some of the countries that have scaled back have seen increases in private sponsorship. –Andrew Anzel

8. The never-ending battle over net neutrality continues to not end

When Net Neutrality first landed on Createquity’s Top Ten Stories of 2010, the angle was “this is a story that is still being told.” We’re still in the telling. This contentious debate has polarized the tech-policy world since the term “network neutrality” was coined by Tim Wu in 2003, and it shows no signs of letting up, especially after the Federal Communications Commission’s recent repeal of regulations put in place by the Obama administration that were supposed to have laid the issue to rest once and for all.

Here’s how the battle lines are drawn: the pro-net neutrality camp calls for a free, fast and fair internet, where everyone gets equal access to everything. This side argues the internet is a basic human right and a critical tool for social movements, small businesses and start-ups. (Content providers from Netflix to Etsy and Kickstarter tend to be in this camp.) Opponents (usually broadband providers, like AT&T and Verizon) argue the internet should be left to free-market forces. The story begins in 2005, when Bush-era FCC Chairman Michael Powell first articulated a policy of network neutrality. This policy was tested the following year, when the FCC ordered Telco to stop blocking VoIP, and light-ish regulation followed, with the FCC going after AT&T and Apple, MetroPCS, and Verizon, among other efforts. In 2008, the White House switched hands, and the Obama-era FCC delivered major wins for the pro camp: in 2010, it introduced the Open Internet Order (with new guidelines prohibiting discrimination on “wired” services) and in 2015, following a lost lawsuit to Verizon, it voted along party lines in favor of classifying broadband Internet as a public utility. This was vote hailed as historic by advocates of a fair, fast and open Internet and many considered the battle won. (Createquity’s coverage of Obama-era net neutrality stories ranges from victories for proponents to appeals-court reversals to debates within the administration over policy.)

Then, of course, came the election of Donald Trump. Just days past his confirmation in early 2017, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai began rolling back the Obama-era regulations, and in November, Pai released a plan to repeal the 2015 ruling classifying broadband as a public utility. On December 14, despite fake comments and calls to delay (from its own Commissioners, Senators, and the City of New York), the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 rules. As before, the vote was along party lines – and hailed as historic, this time by advocates of deregulation.

So what now? In the short term, expect a slew of lawsuits and Congressional action. But here’s the thing: this is 2017, not 2003. Today we’re in a Google-Amazon-Facebook oligopoly world, and Big Tech has been conspicuously quiet this time around, suggesting they may be rich enough not to care. Some, like award-winning jazz musician Maria Schneider, say net neutrality be damned: we’ve already lost big to Google, and companies had already been denying us content access even under the Obama-era guidelines. And let’s not ignore the regulatory gap created by the AT&T vs. the Federal Trade Commission case, which rules that the FTC is banned from regulating a company if they are, even in a small way, regulated by the FCC. If there’s one thing that both sides can agree on, it’s that the internet is increasingly central to our lives – and the more it matters, and the more money there is to be made, the more we’ll fight about it. –CIS

9. The (near-)death of arts journalism

“It’s not that the book critic goes before the city hall reporter. It’s that the book critic goes before the guy who covers high school hockey,” wrote Jed Gottlieb in a comprehensive review on the state of arts criticism last January. Buzz about the impending demise of arts journalism started gaining steam around 2008 (though troubling signs were in evidence well before that). A flurry of publications – ranging from newspapers like the San Jose Mercury News and the Houston Chronicle to magazines like Time and Newsweek – have slashed A&E sections due to declining subscriptions, free-falling ad revenues, and questions about the relevance of arts criticism in the age of social media, when seemingly everyone is a critic. Even stolid institutions like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have not been immune to cuts to arts and entertainment coverage. In the aftermath, arts critics are opting for buyouts, shifting (by choice or not) to freelance positions or other beats, or exiting the field altogether. News outlets have answered declining readership by pushing writers to create generalized content (read: puff pieces) that arts patrons and hockey dads alike will click on their e-readers, keeping dwindling ad revenue rolling in (for now). Yet critical arts writing has seen a resurgence in alternative venues, with foundations and arts service organizations committing dollars and programs toward initiatives driving innovation in arts criticism and nonprofit journalism, including the emergence of artist-critics who both make and comment on art. To some, however, these shifts can create questionable conflicts of interest. Debate continues – mainly among writers, some employed, and some not – over whether the loss of the independent arts critic’s subjective, evaluative voice will prove a bigger blow than artists would like to admit. –LW

10. Obamacare passes and survives…so far

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, topped our annual review of Arts Policy Stories back when it became law in 2010. Over the years we watched Obamacare have a rocky start, overcome two challenges in the Supreme Court, and battle against increased premiums. Still, we believe Obamacare has been the piece of federal legislation that has most deeply affected the arts ecosystem in the United States in the past ten years. We think this for three reasons. First, by increasing affordable healthcare options for freelance and low-income folks, Obamacare reduces the financial risk often associated with careers in the arts and may allow more individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to enter the field. Second, lower out-of-pocket healthcare expenses (after taking subsidies into account) for previously uninsured artists may allow artists to spend less time working non-artistic “day jobs” and more time in their artistic medium. Finally, by reducing out-of-pocket expenses for newly insured folks (although not the promised $2,500 annually), Obamacare affords individuals more disposable income to participate in the arts. While several attempts by the Trump administration and current Congress to dismantle Obamacare have failed, the recently signed tax legislation could dramatically elevate costs by repealing the insurance mandate. Congress has acknowledged that such increases could also be used to justify cutting $1.3 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid, both of which enroll artists. Even so, Obamacare, or something like it, is likely to exist for at least a little while longer, to the continued benefit of the arts ecosystem. –AA

Honorable mentions

• Corporate media consolidation
• The rise of Kickstarter and equity crowdfunding
• The 2016 U.S. presidential election
• Culture and its place in global Sustainable Development Goals
• Detroit Institute of Arts rescues/is rescued by Detroit
• The rise and (partial) fall of creative placemaking
• The rise of effective altruism and tech philanthropy

“Artificial Intelligence” by Flickr user GLAS-8

Each year since 2009, Createquity has offered a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past twelve months. And let’s be frank: some of those years are a little…what’s a polite way to put this? Boring. (Looking at you, 2013.)

2016 was not one of those. When the fifth-largest nation in Europe decides to give the equivalent of a year’s allowance to every 18-year-old in the country to spend on culture, and that only barely cracks #10 on the list, you know it’s been a consequential year. (To be fair, it also reflects the global perspective we take in our methodology for ranking stories, described more fully last year.) Amidst all the uncertainty, one thing is for sure: 2017 is going to tell us a lot about our collective future.

As has been the case for the past few years, creation of this list is distributed amongst our editorial team. Authorship of individual items is noted at the end of each story.

10. The Italians launch a cultural voucher program

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who resigned this month after a bruising referendum, may not have achieved everything he had set out to accomplish, but his government did leave one cultural legacy for the country’s young people. Beginning this year, Italian teens will receive a €500 “cultural bonus” from the Italian government along with their right to vote on their 18th birthday. The money will be available for a full year, and, yes, keeping to its millennial audience, is administered entirely through an app. In its first year, a total of €290 million in government money will be apportioned out to some 574,000 teens–both Italian natives and foreign-born residents. The program is intended to foster affinity between the country’s youth and its arts sector by providing Italy’s youngest adults with incentive to consume culture on their own terms, and is part of a larger package of programs aimed at “fighting terrorism through culture” that was initially announced in November 2015. Though vouchers are viewed as efficient ways to provide social benefits (Brazil implemented a cultural voucher program in 2014; Canada and Finland are experimenting with broader programs), critics of Italy’s program question the wisdom of its launch in a struggling economy and its ultimate ability to empower workers in arts and culture. It’s unclear what will happen to the program under the new administration, though Paolo Gentili, tapped to succeed Renzi, seems, for now, to be following in Renzi’s center-left footsteps. –Michael Feldman

9. The era of Peak TV is upon us

2015 was the year that the number of original scripted television series available in the US surpassed the 400 mark–coming in at 409 shows, up almost 9% from 2014 and nearly double that of 2009. FX Networks CEO John Landgraf dubbed it the year of “Peak TV,” and assured us the decline was nigh (a welcome thought for many). He was, by his own admission, wrong. By his new accounting, the peak will hit in 2017, and possibly carry through to 2019, with the tally soon to cross 500. Netflix is primarily to be blamed (or congratulated) for the push; the streaming video industry as a whole is projected to earn nearly $7 billion this year. The business of too much TV is a complex one, with numerous winners and losers: short-term boosts in salaries and profits don’t necessarily translate to long-term profits; more scripted shows means more room for voices in the writers room but also fierce competition for crew and equipment. And the irony is it’s more expensive than ever to produce a TV show: according to Landgraf, the price for making and marketing an hour of television has gone up about 20% in the past 5 years, to $4-$5 million an hour. Beyond the benjamins (and the fear the good times will come crashing down around us), there’s another side to consider: with the explosion of scripted shows from small producers aimed at niche audiences, it’s becoming increasingly easy to create our own television bubbles, creating a narrative space populated with characters who look and think exactly as we want them to. As we look towards a Trump presidency, fake news, and filter bubbles, it will be imperative to keep an eye on the role of television. We watch as much as five hours a day, after all. –Clara Inés Schuhmacher

8. Ghost Ship brings underground artist spaces into the light of day

Described as one of the worst U.S. structure fires in over a decade, the tragic Ghost Ship warehouse fire took at least 36 lives in Oakland, CA on December 3. The warehouse, whose owner had an industrial permit (but not a residential or event permit), served as the illegal residence of some 25 artists, and was the site of an electronic dance party the night of the fire. The tragedy has pulled back the curtain regarding the crushing cost of rent and inavailability of safe spaces in which artists can afford to live and work, in Oakland and beyond. It has also triggered a flurry of investigations into code and permit violations across the country that has resulted in heavy scrutiny of similar spaces, and the subsequent closings of DIY event venues and live/work spaces in Nashville, Denver, Los Angeles and Baltimore, with more likely to come. Sadly, the issue has become politicized: as of December 24, the East Bay Times reported that the so-called Right Wing Safety Squad, an extremist group on the anonymous message board 4chan, was claiming at least partial responsibility for 16 closures after a call to action December 7 to “Make America Safe Again” by alerting authorities to potential code and permit violations in DIY artist spaces. A counteractive push from foundations is aimed at recognizing that urban artist communities operating in spaces like Ghost Ship are in desperate need of affordable real estate, and artists from marginalized communities are especially affected. Three days after the fire, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf issued a statement regarding a coordinated response to the Bay Area’s real estate problem, involving three local foundations in a $1.7 million grant initiative aimed at “preventing displacement, growing the capacity of the city’s artists and cultural organizations, and enhancing municipal resources for the cultural sector over the long haul.” –Lauren Warnecke

7. Impact investing and equity crowdfunding gain ground

Interest in impact investing–taking a financial stake in ventures designed to create social, economic, cultural or environmental impact–is growing: the 2016 U.S. Trust Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy and the First National Benchmark Survey of Family Foundations found that fully one third of those surveyed are interested in impact investing. The arts have been latecomers to this game, largely because it’s tricky to create a competitive return on investment in many areas of the arts sector. Despite $2.4 billion annually in corporate impact investing, the arts’ best chance may be with individuals, and many are working on making the arts appealing to folks with deep pockets. Upstart Co-Lab, a startup nonprofit headed by former NEA Senior Deputy Chairman Laura Callanan, has forged an agreement with the Calvert Foundation to create a Community Investment Note for impact investment opportunities like low-income artist housing developments. Another way for corporations and foundations to “make an impact” with their investing, of course, is to choose who they don’t invest in. Such divestment movements have been floating around for some time now, but the Brooklyn Community Foundation has taken it further than most, committing to divest all its interests in corporations or initiatives that, in its judgment, harm communities of color. Upstart and Calvert’s Community Investment Note, however, is primarily aimed at individual investors, who now have even more options than before thanks to 2012’s Jumpstart our Startups (JOBS) Act. The JOBS Act lifted regulations on capital investments that kept average Americans from seeking a financial stake in new companies, and this November, the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo announced a new partnership with Microventures to provide vehicles for regular folks who want to invest in new companies. –MF

6. Turkey continues its crackdown on artists and intellectuals

We first wrote about Turkey’s alarming trend towards artistic censorship in 2014 (the story made our Top Ten), and–unfortunately–the news continues to worsen. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was first elected as prime minister in 2003, was once considered a relatively moderate leader. Over the past decade he has gradually manipulated the political system to remain in power, increasingly targeting journalists, artists and intellectuals in his continued drift toward authoritarianism. A “culture war” that began in 2012 when Erdoğan felt his daughter was disrespected during a theater performance has since spurred attempts to exercise control over the state arts funding apparatus, attacks on public art and television, and going after satirists and museums. Erdoğan used an unsuccessful coup attempt earlier this year as an excuse to crack down even more on free speech, shutting down and seizing the assets of 29 publishing houses accused of aiding the enemy, imprisoning more than 120 journalists, blocking social media networks, silencing writers, closing universities, shutting down TV and radio stations, charging the editors of a Turkish daily with espionage, jailing academics on charges of promoting terrorist propaganda, and forcibly overtaking Zaman, Turkey’s largest-circulation newspaper. Freemuse claims that Turkey, along with Russia, China, Iran, and Syria, belongs to “a special league of countries that systematically repress freedom of expression,” with more than half of the recorded violations against artists worldwide originating in those nations. As Ian noted in his recent article on the Trump presidency, artists and media are often among the first to be singled out when an authoritarian government seeks to impose itself on the people. We can only hope that Turkey’s creative class continues to resist. –CIS

5. Audiobooks and podcasts break records

Books and radio, whose death has alternately been heralded and bemoaned for years, are making a comeback–in scrappy start-up form. No longer just the stuff of road trips and bad jokes, audiobooks are the fastest-growing format in the book business today. Fueled by the ubiquitous smartphone, revenue from downloaded audiobooks grew 32.3% in the first half of 2016 compared to last year. By comparison, hardcovers and paperbacks grew by 0.9% and 8.8%, respectively, and e-books revenue declined 20% in that same period. Some 35,574 titles were published as audio in 2015, up from 7,000 in 2011. Edison Research found that 43% of Americans over the age of 12 have listened to an audiobook, and some audiobooks are even outselling their print counterparts. Everyone is looking to get in on the action: publishers are hiring high profile actors, and testing out original dramas; authors, such as Stephen King and Fred Armisen, are writing new work specifically for audio. Meanwhile, the conditions and format advantages that are propelling audiobooks forward are likewise helping podcasts, which are finally breaking into the mainstream after first debuting more than a decade ago. By a recent iTunes count (which does not host all the podcasts out there), there are some 200,000 podcasts in the iTunes library, 40% of which are active, and one-fifth of which are not in English. Edison Research estimates that 36% of the US population over the age of 12 has listened to at least one podcast–21% in a given month. Legacy media organizations including the New York Times, WNYC, the Wall Street Journal and the Des Moines Register have all announced podcasting investments, and media startups are getting in on the frenzy, including Slate, Buzzfeed and Gimlet Media. As with audiobooks, podcasts are still a small sliver of the pie, representing but 2% of the total time Americans spend listening to audio, and some say we’re approaching a glut. Still, the field shows no signs of slowing down yet. Even Createquity has jumped on board–we launched a podcast in collaboration with Fractured Atlas in March. –CIS

4. Virtual reality and augmented reality establish themselves as new art forms

By most accounts, we are living in the future. You can now teleport to a helicopter flying over the Swiss Alps, then back in your living room just by strapping a cardboard box holding your phone in front of your eyes. You can sit on stage, smack in the middle of a live performance by an orchestra, ballet or play, without ever entering a hall. You can experience the Tate Britain’s iconic collection alongside real-time news cycle without traveling to London. You can even walk down your own street and battle it out with your favorite Pokémon characters via Pokémon Go, downloaded to your smartphone. It’s the era of augmented and virtual reality, and, in reality, we’re just scratching the surface of possibility. Interest in virtual reality rose exponentially this year, while the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go broke through to the mainstream with 100 million downloads worldwide, 30 million daily users, and extensive media coverage. The medium’s potential impact on the arts is far-reaching: arts organizations are putting audience members in the middle of the action, radically challenging notions of interactivity, narrative and site-specificity. Visual artists are pushing the boundaries of their work (see here, here, here), and VR experiences are making their way into film, making a splash this year at Sundance. VR is even changing how news stories are told, with the New York Times leading the charge. It’s changing the world of gaming, too: in South Africa, you can book a spot to play video games in virtual reality at the VRCade, and fend off zombies approaching you from your periphery. With Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard putting VR in the hands of the masses, it will be interesting to see how the medium continues to evolve. The Onion may just turn out to be right–on some counts, anyway. –Benzamin Yi

3. China expands holdings in (and censorship of) arts and entertainment

As Clara predicted, China dominated the news again this year, finding itself on this Top Ten two years running. The country’s economy continues to grow at a breakneck pace, and is predicted to overtake the United States as the world’s largest by 2018. China can thank the entertainment industry for much of this growth, including plans for a new $2 billion film studio in Chongqing, homegrown worldwide blockbusters, and buying up big players such as Dick Clark Productions, Legendary Entertainment, and Dalian Wanda (the Chinese conglomerate that now owns AMC Theatres.) This rapid entertainment biz expansion has raised some concerns in Congress about the potential of Chinese nationalism and socialist propaganda infusing American arts and entertainment. Those concerns are not without merit. China ranks 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index–a report by Reporters Without Borders which calls President Xi Jinping a “predator of press freedom”–and the government’s grip on content continues to tighten. Its airtight Great Firewall includes bans on most social media networks and news sites that report a negative image of the country (notably including the New York Times and Bloomberg); this censoring led Google to pull out of the market in 2010. This year, the government passed a law promoting Chinese nationalism in films, updated restrictions on television content, and scaled down relationships with Apple and Disney (despite these companies’ unbridled popularity in the country). It has also continued its intimidation of neighboring Hong Kong: the disappearance of five prominent booksellers in 2015 has virtually everyone in Hong Kong’s publishing industry scared they will be China’s next target. Still, it appears the lure of an enormous untapped global market is hard to turn down. American filmmakers have started producing films that obey the country’s strict regulations regarding content, thus dodging its quota on the release of foreign films, and gaming console manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo are getting back in on the game after a fourteen year ban was lifted last year. Corporations and media companies are adopting an “if we can’t beat them, join them” approach too–even Google is preparing for its return to China and is prepared to follow the government’s rules. Of course, it’s anyone’s guess how things will change once the Trump administration is in the White House, and we find ourselves once again with a case of wait and see on the China front. –LW

2. The United States elects Donald Trump

No top ten list for 2016 would be complete without mention of the election and the now certain inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. As the entire nonprofit sector holds its breath waiting for the effects of a Trump presidency on its business and constituents, predictions about what will come to pass in the coming years run the gamut from apocalyptic to status quo. There are few clues as to how Trump and his Republican majority in Congress might address the arts sector. His responses to Alyssa Rosenberg’s questionnaire about arts policy in March suggest a free market approach, similar to other policy areas like healthcare and education. The delegation of major decisions to Congress, and the recent proposed appointment of Sylvester Stallone to the top arts position in the administration, underscore Trump’s habit of relying on others (often supportive friends with little government experience) to figure out policy details, especially when they fall outside of the core issues that defined his campaign. While tensions between Congress and the National Endowment of the Arts have eased significantly since the culture wars of the 1990s, there is nevertheless a risk that the Republican Congress may revive attempts to defund the NEA in the context of a larger effort to rein in government spending. Meanwhile, the GOP and Trump administration’s promised policy adjustments to the Affordable Care Act (which provides insurance for many independent artists), and planned tax reforms (including the possibility of a rollback of the tax incentive for charitable giving) could both have immediate effects on the financial security of individual artists and small to mid-sized arts organizations. Most concerning of all is Trump’s threats to freedom of the press and his authoritarian impulses, which could expand constrictions on freedom of expression in a country that has prided itself on being one of the safest places for speech in the world. While the likelihood of overturning a mountain of legal precedent protecting the first amendment is relatively slim, Trump’s attempts at intimidation (like lashing out about flag burning or lecturing Mike Pence at a Hamilton curtain call), not to mention the ease with which his supporters can be goaded into threats of violence against vulnerable individuals and populations, are worrying to say the least. The bizarre and uncharted landscape we’ve found ourselves in has inspired much reflection, from calls to action and lessons learned from the campaign, to the role of the arts in promoting fantasy over fact. One thing is clear–artists will play a role in public discourse over the next four years, and we’ll be right there with them. –Rebecca Ratzkin

1. Artificial intelligence comes into its own

Wait, what?! Donald Trump in the Oval Office is not the top story of the year? Amazing as it may seem, events of 2016 make clear that the march of technology promises greater long-term disruption for our society than even our Tweeter-in-chief can muster. Chief among these developments was the March tournament victory of AlphaGo, a computer application developed by Google’s DeepMind team, over Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol. While it was expected that an artificial intelligence would eventually topple a human in the ancient Chinese game, the milestone was achieved nearly a decade earlier than anticipated when AlphaGo bested Lee in four out of five matches. To understand how consequential this is, consider that the number of potential positions in Go is exponentially greater than the number of atoms in the universe, putting the game beyond the power of the brute-force computational approach that has enabled computers to defeat humans at games like chess. Instead, the DeepMind team trained AlphaGo to learn from past games in order to develop new strategies for itself in real time–not unlike what a human would do. Google has used similar techniques, more recently, to have its Translate product churn out translations of literature that are almost indistinguishable from human efforts.

The implications for the arts are at least twofold, both enormous. First, the accomplishments of machine learning are directly tied to the accelerating trend of automation pervading all aspects of society, manifesting most recently in self-driving vehicles and fast-casual spots that replace cashiers with iPads. As more people’s jobs become redundant with what machines can do, unemployment rates could rise substantially, creating far more collective leisure time–and far more opportunity for creative expression. (How exactly that leisure time is spent will, clearly, depend a lot on what we decide to do about our social safety net, which is why many people in the tech community favor a universal basic income.) That could be amazing for the cause of art, though perhaps not so great for professional artists, who are already facing competition from the likes of Jukedeck and Google Brain itself. A grimmer view of artificial intelligence’s advances points to the specter of AI as, essentially, a new life form that could compete with humans for dominance of the earth. Given the rate at which machine learning applications are developing, a lot of smart people have begun to conclude that this isn’t just science fiction–to the point that increasing resources are flowing toward the cause of ensuring that the development of an artificial superintelligence, if and when it happens, won’t destroy the human race. Lest you get too freaked out, be reassured that this worst-case scenario is still considered a low-probability outcome by most observers…but perhaps now you can understand why we think this outranks The Donald. –Ian David Moss

Honorable Mention:

• The Pulse nightclub shooting targets social dancers
• Brexit shakes up the landscape for UK artists and organizations
• Google Books ruled to be fair use (and Stairway to Heaven is not plagiarized)
• Artistic quality metrics controversy at Arts Council England
• Canada Council holds grantees accountable for diversity (and other changes)
• Black Lives Matter and US Department of Arts and Culture release policy platforms

Best wishes for 2017 to all!

Trump mural, Downtown Los Angeles, California, USA (Credit: Cory Doctorow, via Creative Commons)

A bitter and divisive 2016 Presidential election is finally over, and Donald J. Trump’s seat in the Oval Office awaits him, with Republicans holding their grip on both houses of Congress. Trump’s views on the arts are vague; the Irish Times reported that, when asked his position on the arts, Trump spoke of decorating his promised border wall with Mexico so that it “looks real nice.” His main connection to the arts is through architecture, although he has a contemptuous relationship with the critics and an American Institute of Architects letter congratulating his victory left many of the organization’s members reeling. (For whatever reason, a similarly congratulatory message from Americans for the Arts escaped an analogous public backlash.) As with nearly every other sector, questions abound about what a Trump presidency will look like. The litany of artists’ concerns include the future of public arts funding, the fate of the Affordable Care Act (which provides insurance for many independent artists), the possibility of a rollback of the tax incentive for charitable giving, and fear of moving backward after decades of work to ensure equity for all Americans. Trump’s authoritarian impulses could have a major impact on freedom of expression, including in the arts: while the likelihood of overturning a mountain of precedent favoring the first amendment, be it flag burning or lecturing Mike Pence at a Hamilton curtain call, is relatively slim, Trump has many legal and quasi-legal means at his disposal to intimidate policymakers, journalists, and artists. The bizarre contours of the election likewise have “provided significant thought-fuel for cultural organizations” and called into question the role of truth and evidence in public dialogue. On the plus side, several pro-arts ballot measures passed electoral muster on November 8 (the most significant of these being the reauthorization of a $50+ million public funding stream in the Denver area through 2030), several museums publicly affirmed that they will continue to provide safe spaces and work to ensure the arts and culture are available to all, and healthcare robber baron Martin Shkreli is keeping at least the first part of his promise to release the only known copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album in the event of a Trump victory.

Yet more regulations in the rapidly growing Chinese film market. A new law further promotes nationalism in Chinese films. According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, the law imposes massive fines against companies that fabricate box-office earnings or other data, and further states that films should “serve the people and socialism, prioritizing social benefits and bringing about harmony of economic returns and contribution to society.” The growing film industry in China is second only to the United States, and may soon take over the top spot with plans to build a new $2 billion studio in Chongqing. Anxious to join the Chinese market, U.S. studios have been able to avoid the country’s quota to release just 34 foreign films per year by incorporating Chinese characters and plot lines. China appears equally anxious to find a grip in the U.S. market, with the Chinese firm Dalian Wanda picking up big swaths of the entertainment industry, buying AMC Theatres in 2012, and more recently adding Legendary Entertainment and Dick Clark Productions for $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. As the world’s largest media conglomerate, Dalian Wanda’s recent moves made Congress sit up straighter, raising concerns about the potential influence of Chinese nationalism and socialist propaganda infusing the American entertainment industry.

Is impact investing finally hitting its stride? The arts could benefit from an emerging trend among wealthy donors. Of those surveyed in the 2016 U.S. Trust Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy and the First National Benchmark Survey of Family Foundations, the Denver Post reported that a third are interested in impact investing, or taking a financial stake in ventures designed to create social, economic, cultural or environmental impact. The arts are a little late to the game, because it’s tricky to create a competitive return on investment in many areas of the arts sector. So despite corporate donations of $2.4 billion annually toward impact investing, the arts’ best chance for joining the trend may be with individuals. At least that’s what the folks at Upstart Co-Lab believe; the startup headed by former NEA Senior Deputy Chairman Laura Callanan has forged an agreement with Calvert Foundation to create a Community Investment Note for opportunities like low-income artist housing developments. For corporations and foundations, impact investing is partly about who they give to, and partly about who they don’t. The Brooklyn Community Foundation is leading the charge in this area, committing to divest all its interests in corporations or initiatives that harm communities of color.

Equity is the newest Indiegogo perk. The crowdfunding platform Indiegogo announced a new partnership with Microventures, joining the lesser-known Crowdfunder, OurCrowd, and EquityNet as vehicles for regular folks who want to invest in new companies. Budding entrepreneurs can now offer potential investors a financial stake in their companies (think Shark Tank on the Internet) instead of the traditional crowdfunding model that trades products and other perks for donations. Equity crowdfunding became possible in 2012 due in part to President Obama’s Jumpstart our Startups (JOBS) Act lifting regulations on capital investments that kept average Americans from seeking a financial stake in new companies. Rival crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, whose main difference from Indiegogo is its “all-or-nothing” model, remains committed to project-based funding over entrepreneurial pursuits, and does not currently have plans to implement equity crowdfunding.

Philly parks and libraries get a facelift. The William Penn Foundation announced it will give up to $100 million to the city of Philadelphia’s Rebuild initiative to enhance community parks, libraries, and recreation centers. The gift, which is the largest in the foundation’s history by a factor of four, covers more than 80% of the city’s fundraising goal for foundations and private donors. Penn intends not only revitalize Philadelphia’s infrastructure but also make a significant social and economic impact by creating jobs and promoting community engagement. The big news follows on the heels of executive director Laura Sparks’s departure from the foundation, the latest in a series of such transitions for Penn that has prompted a renewed call from the author of a previously published critical report to diversify its board and delegate greater authority to staff leadership.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• University of Iowa Museum of Art names former Congressman and National Endowment for the Humanities head Jim Leach as its interim director.
• Former Colorado Business Committee for the Arts head Deborah Jordy has been appointed as the new executive director of Denver’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District.
• Ken Tabachnick will be the new executive director of the Merce Cunningham Trust.
• A tenure-track Assistant Professor position is available at the University of Arizona in the Division of Art and Visual Culture Education
• University of Oklahoma’s School of Visual Arts seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Art, Technology & Culture.
• Queens Museum seeks a full-time Director of Education, supervising in-school and community programs and New New Yorkers, an arts and literacy initiative for and with adult immigrants.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• A new study on tax filings by the Institute for Policy Studies found that U.S. giving is top-heavy, with more than half of donations coming from the top 10%. Market Watch summarized the report, noting that the middle class is giving less to charity compared to 10 years ago while those earning at least $100,000 annually have increased donations by 40%.
• GLAAD reported record-high representation of LGBTQ, black, and disabled characters on broadcast television series this season.
• New evidence further links viewing of reality TV to narcissism. And a study out of Michigan State University explains why we gravitate toward ideological bubbles, surrounding ourselves with those who agree with us. The short version: it’s more comfortable.
• U.S. orchestras fare relying more on donations than ticket sales, according to a report by League of American Orchestras. With subscriptions down and donations up, the shift is forcing organizations to revisit funding models and mission statements. Similarly, the Arts Council of England reports that UK nonprofits are increasingly relying on private funds, with revenues dropping despite an uptick in charitable giving.
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s data dashboard reveals online giving trends to arts and culture, among other causes, using data from the Network for Good platform.
• The MacArthur Foundation released an evaluation of a loan fund program designed for small and mid-size arts and culture organizations.
• Women in the arts are not exempt from the wage gap between genders, according to a study in the journal Social Currents. And men are the most creative of the sexes…and the least, says Pacific Standard’s Tom Jacobs in a review of the literature.
• New research at the University of Waterloo makes the case that arts experiences should be accessible to all because they are tied to wellbeing.
• European researchers may have found the heart of creativity, locating structures in the brain that form novel connections between known and new information. Meanwhile, a new study funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China suggests that the brain responds differently to classical music compared to popular music. And Keith Sawyer discusses interesting new research on musical improvisation and the influence improvisers have on each other’s contributions in a jam session.
• A study from Fort Collins, CO yields promising results about music’s positive effects on delaying and perhaps preventing dementia. Sadly, though, a survey of 2,200 musicians conducted by the charitable organization Help Musicians UK found high rates of anxiety and depression.
• Belgian researchers find that even experts have a difficult time discerning between fake art and real art.
• The New England Foundation for the Arts published “Moving Dance Forward,” an in-depth report analyzing the dance field’s pressing needs and the impact of the National Dance Project.
• Theater is a more popular leisure activity than sports for Brits, according to a survey by Birmingham’s Town Hall Symphony Hall. The results suggest that younger generations are even more likely to attend a show, with nearly two-thirds of respondents under age 25 saying they enjoy live performance across all genres.
• A new Slover Linett report highlights the changemaking potential of the Levitt chain of music venues (disclosure: Createquity founder Ian David Moss was an advisor to the project).
• Chicago-based Ingenuity’s report on “State of the Arts” in Chicago Public Schools indicates that access to arts education during the school day is on the rise.
• UNESCO’s Culture for Sustainable Urban Development initiative aims to become a policy framework to support governments in promoting arts and culture as a means of sustainability.
• A meta-analysis published in EPJ Data Science claims that most fiction falls into one of six core story lines.
• Tim Robbins’ “Improv for Inmates” expands to 10 California correctional facilities next year, as promising data from a preliminary study by the California Department of Corrections suggests that the program reduces recidivism.
• A study from the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that robots will eventually take over nearly a third of our jobs.

China – photo by flickr user Diego Aviles

China has a long history of censoring free speech and media content in an effort to control the information its citizens consume. In 2016, Reporters Without Borders ranked it 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, and that position is likely to keep sliding as China continues to fortify its virtual borders. (By comparison, Russia ranks at 148 on that same index.) This month, China went after Apple, which had long received somewhat preferential treatment in the country, shutting down its iBooks Store and iTunes Movies just six months after those services launched. That same day, it abruptly suspended a partnership between e-commerce giant Alibaba and Disney, struck in December 2015, which allowed Alibaba to license streaming Disney content. China also significantly tightened restrictions on foreign nonprofits under the guise of national defense, echoing Vladimir Putin’s policies in Russia. The month ended with a move against one of its own: China suspended Ren Zhiqiang, an outspoken property magnate, from the Communist party in retaliation for Ren’s publicly criticizing President Xi Jinping’s call for loyalty from the Chinese media. All signs seemingly point to the government of the world’s most populous country getting more and more repressive by the week.

Google Books scores a big win for fair use. A decade-long copyright battle has finally come to an end as the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming that Google’s scanning of books to make excerpts available on its search engine, without the authors’ permission, is a form of copyright infringement. Guild members believe Google is providing an illegal free substitute for their work, depriving authors and publishers of potential revenue. (An original 2005 settlement, later rejected by courts, would have required Google to pay authors.) The Supreme Court did not comment on its decision, but the crux of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals’s earlier ruling in Google’s favor was that despite scanning entire books, Google is only supplying “snippets” to the public. Since in most cases these snippets are vetted so as not to actually satisfy a reader’s need for the entire book, Google’s use of them can be considered “transformative” as permitted by the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law. The court also considers these excerpts primarily a source of information about the full texts, and individual authors have never been guaranteed “an exclusive right to supply information… about [their] works” under copyright law. ArsTechnica posits that “in the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.”

From robot-building to social innovation, Silicon Valley invests in artists: In mid-April, a group of artists, impact investors, philanthropic funders and social innovators launched Upstart Co-Lab. Led by Laura Callanan, who was briefly the NEA’s Senior Deputy Chairman under Jane Chu, the new collaborative aims to connect more artists with social entrepreneurship and impact investing opportunities, recognizing the importance of artists as catalysts for economic and social change in the private as well as public sector. With partners including the Ford Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Oberlin College on board, some of Co-lab’s more ambitious initial proposals include a new Creative Economy Index Fund (comprising U.S. public companies across the creative industries) that seeks to enable targeted impact investment in the arts for the first time. An “ArtPath” national initiative also promises to help artists develop career skills and plans to better make a living from their creative work. Meanwhile, according to a recent Washington Post report, one particular sub-sector of Silicon Valley is especially in need of creative professionals like writers who can “engineer the personalities” of virtual assistants, i.e. Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. An ambitious new crop of virtual assistant startups (garnering at least $35 million in investment over the past year) is developing bots that can engage in not just mundane office tasks but more “human” interactions, requiring the same types of colorful personalities and detailed backstories as Hollywood characters. Up for debate is just how lifelike to make these virtual assistants without causing psychological confusion. Yet giving these rookie robots enough “people skills” to handle all possible workplace situations (including avoiding being provoked by their “bosses” into publicly offensive behavior) seemingly requires the skills of true artists.

Music, art and the Panama Papers. The Panama Papers–a leak of 11.5 million files from the database of the world’s fourth-biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca–rocked the world when they were released this month by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The Papers–the largest leak in whistleblower history–reveal the myriad ways the rich have exploited tax havens to conceal their wealth, and have fascinated and horrified the public in equal measure with their scope and complexity. They implicate some 143 politicians, including twelve national leaders among its pages, with a $2 billion trail that leads all the way to Russian president Vladimir Putin. So what does this have to do wit the arts? For one thing, Putin’s apparent use of the St. Petersburg-based cellist Sergei Roldugin as his “bag man” has sparked the public’s imagination. More substantively, the art market, which this year has reached astronomical proportions, has had its underbelly exposed by the scandal. The papers reveal several instances of potentially shady dealings, raising troubling questions about the value of provenance and the legality of ownership.

Cinema returns to Gaza. The embattled Gaza Strip once enjoyed a vibrant cinema culture, with more than a dozen cinemas across the small territory showing films almost daily. In 1987, these cinemas burned during the first Palestinian uprising. They were repaired, only to be destroyed, definitively, in 1996. In January, Gaza Cinema, led by members of the production company Ain Media, quietly began a movie-going revival. They rented a small events space, and screened “Oversized Coat,” a 2013 film from the Jordan-based Palestinian director Nawras Abu Salehl. As word has spread, so has demand; this month the organizers added a second weekly show. Tickets are priced at an accessible $2.50, allowing many to participate their first-ever movie-going experience. For the moment, the organizers are focused on Palestinian films, though they plan to expand their content (with permission, of course).

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After twenty-five years with the McKnight Foundation, Neal Cuthbert has announced he will retire from his position of vice president of program at the end of this year.
• Robert L. Hughes has been named the new director of K-12 strategy at the Gates Foundation.
• Regina R. Smith has been appointed managing director of The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program.
• The Ford Foundation seeks a Program Associate. Posted on April 8; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Several recent reports provide insights into United States philanthropy and the arts. According to the the 2016 edition of the BNP Paribas Individual Philanthropy Index, the U.S. ranks first among four regions worldwide in terms of the commitment of its philanthropists, followed by Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet the Foundation Center’s snapshot of 2013 arts and culture giving demonstrates that arts funding did not keep pace with a general rise in U.S. foundation giving that year; the arts also received a lower share of overall giving than in the previous three decades.
• Two reports this month parsed film data. One shows strong evidence that movies featuring black actors not only keep up with films at the box office and among the critics, but blow away films with no black actors at all. A second analysis, published in Polygraph, breaks down the dialogue of some 2,000 films by cast member age and gender, revealing some stark realities about equity.
• How Cities Can Grow the Maker Movement, published this month by the National League of Cities, explores the emergence of the maker movement within a selection of major U.S. cities.
• How much TV do millennials watch a day? A new report out from Nielsen suggests not all millennials (that’s people 18-34) are the same.
• Americans for the Arts’s latest National Arts Index measuring the vitality of arts and culture in the United States shows American exported arts goods rising in value and new technologies as increasingly important in engaging arts audiences, among other findings. Meanwhile, SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR)’s second Annual Arts Vibrancy Index ranked Portland, Austin and Kansas City as some of most vibrant art cities in the U.S.; they join a “top 20” list that also includes New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
• This month, the Education Commission of the States and Arts Education Partnership published its 2016 “State of the States” comprehensive survey of state policies for arts education nationwide.
• ArtPlace America released two field scans this month focusing on housing and public safety, kicking off an ongoing effort to assess “how arts and cultural practitioners have and might be partners” in achieving a range of ArtPlace’s community development goals.
• A first-of-its-kind study commissioned by several major US museums shows that the effects of arts programs can last well into adulthood. In other news, US museums spent nearly $5 billion on expansions during the time of economic recession between 2007-2014, more than the other 37 countries examined put together, according to research by The Art Newspaper.
• The percentage of Americans who visited a library in the past year is down sharply, according to a Pew report on the Future of Libraries–and technology may not be the only reason.
• For the first time, UK higher education data experts QS have ranked universities by their performing arts capabilities, with two music and drama conservatories making it into the top ten this year.
• A recent Creative Capital survey of its artist grant recipients from 2000-2013 found that the awards have had significant impact on both artists’ visibility and income.
• The LA County Arts Commission released a literature review on how organizations have addressed issues of diversity and cultural equity, as a first step towards achieving the November 2015 resolution from the County Board of Supervisors to diversify local arts organizations. D5 also published an annual report on the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in philanthropy. Related, in a paper recently published in The Sociological Quarterly, sociologist Keith Leicht argues that the conversation about inequality in America revolves too much around disparities between groups and not enough on the disparities within them.
• Barry’s Blog’s recent survey on how nonprofit arts organizations use communications internally and externally revealed that while many report “information overload,” few have formal communications plans (or staff) to address this issue.
• Research from the Chicago School of Business found that setting a donation option as the default in a charitable appeal can sometimes increase revenue, but not always.
• New research commissioned by The Guardian into the 70 million comments left on its site since 2006 provides the first quantitative evidence that articles written by women and minorities are more often the victims of internet abuse and trolling. Also across the pond, The Stage published two reports on arts professionals in the UK, one finding that local arts graduates earn less than graduates of any other subject, and the other showing that women leaders at the country’s top subsidized theaters are paid £29,000 less on average than men. But here’s something to inspire “confidence” about making a living as a visual artist: inflating your ego might also inflate your prices! A new study from the European Journal of Finance suggests that the work of narcissistic artists earns more at auctions.
• An exploratory paper out of the UK found mental health benefits to participating in drum circles. Are we all in fact born with a beat? Recent insights from neuroscience (aided by small zoo’s worth of dancing animals) shed light on the biological origins of rhythm.

Men playing go – photo by flickr user J.A.G.A.

Computers have a long history of beating humans at complex games. This month, Google clinched the crown jewel a decade earlier than anticipated, when its program AlphaGo defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol in four out of five games of Go. Invented some 2,500 years ago in China, the game is deceptively simple: despite straightforward rules, there are more possible legal positions in the game than there are atoms in the observable universe (actually, than all the atoms in all universes if there were as many universes as there are atoms in our universe!). As such, it has long been an irresistible challenge to artificial intelligence researchers. Google’s DeepMind project team’s winning strategy was to abandon the traditional AI tactic of building search trees in favor of deep neural networks, training AlphaGo not only to learn from games past, but, importantly, to discover new strategies for itself. Why does this matter for the arts? Well, first of all, we just witnessed a computer mastering an art form: historically, Go was considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholar, the others being a musical instrument, calligraphy, and painting. And second, the implications of AlphaGo’s win for the future of artificial intelligence go far beyond this single match; the principles DeepMind uses in AlphaGo may have broader applications for artificial “general” intelligence, which could include creating artistic work. More controversially, the early completion of this milestone may signal a hastening of the moment when machines take over the world.

China cracks down on TV. Cultural censorship in China reached new levels this month when the the government released updated regulations for what’s shown on television. The guidelines make it illegal to depict “abnormal sexual relationships and behaviours” on screen. This means, effectively, no incest, extramarital affairs, one night stands, underage relationships–and no gay people. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, it still remains taboo, and the first show to be cut under the new rules was Addicted, about the lives of queer high schoolers, outraging the show’s many fans and angering LGBT activists. The measures are a challenge for everyone, not least of which for Chinese video websites, which have benefited from a lack of government regulation of online television: in 2015, Chinese video platforms produced some 805 online shows, compared with 200 shows in 2013. All eyes are on if and how the new regulations are circumvented or resisted. The increased censorship comes at a time of rising individualism in China, and on the heels of a recent tiff between President Xi Jinping and Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang which unexpectedly spurred journalists, scholars and party insiders to come forward in his defense. Will it be enough to force a wavering of the party line? Only time will tell.

Canada follows through with big arts funding increases. Just two months after committing to diversity at the grant level, Canada continues to lead the way in government arts funding with the announcement of Justin Trudeau’s budget plan. Fulfilling campaign promises, the cultural sector will receive a $1.87 billion boost over five years. $75 million was reinstated to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s budget this year, to be followed by $150 million a year until 2020-21. The Canada Council for the Arts also received welcome funding news, though a bit less than expected; it will see an additional $40 million this year, eventually rising to $180 million by 2020-21. Likewise, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada will each receive $3.5 million this year, and $8 million annually thereafter. (The NFB made its own news this month when it announced that it is committed to ensuring that, in the future, half of its films are directed by women and half of its production budgets are spent on films directed by women.) After years of budget slashes by the previous Conservative government, all are in agreement that the funding is a “game changer.” The package also includes capital funding for Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, which announced this month that it will launch a new Indigenous Theater department that will equal the NAC’s English and French Theater companies in importance.

ISIS is out of Palmyra. The Islamic State’s ongoing destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria has received lots of coverage from Createquity over the past year (see here, here, and here.) This month, ISIS was finally driven by Syrian government forces from the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the center of Syria. With ISIS gone, the work of restoring the ancient site can begin. Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s head of antiquities and museums, has said that “eighty percent of the ruins are in good shape,” and that the city will be fully restored in five years. Beyond Palmyra, significant efforts are underway to preserve antiquities under threat. The Italians, in conjunction with UNESCO, have created a task force dubbed Peacekeepers of Culture which is aimed at keeping ancient artworks, monuments, artifacts and archaeological sites in conflict areas out of the hands of extremists. In addition, several organizations have undertaken to document cultural heritage digitally, most recently the French 3D digitization agency Iconem. Finally, the International Criminal Court this month is considering whether to take to trial Malian jihadi leader Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi for destroying mausoleums and damaging a mosque in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012. If the trial goes ahead, it will be the first time that war crimes against cultural heritage constitute the main charge of an ICC hearing.

Cultural policy is so hot right now in the UK. The UK’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, published a much anticipated White Paper this month, the first such statement since 1965. It comes at a critical juncture for the arts in Great Britain, as organizations across the country continue to recover from the recession-era austerity policies that forced a greater reliance on American-style private funding and government advocacy. The White Paper calls for a widening of access for the arts, announces a Cultural Protection Fund for heritage in global conflict zones to be launched this spring, and calls for a detailed reviews of museums, arts and heritage, due to be completed by summer 2017. (In advance of the paper’s release, Arts Council England announced earlier this month a major restructuring to its grant programs, which are in direct support of many of the tenets of Vaizey’s work.) Though some have criticized Vaizey for a lack of vision, many welcome the “vote of confidence” it places on the arts. Meanwhile, the Cultural Value Project, a two-year exploration of the value of culture beyond economic measures, concluded this month with the publication of a significant evidence review that perhaps controversially concludes that the value derived from arts and cultural activity arises primarily at the individual level.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Maurine Knighton, currently senior vice president at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, has been named new program director of the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, replacing Ben Cameron.
• Malcolm White returns to the helm of the Mississippi Arts Commission after three years as the state’s tourism chief.
• Pew Center for Arts & Heritage seeks a Center Specialist in the visual arts. No closing date.
• The League of American Orchestras is hiring a Director and a Manager for its Knowledge Center. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Americans for the Arts and Ipsos surveyed 3,020 adults in December 2015 on topics such as support for arts education and government arts funding, personal engagement in the arts, and the personal benefits and wellbeing that come from engaging in the arts. Here are the results.
• A report commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation looks closely at what arts leaders across generations “really need” while the Center for the Future of Museums’ TrendsWatch report looks at what museum audiences “really need.”
• Art of the Rural and the Rural Policy Research Institute launched Next Generation: The Future of Arts & Culture Placemaking in Rural America, a “digital learning commons” designed to address major challenges facing rural arts practitioners.
• A paper published in the Journal of Cultural Economics this month looks at the history of copyright in music and of music publishing.
• “Neighborhood Diversity, Economic Health, and the Role of the Arts” zeroes in on the relationship between arts organizations and economic and cultural diversity in New York City.
• Over the last three years, the Denver Public School system has invested $40 million into its arts education programs. This month, it released an analysis of the impact of this investment.
• Several reports this month look at the benefits of music making. A close look at choral singing published in Psychology of Music suggests that the “well-being benefits afforded by choral singing could be distinct in comparison with other leisure activities.” Another study, this one from WolfBrown and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, looks at the positive impact that making live music together has an families. A third builds on the Manchester Camerata Orchestra’s pioneering music projects with dementia patients.
• A paper published this month offers a systematic literature review of the applications of cultural impact assessment internationally.
• Besides the Cultural Value Project’s final report, several other studies have come out of the UK this month. One report looks into whether physical proximity to a museum or gallery affects whether or not you’ll visit. A survey by the Entertainment Retailers Association finds that the number of stores selling music and video has more than doubled since 2009, while another finds that London-based organizations receive almost twice as much arts funding as the rest of England combined. Finally, researchers from the London School of Economics and Goldsmiths College suggest that there is a “class ceiling” in British performing arts organizations.

North Adams, Massachusetts – photo by flickr user John Herr

In 1986, Thomas Krens, with an MBA in hand from Yale University and new to his consultancy for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, suggested turning a shuttered electrical plant in North Adams, Massachusetts into the world’s largest contemporary art museum. He had spent six years in North Adams as the director of the Williams College Museum of Art, and the plant had been in his backyard. It was a big, wild idea, and it came to fruition thirteen years later, when the site became the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in 1999. Now, nearly thirty years later, Krens is back with a newer, bigger idea for North Adams: a 160,000-square-foot art gallery on the city’s Harriman-West Airport grounds. This new museum is designed to complement, rather than compete, with the “old” one: it would only show its contemporary-art collection, and there would be no exhibition programming. The idea is unusual in structure, as well; unlike most museums, Krens’ idea is for this one to be privately owned by a for-profit group of investors, and they’re only seeking a twenty-year lease. Not much has been heard of from Krens following the end of his twenty-year tenure as director of the Guggenheim Museum, but this new idea–five years in the making and originally planned for China–is sure to push him back into the limelight. The North Adams Airport Commission is on board. Next up: the Federal Aviation Administration.

Chula Vista Schools Invest Heavily in Arts Education. Chula Vista Elementary School District, which lies just south of San Diego, California, serves some 30,000 students. The last time the district had an arts coordinator was the 1970s, and last school year, the district had just four full-time art teachers. All this is about to change: this summer, the district has undertaken a massive expansion of its arts education program, hiring 60 new art teachers, with 16 spots still left to fill. This unprecedented investment in arts education, spearheaded by Lauren Shelton, has been made possible by $15 million in funding approved by the Chula Vista school board in June. The money comes from from Governor Jerry Brown’s state local control funding formula, which shifted education spending decisions to the local level and targets disadvantaged students. Chula Vista is not the only district to benefit from Governor Brown’s formula, but it’s the first to focus the entire pool of funds–$5 million a year for the next three years–on aggressively expanding arts education. The District’s goal is simple, if ambitious: to raise student engagement, boost attendance and improve academic performance among low-performing students, and of course, implement a long-term plan to restore arts instruction in the district.

Social Sciences Scrutinized, Found Lacking. The social sciences have found themselves in the Createquity limelight recently, and not necessarily for good reason. In March, we reported that the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology had banned testing for statistical significance and related procedures in papers published in its pages. In May we covered Michael LaCour’s study on the impact of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior, which was retracted when its data was found to be falsified. And this past month, the journal Science released the findings of a yearslong effort to faithfully reproduce 100 studies, in most cases using original data. These studies, published in the leading journals Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, are considered some of the most important work published on personality, relationships, learning and memory. In the case of more than half of the studies, the replication project found that “the evidence for most published findings was not nearly as strong as originally claimed.” While the study of the studies itself could stand some further investigation, the shocking numbers are just the latest warning not to take research results at face value. Is increased competition for academic jobs and research funding to blame, or is the Internet merely making it easier than before to spot crimes against science? Either way, social science is not doomed–but it sure is harder than we give it credit for.

China Lifts 14-Year Old Ban on Video Gaming. In 2000, the Chinese government banned the production and sale of video game consoles, citing concerns that games could have “adverse effects” on Chinese youth. Last year, China eased those restrictions, letting game console-makers operate in the Shanghai free trade zone (though even then they had to enter into contracts to build new manufacturing facilities, secure approval for console sales from regulators, and allow every console to be individually inspected.) This month, the Ministry of Culture lifted the ban altogether, opening the door to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to manufacture and sell their Xboxes, Playstations and Wii. Although China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s largest mobile gaming market by 2016, it’s not immediately clear what impact the lifting of the ban will have on Chinese gamers, or on the bottom line of the big three. In the absence of consoles, PC and web based games have eaten up the lion’s share of the market, leaving little room for new products, especially new consoles, which have, despite it all, long been available on the grey market.

Art School Profits off of Student Dreams. Remember when the entire first year MFA class at USC Roski School of Art and Design in Los Angeles dropped out in May on account of their funding and teaching opportunities being curtailed? If that story made you mad, have we got a tale of student exploitation for you. The for-profit Academy of Art University, based in San Francisco, was by founded by Richard S. and Clara Stephens in the 1920s. Under the watch of granddaughter Elisa Stephens, who became president in 1992, the school has become the largest private art university in the United States, with 16,000 students (35% of which are online-only) generating an estimated $300 million in annual revenues. The Stephenses are purportedly worth some $800 million, which they spend–lavishly and visibly–on prime San Francisco real estate, summer homes, yachts, jets, and cars. According to a Forbes exposé this month, it seems that fortune has been built on the selling of false hope. The Academy accepts any applicant with a high school diploma and the willingness to spend $22,000 a year on tuition–no art portfolio required. Only 32% of full-time students and 3% of part-time students graduate, and it takes most full-time students six years to do so. (The school keeps a full semester’s tuition if the student is enrolled for at least four weeks.) Add to this a caginess around job placement statistics and numerous building violations, and regulators are finally taking notice. It’s worth reconsidering the white-hot controversy surrounding Roski dean Erica Muhl in this light: shady as the university’s dealings might have been, they affected a grand total of seven students.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• At long last, the National Endowment for the Arts has a new theater director: Greg Reiner.
• Charlotte Cohen has been appointed executive director of the Brooklyn Arts Council, succeeding Ella J. Weiss who is retiring after serving 16 years as president of the organization.
• The Tucson Pima Arts Council announced a leadership shift this month: Debi Chess Mabie was appointed CEO, with current executive director Roberto Bedoya transitioning to the new role of Director of Civic Engagement.
• Angie Kim was named president and CEO of California’s Center for Cultural Innovation.
• Jennifer Coleman has been appointed Senior Program Officer for the Arts at the George Gund Foundation in Cleveland.
• After fifteen years with the Walton Family Foundation, Buddy Philpot will step down as its executive director.
• Sarah Martínez-Helfman has been named president of Philadelphia’s Samuel S. Fels Fund.
• Former Microsoft executive Michael Thatcher was named president and CEO of Charity Navigator.
• Scott Cantrell, long time staff music critic at the Dallas Morning, is the latest writer to accept a buyout at the paper.
• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation seeks an arts program officer. Posted July 27; no closing date.
• The David and Lura Lovell Foundation seeks an executive director. Posted July 31; no closing date.
• The Krupp Family Foundation is hiring a part-time Foundation Grants and Program Director. Posted August 4; no closing date.
• The Prince Charitable Trusts is hiring a managing director. Posted August 5; no closing date.
• The California Arts Council is hiring a deputy director. Posted August 19; closing date September 18.
• The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is hiring a Program Fellow for the three-year Hewlett Fellowship. Posted August 28; no closing date.
• The South Jersey Cultural Alliance seeks an executive director. Closing date September 11.
• Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts is hiring an Assistant Director for the Arts Research Institute. Closing date September 30.
• The New Jersey Council for the Humanities seeks a Director of Programs. Applications will be reviewed beginning October 15.
• ArtsEnging/a2ru_News has openings for a Research Director and Research Fellow. No closing date.
• AEA Consulting is recruiting a research analysts and consultants. No closing date.
• The Oklahoma Arts Council is hiring a Director of Art in Public Places. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A recent analysis of the Mellon Foundation’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute has found that the program has “no significant effect” on Ph.D. completion rates among minority students.
• The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism examined the 700 top-grossing films between 2007 and 2014 and released a report revealing, in no uncertain terms, Hollywood’s bias against women, people of color and LGBT characters.
• A new study suggests that educational television programs such as Sesame Street have not been successful in reducing kids’ prejudices.
• The U.S. Department of Education released two reports assessing the qualifications of middle & high school instructors across arts disciplines. Spoiler alert: they’re not all qualified.
• How do you get to Carnegie Hall? A new study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that individuals underestimate the value of persistence for creative performance. Another report from the same journal indicates that money does matter, and what’s more, that low-income individuals are less happy in places with greater income inequality.
• A public study of Chicago residents commissioned by Arts Alliance Illinois last year reveals that while Chicagoans are united in wanting access to arts, not all have access: 28 of 77 of the city’s neighborhoods are home to zero arts organizations.
• A report published by Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists, reveals that underpayment and harsh working conditions have persisted for migrant workers building new Guggenheim, Louvre and Zayed National museum branches in Abu Dhabi.
• A survey of professional dancers in UK revealed that more than half of them earn less than £5,000 a year from their performing engagements (and other bleak statistics).
• And in more lighthearted news: baristas rejoice! A new study reveals that people are willing to pay more–13% more!–for latte art.

Red — photo by flickr user André Hofmeister

Income from streaming services eclipsed CD sales for the first time in 2014, and the fatcats have taken notice. This month, Apple, which spent $3 billion to acquire Beats last year, announced it is developing its own subscription streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify. The service will be available online and through its soon-to-be-revamped iOS music app. In an interesting move, Apple has appointed Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame) instead of an engineer as the front man in the development process. The company also has plans to overhaul iTunes Radio (look out, Pandora), introducing regional market targeting and other personalized services. With more than 800 million customer accounts, Apple has the potential to become a market leader in short order. (Spotify, by comparison, has only 15 million paying subscribers internationally; Pandora fewer than 3 million.) And it’s not just big tech who wants in on the action. On March 30, Jay Z announced the launch of his own streaming service, Tidal, having bought Tidal’s parent company earlier this month. Jay Z’s main objective seems to be fair play for musicians, and indeed, the company will primarily be artist-owned (though at present, that seems only to include celebrity musicians in Jay Z’s tax bracket.) The platform – which will be available in 31 countries – will, like Apple, offer only paid subscriptions. For its part, Spotify isn’t standing still. In January, Sony announced that Spotify would replace Music Unlimited as the music streaming outlet for its PlayStation Network. That platform, available in 41 countries (which triples Sony’s live streaming reach), went live on March 30.

Streaming services aren’t the only mechanism by which tech giants are trying to elbow into the music business. In March, Google formally launched YouTube for Artists, a set of online tools aimed at helping musicians generate more revenue from their music, and ostensibly plan better tours through in-depth access to viewer information on a city level. YouTube also revamped its Music Awards this month, putting the artist front and center. And commercial theater is now in play as well, with Amazon’s announcement that it is expanding a its service which sells theater tickets to London’s West End shows. The service — which previously sold only discounted tickets and special offers — will be direct competition for current ticket venues, including numerous websites and London kiosks, and could be a first step towards taking on Telecharge and Ticketmaster in the United States.

Middle East Museums in the Hot Seat: Museums and cultural heritage sites were all over the news from the Arab world this month — though sadly not for welcome reasons. On March 18, gunmen attacked the National Bardo Museum in downtown Tunis, killing two Tunisians and 20 foreign visitors, and wounding at least 50 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack – Tunisia’s deadliest since 2002 – shaking a country that prides itself on having emerged as the most successful post-Arab Spring democracy. On March 29, Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid announced that Khaled Chaieb, a prime suspect in the attack, had been killed, and the museum reopened to the public on March 30. (In response to the attack, the NYPD stepped up its presence at major museums in New York.) Thankfully, there was no sign of damage to the National Bardo Museum itself or its collection, though it wouldn’t have come as a surprise if there had been. In recent months, Islamic State militants have taken to destroying ancient antiquities deemed blasphemous. Following February’s much-publicized destruction of replica statues and original artifacts at the Mosul Museum, they destroyed three cultural heritage sites: the ancient archaeological site of Dur-Sharrukin (present day Khorsabad), the 3,000-year old Nimrud, and 2,000-year old Hatra. The latter two are UNESCO world heritage sites. Meanwhile, in Yemen, the ongoing conflict between Al Qaeda and the Yemeni army has also robbed the country of its cultural heritage, though in this case, the perpetrators are looters. The silver lining in that tragedy? Some looted museums have become shelters for displaced Yemenis, and, in the absence of functioning cultural institutions, Yemen’s remaining artists have becoming increasingly resourceful, continuing to gather and show work – albeit underground.

Got to Give It Up for Good: The copyright battle that has gripped the music industry for more than a year was settled when an LA jury decreed that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had committed copyright infringement, pilfering elements of Marvin Gaye’s 1977 song “Got to Give It Up” for their track “Blurred Lines” without permission. The decision is believed to be one of the largest damages awards in a music copyright case, with Thicke and Williams ordered to pay $7.3 million to the Gaye estate. The song, which broke records for its No. 1 run, and this lawsuit—which was actually brought preemptively by Thicke and Williams in August 2013—has prompted fierce debate about the difference between homage and plagiarism. What this means for the future of copyright and creativity remains to be seen, though Thicke and Williams are not optimistic. In a joint statement released after the verdict, they noted that “while [they] respect the judicial process, [they] are extremely disappointed in the ruling…which sets a horrible precedent for music and creativity going forward.”

GIA Takes a Stand for Racial Equity: Culminating several years of activism by key leaders associated with the organization, the Grantmakers in the Arts board of directors has released a statement of purpose detailing its commitment to racial equity in arts philanthropy. The statement confirms GIA’s commitment to addressing structural inequities and increasing philanthropic and governmental support for ALAANA (African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American) artists, arts organizations, children, and adults. The twelve actions proposed to support this new focus include advocating for collecting data on the demographics of arts organizations’ boards, employees, and constituents; requiring all of GIA’s board and staff to attend anti-racism training; ensuring representation by ALAANA individuals at annual conferences and among GIA’s own board and staff; and providing unspecified support “for individual members and collective groups of funders who are seeking to achieve greater racial equity in arts philanthropy in their own communities.” While most of these activities were already underway, this is the first time GIA has committed so publicly to being an anti-racist organization.

China Stakes Its Claim on the Arts: In 2015, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest economy, and in March, Beijing confirmed its ascendance in the arts with two important firsts. With the value of art traded in 2014 reaching an all-time high at an estimated €51 billion, China edged out the United States as the world’s largest market for modern art. On the other end of the spectrum, China pulled in $650 million in February box office revenue, beating out the United States for the first time. What’s more, where the global box office rose by just 1% in 2014 – and fell by 5% in the US – in China, revenue increased by 34%. A recent report from Ernst & Young predicts that China will be the world’s biggest film industry by 2020, and at least one partner is taking note, choosing to collaborate rather than compete: Hollywood.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After eight months as interim president, Julie Stasch was formally appointed president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
• Victoria Rogers, former New World Symphony executive vice president, has been appointed the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s new vice president for arts, replacing Dennis Scholl.
• Felicia Shaw, former director of arts and the creative economy at the San Diego Foundation, has been named executive director of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission.
• Tad Smith, former CEO of Madison Square Garden, joined Sotheby’s as its new CEO on March 31.
• Sphinx Organization founder and University of Michigan alum Aaron Dworkin will return to his alma mater as dean of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
• Francene Blythe will join the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation as its new director of programs.
• Paul Brohan has been named deputy director of programs at the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
• The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (based at the University of Pennsylvania) seeks a Research Director. Posted February 13; no closing date.
• The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at the Stanford Graduate School of Education seeks a Policy Analyst. Posted March 13; no closing date.
• The Boston Globe is hiring a Features Writer for its Living/Arts Department. Posted March 20; no closing date.
• The Foundation Center in New York seeks a Data Scientist. Posted March 24; no closing date.
• AMS Planning & Research Corp. is hiring a Senior Analyst. No closing date.
• The Wichita Falls (TX) Alliance for Arts and Culture, newly state-incorporated, seeks an Executive Director. Posted March 30; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The Wallace Foundation released two reports in March which look at building arts audiences. The first is a case study of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s efforts to increase the under-25 audience for ballet. The second analyzes the Seattle Opera’s four-year-long experiment with technology.
• Another pair of reports released in March look into audience demographics. The first, a market research report commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony, looks at orchestra audiences for this mid-sized ensemble. The second, commissioned by the Broadway League, looks at Broadway audiences more generally.
• “Insights and Lessons: Community Arts and College Arts,” a new report commissioned by the Kresge Foundation, offers recommendations for art-based civic dialogue & community revitalization based on the results of two pilot initiatives by the foundation.
• “Corporate Social Responsibility & the Arts,” a new report from Americans for the Arts, provides insights into how corporations engage with arts and culture as they work to achieve their CSR/CCI goals.
• Two recent reports — “Supporting Grantee Capacity: Strengthening Effectiveness Together,” from GrantCraft, a service of the Foundation Center, and “Strengthening Nonprofit Capacity” from GEOfunders — offer insights and guidance for developing nonprofit capacity.
• Several studies have recently attempted to quantify the impact of the arts on the body. According to research published in Economic Inquiry, video game playing has been shown to improve cognitive skills, and a small-scale study from the Athens Medical School in Athens shows compelling evidence that listening to music has a positive impact on cardiovascular health.
• A new study analyzes the practice habits of top performing pianists in an effort to distill which strategies lead to success.
• A landmark report released by from the American Music Therapy Association looks at music therapy with a focus on both active duty service members and veterans.
• A new report from the Writers Guild of America shows a decline in number of women and minorities who make up TV staff writers.
• A recent report commissioned by UK’s Labour party calls on the next government to treat culture as a priority sector, and offers specific recommendations for how to do so.

Fireworks going off over the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing, China.

On the evening of August 8, 2008, I sat in the Bird’s Nest in Beijing with 91,000 other spectators and a television audience in the billions, watching China tell its story through the arts. Sure enough, after the final firework exploded over the Bird’s Nest, China had accomplished its goal: prove that, through discipline and creativity, it had become a formidable player on the world stage.

After winning its bid to host the Olympics, China stirred with excitement as it crafted the image it would project to the world. Nationalism was palpable among school children, taxi drivers, government officials, and Olympic volunteers. The games may have been about athleticism, but the prelude, the Opening Ceremonies, was about artistry and the Chinese identity. A blank traditional scroll unfurled on the ground and dancers used their bodies to paint the scroll as they danced. Performers danced on a large globe suspended in the middle of a dark Bird’s Nest giving the illusion of being in outer space.

Dancers performing on a globe suspended in the Bird’s Nest.

Leaders in Beijing knew that their creative abilities were being tried along with their ability to pull off an event of this scale and importance. They spared no expense in making it what many critics hailed as the most spectacular opening ceremony to date.

Nation-building and image-building

All countries engage in what political scientists call “nation-” and “image-” building. Nation-building (not to be confused with state-building) is the internal process of creating a shared identity among citizens through policy and the allocation of public funds. Its external counterpart, image-building, deals with shaping outsiders’ perceptions of a country. The arts often factor into these endeavors: domestically, they affirm a sense of shared culture and enrich social life, while through their export, they help communicate a nation’s identity and may serve as a benchmark for international competitiveness. As countries develop, it is thought, investments in image-building can yield both economic and diplomatic returns.

As the globe’s richest and most heavily armed nation, the United States is in a unique position relative to the rest of the world. Looking at examples beyond our borders shows how other countries handle limited budgets, growing or diminishing international stature, and the desire to be competitive. The four countries compared here—Korea, China, Cambodia, and Brazil—are in different phases of development and provide an important contrast to the industrialized European nations to which cultural policy in the United States is so often compared.

In each of these cases, we will examine the importance of the arts to nation-building efforts, as evidenced by public spending; the degree to which the arts are included in nation-building as an explicit or implicit response to America’s perceived cultural dominance; the degree to which the arts are included in a country’s concept of international competitiveness; and the status of the arts as part of an image-building strategy. Looking at examples such as these can offer fresh insights into the arts’ role in creating a national identity and projecting an image of vitality to the outside world.

China

Historically, China’s cultural sphere spanned the Asian continent. Today, however, it sees its influence in danger of being eclipsed by that of its neighbors—and of the West. China’s investment in the arts is a safeguard against the perceived infiltration of American culture, an attempt for its cultural products to carry more economic weight and status within the region, and a natural extension of its ascendance as a global economic force.

As a relative newcomer on the international stage, China believes that a strong arts sector can help put it on equal footing with developed countries. In recent years, officials have valued culture’s role in “the competition of…national strength.” In 2011, a comprehensive plan for cultural reform was unveiled. China already spends significantly on culture. In 2012, China spent 54.054 billion yuan, or 9.3% of its national budget, on culture, sports, and media. Teasing out the amount for the arts is challenging given China’s notoriously opaque budgets, but if we assume one-third of that 54 billion goes to culture, China’s financial support would be the equivalent of nearly $3 billion in US dollars.

This spending is driven in large part by a reaction against encroaching foreign values. The Chinese consume more American than Chinese cultural products. This trend, and the accompanying values shift, is so alarming to Chinese officials that they counter it with increased spending on theater, television, and radio and regulations restricting foreign programming. In 2006, China’s contribution to the global cultural market trailed that of its smaller neighbors. Japan and Korea made up 13% of the global market for cultural products including literature, popular culture, and games, while the rest of Asia, including China, made up only 6%.

Whatever funding China dedicates to the arts risks being seen by people in more open governments more as a political maneuver than an earnest attempt at moving the arts forward. Financial investments remain undercut by China’s most contentious policy: censorship. From things as trite as blacklisting Lady Gaga and as pedantic as pixelating Michelangelo’s David-Apollo’s privates, to filmmakers and writers being restricted to the point that it forces mediocrity, China tries to keep a tight rein on the ideologies communicated through cultural products. Works of modern dance require approval from a member of the party before they can be performed for the public, and certain topics such as the infamous 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown remain taboo.

Korea

Once upon a time, South Korea’s national investment in the arts was a response to the United States’ cultural dominance. After the Korean War, arts policy in South Korea prioritized fostering national identity by highlighting the uniquely Korean aspects of culture. Article 9 of the Korean Constitution declares “states have an obligation to put forth effort in bequeathing and developing traditional culture and creatively enhancing national culture.” In 1973, Korea’s first five-year cultural plans stipulated new funding for culture, 70% of which was allocated for folk arts and traditional culture. Subsequent government administrations drafted their own national cultural plans, and by the 1980s the arts were more broadly included in goals to promote the excellence of the arts and foster contemporary art. By the 1990s, the advent of democracy shifted the focus to cultural welfare, where the arts are used to address social issues and enhance the nonmaterial aspects of life. Recently, however, its motives have changed. The government now looks to the arts to promote soft power, national image building, and economic growth.

Today, Korea has a strong arts infrastructure—arts agencies, university arts programs, performing arts companies, and festivals— that has surprisingly little visibility outside the region. In 2010, Korea’s central government spent approximately 5.7 percent — $56 per capita — on culture through its Ministry of Culture, about a quarter of which went specifically to the arts. The local government spends twice as much. In recent years, arts and culture in Korea is the one category of spending to enjoy an increasing proportion of government budget allocations, a trend mirrored in few other national budgets.

Korea also has a robust set of policies that support the arts -112 in all. These policies cover public art, the promotion of museums, arts education, tax incentives for businesses and individuals, and artist welfare issues. The country’s largest state-funded arts council and funding agency, Arts Council Korea (ARKO), was mandated as part of the Culture and Arts Promotion Act in 1973. The Public Art Promotion Act requires new large construction projects to allocate 1% of their total costs to public art. Corporations can claim higher exemptions for allocating money to cultural services.

With the rising popularity of Korean television, music, and movies abroad, the government has sought to capitalize on their profitability. South Korea’s overseas shipment of cultural goods came to $4.6 billion in 2012. Comparing cultural exports is a regular practice within East Asia, each country hoping to outdo each other and establish its own world-class arts, entertainment, and creative industries. While Korea enjoys relative success in exporting its cultural products within the region, and there is growing interest among the Korean diaspora abroad in cultural products and traditional culture, it also continues to work on spreading its influence to the States and beyond.

Brazil

Brazil has experienced rapid development in recent years. Like China, it has enjoyed growing economic power and attention on the international stage, but unlike China, its arts policies are not a reaction against the perceived threat of US cultural influence. In one way its motivations seem closer to Korea’s: attaining peer status among developed countries. It also has an increasing demand to keep up with its citizens’ purchasing power, as interest in consuming culture and the arts grows.

Because it’s not possible to unite all Brazilians behind a shared ethnic identity, a strategy used in more homogeneous countries like Korea or Japan, the government must take a more active role in creating a sense of shared identity based on other factors. It seems fitting then that following the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, Brazil has allocated funds to promoting social cohesion through the arts and culture.

In 2007, direct funding from the Ministry of Culture accounted for only 0.7% of the national budget, or approximately $420 million USD. But what Brazil’s government lacks in direct funding for the arts it makes up for through a series of innovative policies, including tax incentives. The Social Service of Commerce (SESC), among other things, is Brazil’s leading private financer of the arts. The SESC’s budget for programs in Sao Paulo alone is roughly equivalent to the NEA’s yearly budget. The organization’s funds are tied to a 1.5% payroll tax on companies that is virtually unopposed by policymakers and companies. In addition, the so-called Rouanet Law has allowed corporations to divert their owed taxes to finance cultural activities since 1991 and now drives about $630 million towards the sector annually. In January 2013, the government began offering small annual stipends for each citizen to use on “cultural expenses.” Employers foot the bulk of the money that funds the stipend, with individuals supplying the remaining 10% through their paycheck.

Brazil enacted a ten-year cultural plan in 2010, which lays out strategies and priorities for Brazil’s cultural development. The top priority includes using culture and the arts to help bolster Brazil’s image abroad. One of the others is a series of bills promoting culture and cultural exports, such as a plan to work with trade organizations in hopes of becoming one of the world’s top 20 cultural exporters.

Cambodia

Until relatively recently, Cambodia held prominent cultural status within mainland Southeast Asia, and many artists traveled there to train in their craft. But today, the arts struggle for rehabilitation and revival. When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, intellectuals and artists were targeted for purging. While 25% of the population that died during that period, an astounding 90% of museum workers, professors, performing and visual artists, and writers were killed, forcing the closure of many institutions. Many of the artists that survived subsequently sought to return Khmer arts to their former glory. When things finally stabilized, protection for the arts—both its institutions and practitioners—was written into the new 1993 constitution. However, funding for them did not always follow.

Robert Turnbull describes the situation in the book Expressions of Cambodia: The Politics of Tradition, Identity and Change: “While the Cambodian establishment frequently alludes to Cambodian classical arts being the ‘soul of the nation,’ it has been largely unwilling to develop performance culture in ways that are sustainable or give artists under its charge reason for optimism.” Government funding for performing arts, for example, is on average just 0.25% of the national budget.

Faced with limited government assistance, arts organizations often rely on foreign individuals and foreign-backed NGOs for financial support to rebuild a national identity and improve Cambodia’s image abroad through the arts. Cambodian Living Arts, one of the most active arts organizations, exists in part to “facilitate the transformation of Cambodia through the arts” and specifically, “to create an understanding of what it means to be Cambodian and to create a sense of unity and shared culture.” Amrita, Cambodia’s premier contemporary dance and performing arts organization, seeks “new life for Cambodia’s ancient artistic heritage” in part through networking internationally both to raise the status of Cambodian arts overseas and to find donors.

American influence in Cambodian culture has only recently become an issue, in part because of how reliant the arts are on funding from foreign sources. Cambodian artists and arts administrators are investigating ways to become more self-sustaining. Artists and performers, rather than waiting for acknowledgment from the government of their value, are thus demonstrating initiative in ensuring the arts don’t get neglected while the government focuses on other important development issues.

Bringing It Home

Ironically, the United States, whose arts infrastructure is envied around the world, devotes hardly any government support to the arts at the federal level compared with other nations. Even if you look beyond the National Endowment of the Arts and include appropriations to entities like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Portrait Gallery, the US still spends less than one one-tenth of one percent of its budget on arts and culture – orders of magnitude lower than some of the countries covered here. Even Cambodia’s investment in arts and culture dwarfs our own – on a relative basis, anyway.

While government support for the National Endowment for the Arts in particular has declined in recent decades, the truth is that Washington has never played a central role in the shaping of the arts ecosystem nationally. In part this is because of the decentralized nature of government arts funding: a recent NEA analysis shows that state and local funding for arts and culture outweighs federal support by a factor of nearly 5 to 1. And of course, the strong history of private giving in this country makes up for the lack of centralized support to no small degree.

So how has the United States been able to achieve such cultural dominance with so little government support? Certainly, the country’s economic and military might, developed largely without the help of state-supported museums and symphonies, are contributing factors. But it’s hard to ignore the role that the for-profit cultural industries, Hollywood in particular, have played in spreading American identity and influence abroad. US cultural exports in 2011 reached almost $40 billion, with over half coming from the motion picture industry.

Indeed, our examples here confirm that the private sector can have an energizing influence on the arts even when governments have limited capacity to invest directly. In Brazil, the government supports the arts through tax benefits that incentivize private investment; in Cambodia artists and arts administrators have taken the situation into their own hands and been active where the government has been silent.

In this light, the efforts of China and, to a lesser extent, Korea to explicitly build national power and identity through government investment in culture represent a fascinating natural experiment. Every year, the World Economic Forum ranks countries by international competitiveness. Twelve “pillars” including infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, higher education and training, financial market development, market size, and technological innovation determine a country’s rank. Each pillar matters, but each affects countries in different ways. According to the report, economies fall either squarely into one of three stages of development or are “transitional,” falling between them. The first development stage consists of economies like Cambodia driven by unskilled labor and natural resources, with low wages, and only the most basic commodities. Here, competitiveness depends on the strength of institutions, infrastructure, public health, primary education, and a stable macroeconomic environment. China is at the second stage representing “efficiency-driven” economies that thrive on manufacturing. Competitiveness at this stage hinges on higher education and training, an efficient goods market, mature labor and financial markets, technological readiness, and large domestic or international markets. Brazil is in transition between the second and third “innovation-driven” stage, where economies become more competitive by improving business sophistication and through technological innovation. South Korea and the US both fall into this third category, but interestingly, the US’s rank has been declining over the past several years. Will America’s cavalier attitude toward nation-building prove shortsighted in the end? Only time will tell.

Jane Chu is inching towards nomination as the next NEA Chair, as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted to approve her candidacy with “no controversy.” Over the past few years, Republicans appear to be content to let the NEA languish in level-funding purgatory rather than continue to whip up the kind of culture-war controversy that proved so successful in handcuffing the agency in the ’90s. Let’s be grateful for small victories.

STATE AND LOCAL

This is the season for state arts council budget drama, and there are certainly a few stories worth reporting. First and foremost is the prospect of an incredible resurgence for the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which had its budget cut an astonishing 94% over a three-year period and nearly zeroed out in the heady summer of 2009. Since then, arts advocates have slowly moved the needle towards more funding, but nothing compared to the 384% increase the agency would be in line to receive if Governor Rick Scott signs the budget recently passed by the Legislature, restoring funding to pre-recession levels. It’s not a done deal yet, though – Scott has line-item veto power and may be itching to use it.

In somewhat more bittersweet news, after all the brouhaha from last time, Maryland has agreed to increase tax incentives to Media Rights Capital, the producer of Netflix’s House of Cards, settling on $11.5 million to keep the show in the state. The figure does represent a decrease from the average amount the show had received in previous years, but as previously reported the state had to raid a fund intended for local arts organizations to make the deal happen.

On the local front, the Art Newspaper takes stock of NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s arts agenda: whereas Bloomberg invested in large-scale projects designed to drive tourism and economic impact, de Blasio appears to be focused on the outer boroughs, access, and community engagement. Meanwhile, de Blasio’s first budget for New York City is out, and with a 6% overall increase in spending gives educators a lot to be happy about: steps toward universal pre-K, expanded after-school programs and a $20 million allocation for arts education.

Los Angeles may be on the verge of overhauling its public art ordinance, thanks to an audit that recommends the city relax the requirement that developers’ public art fees be spent within one block of the constructions that generated them. Paralyzed by the geographical restriction, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs had been sitting  on $7.5 million in funds earmarked for public artwork.

Any cities or counties pondering local tax increases for arts and culture, take note: the ultraconservative Americans for Prosperity is wading into local politics with a campaign against a local tax increase in Franklin County, Ohio meant to benefit the Columbus Zoo.

INTERNATIONAL

The authors of last year’s report showing that the UK Arts Council gave London-based organizations five times as much money per capita as those in other parts of the country have released a new study showing that UK lottery arts funding is similarly concentrated in the capital. The Mayor of London and organizations in his city  support raises for others but not cuts for themselves. And Parliament may decriminalize non-payment of Britain’s $250 annual TV-licensing fee, the primary source of income for the BBC. Scofflaws, such as the 107 TV owners jailed in 2 years for failing to pony up, would still be subject to civil penalties. Meanwhile, the BBC is calling for payment even by those who don’t own televisions in an age when physical TVs are an afterthought.

Australia’s conservative government has taken aim at the arts, enacting more than $100 million in cuts to various national funding bodies. Since most of that amount is spread over a four-year period, the impact is not as drastic as it sounds, and the head of the Australia Council doesn’t seem too worried. Still, $100 million is $100 million…well, about $94 million in American dollars. On the other side of the ledger (and the world), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is investing $1.7 billion to build 230 new museums across the country, intended to show off the nation’s rich cultural history. Private-sector firms, including the oil giant Saudi Aramco, are getting in on the museum-building act as well.

Despite all the money that Russia pumps into the arts, there is mounting criticism—especially in the theater world—against its contents, with a new, envelope-pushing generation of artists facing political pressure from the government. Woolly Mammoth Theater’s Festival of New Radical Theater, which was set to include works from Russia, has become the most recent collateral damage in Moscow’s politicization of art. Meanwhile, on July 1, it will become illegal to curse in public performances in Russia – though the ban may cover only four very, very dirty words. Russia, of course, isn’t the only major world power wanting to shape artistic expression: China appears to be stepping up its campaign against Western media, banning four US television shows from streaming websites for violating a regulation aimed at shows that “harm the nation’s reputation, mislead young people to commit crimes, prostitution, gambling or terrorism.”

National Museum of Cambodia. Photo by kfcatles.

A heat map of museum activity in Asia would show the whole region aglow. At first glance, if you’ve been getting your story from mainstream American media, you might think Asian institutions are becoming just like us, or beating us at our own game: the National Museum of Cambodia recently put its collection online thanks to a grant from an American foundation, and the Mumbai airport recently unveiled the largest airport gallery in the world. Other stories might give the opposite impression: a museum in China was shuttered after nearly its entire collection of 40,000 artifacts was found to be fake; in some public museums in Southeast Asia, staff are government employees who have been demoted to what is seen as an undesirable role.

So what’s really happening? I have spent the last two years as Programs Director at a private ethnology museum in Laos, but I’ve been following these developments for much longer. During the three years I lived in China after college, I became interested in museums as a platform to share my growing appreciation of Asia with a wider audience. My interest deepened back in the U.S., as I researched China’s recent cultural policy changes and their impact on museums for a master’s degree in China Studies and then wrote more broadly about museum issues in Asia for a museum studies certificate. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the story is as complex as the continent, a medley of unique political systems, museum governance structures, geographies, human resource policies, levels of development, and education systems.

I can’t tell that whole story in a single post, but I do want to share some of what I have seen unfolding in museums across developing Asia.

The boom

Over the past several years, prominent news sources have reported the growth of museums in Asia: The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Economist. The focus is often on China. In 2011, at the People’s Consultative Congress, former President Hu Jintao announced China’s plans to become a world leader in the arts and to make cultural industries a pillar industry by 2015. To make good on its plans, Beijing earmarked more money for the construction of new museums and to make public museums free. But the government alone isn’t driving the growth. Affluent businessmen are opening their own museums to house the private collections they’ve amassed at auctions. All over China, even in sparsely populated regions, new museums go up at the astounding rate of about 100 a year.

But other places are beginning to share some of the spotlight. Further south in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country and fourth largest by population in the world, similar conditions for art museum growth exist: economic prosperity and strong competitiveness in the international art market, with Indonesian artists beginning to break local price records. Indonesia also has one thing to credit for the creation of new museums in general that China doesn’t: rapid political decentralization. Each province in the country must have a museum, and new provinces come into existence at a surprisingly frequent rate.

Thailand’s strong national interest in archeology and the sheer volume of artifacts being discovered motivate the building of new museums, although fewer than in China and Indonesia. Alongside these more traditional (albeit brand-new) institutions, a robust network of grassroots, community-based museums adopting unconventional practices has sprung up as the result of local training opportunities.

Though India has also seen a relatively modest increase in the number of museums, it has a growing network of international partnerships. Recent agreements signed with the Tate and the Metropolitan Museum may go further in raising the level of museum practice in the country through the loan of objects that will help keep exhibits fresh, research collaborations, and joint learning programs for staff and fellowships.

In Asia as elsewhere, museums come into being for a variety of reasons and through a variety of actors. Burgeoning economic prosperity is often the impetus for museum growth. Yet slower economic development does not preclude it. Because many national governments, occupied with meeting other development benchmarks, have been slow to invest in arts and culture for purposes outside of economic growth, other parties have stepped in. Organizations owned in whole or in part by foreigners, or grassroots artist cooperatives such as San Art in Vietnam or the Cemeti Art House in Indonesia, may fill the art-for-art’s-sake gap. Their unaffiliated status translates to more flexibility in hiring, fundraising, interpreting their collections, and setting their own budget and agenda. Private museums are still much less common in Asia than public ones, but they, too, are part of the boom.

Audience, outreach, and local impact

Tourism and the local audience

Tourism contributes significantly to the economies of Asian countries. This can be helpful in keeping up foot traffic for museums – but whose feet, and at what cost? Many Asian museums have geared themselves toward foreign visitors, for at least two reasons: money and education.

It’s not uncommon for museums to offer free entry for locals. These patrons’ lack of financial contribution, however, may lead to their neglect. In a country like Laos, in which tourists make up a large part of museum visitation, locals may be put off by the fact that the majority of guests are not like them – a familiar refrain for American museums struggling to reach out to underrepresented groups. When tourism drives the local economy, the tourist is king, and the quality of service provided to locals may receive little attention, if any at all, in programming and promotion.

In addition to having more money, tourists also tend to be better educated. One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking about exhibit design after moving to Laos was about assumed literacy and comfort with self-guided discovery. The same Asia that is home to economies such as Singapore, Korea, and Shanghai, envied for their top-ranking academic performance, also suffers from development-stunting education systems. Literacy statistics for Asia—especially South and Southeast Asia, which is most of the continent in terms of both population and landmass—look deceptively high when the reality is that they only measure basic, not functional, literacy. As museums in Asia have added less familiar objects to their collections and adopted the Western model of explaining them with labels, some have risked losing connection with their local audience. What good are labels and panels if your audience can’t read well enough to understand the signage?

Going local

But the story may yet have a happy ending. I have noticed several hopeful signs that Asian museums may be paying more attention to local communities. Last November, I met Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the director of the encyclopedic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai, India, at a conference. I was impressed with the recent push in India for museums to appeal to all segments of society. Mukherjee was clearly interested in this topic: he questioned speakers at the end of every session, challenging museum directors from the West to rethink their audience.

It turns out Mukherjee’s commitment to orienting museums towards their communities is working for him back home. At the CSMVS, local participation increased by almost 50% over a three-year period, thanks to a mix of dynamic exhibits and unconventional programming. In the United States, we take for granted that a museum will display objects from other countries. By contrast, typical museum collections in Asia consist primarily of artwork or objects from that country’s own heritage and history, given their focus on preservation and guardianship of national heritage. India stands out in Asia for its ability to host blockbuster exhibits of artwork and artifacts from around the world. Both the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert have brought shows to the CSMVS, and other notable exhibits have featured paintings of Rubens and Van Dyck.

Mukherjee has also experimented with museum buses, which carry objects from the collection to neighborhoods throughout Mumbai and offer free access to locals. The program began as outreach to schoolchildren, but has since expanded its focus to reach suburbanites. The CSMVS has also begun to partner with NGOs to do programs with marginalized communities, such as sex workers and HIV patients.

The push in India for accessible art goes beyond the CSMVS, and it includes public art. Leading that initiative is Rajeev Sethi, the designer behind the T2 terminal at the Mumbai airport I mentioned at the start of this post. Though the idea of art in airports is not unique, the initiative is much broader. Sethi envisions the whole country as a museum and advocates bringing art dug up from museum basements “back to lived spaces—railway stations, bus stops, public parks, hospitals” – to serve a richer pool of stakeholders than he believes the Western view of museums supports.

Faced with a rapidly growing consumer class, museums in Indonesia are also trying to adapt their approach to their public. Until a few years ago, Indonesian museums were run by the Ministry of Tourism, where they enjoyed relatively high levels of financial support and attention. Their main audience under this ministry was foreigners or traveling Indonesians, which meant that exhibits changed infrequently — it matters less if your information is static if you have few repeat visitors. Museums were seen mostly as places of leisure, and money was poured into them to attract tourists.

In 2010, control switched to the Ministry of Education and Culture, which has a budget predominately allocated to education, and funding levels dropped. But this move also prompted museums to begin to think of themselves as serving the people of Indonesia and having an important role in informal education. A series of locally focused initiatives began then that included a Museum Visit Year campaign and revitalization projects. Most recently, in 2013, thirteen museums in Jakarta took their collections to that most public and popular of institutions, the mall. They hosted a museum week cosponsored by the Jakarta Post and the Ministry that featured an expo-style layout of booths with exhibits. Visitors were able to see exhibits and objects they might otherwise not have seen. The organizers hope to make this an annual event, and there is optimism that over time the event will bring more visitors to the museums in their own cities.

Human Resources

The Role of the Curator

Staffing has traditionally been a challenge for private and public museums alike in Asia, limiting the vitality and even sustainability of these institutions. With a glut of museums opening quickly and then having virtually no visitors, or even closing, China‘s example has shown that the success of new museums often depends on having the right people running and staffing them.

Museum professionals in the West take for granted that decisions about the collection and interpretation of objects—a principal function of a museum—will be made by a curator, someone with specialized content knowledge and appointed for that specific purpose. In China, curation has only emerged as a distinct role over the past ten years. In that time, though, it has taken off: it’s not uncommon for established museums to have hundreds of exhibits a year. Flexing its new muscles in this area, the National Art Museum in China sponsored its first international Asian Art Curator Forum last September, which gathered eighty curators from thirty countries.

However, less developed countries in the region still have a long way to go. In the most extreme cases, such as some government museums, curators may actually be seen as unnecessary, since exhibits may only change every five years. More often, where turnover is somewhat higher, curation may be outsourced to independent consultants.

It’s not just curators, either. Several roles in Western museums, such as marketing, fundraising, digital media, and visitor services, simply do not have counterparts in Southeast Asia, where job categories reflect an institutional focus on preservation or research on new archaeological finds.

Training

Perhaps unsurprisingly, museum workers in parts of developing Asia come to the museum with very different training than what might be typical for young museum staff in America.  For example, those in parts of Southeast Asia may have studied history, art history, biology, anthropology or archaeology only up to the university level – and in some cases, maybe only at the high-school level. It’s highly unlikely that they have specialized museum education or experience interning or volunteering at a museum, so training happens on the job. For example, in Cambodia and Myanmar, the respective National Museums are charged with the professional development of the entire country’s museum staff after they are hired. What’s more, government museum staff may lack not only expertise but even interest. Because civil service positions are often coveted for their benefits rather than actual job responsibilities, motivating public museum workers can be especially challenging and those who are motivated may find themselves isolated.

This, too, is beginning to change. Thailand has taken a leading role in providing professional development in Southeast Asia through its involvement in regional networks such as the SEAMEO SPAFA Centre for Archaeology and Fine Arts and with the support of members of the royal family through the Princess Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre and Museum Field School. Students from throughout Southeast Asia attend these programs, where instructors include regional experts and museum professionals from the U.S., Australia, and Europe. Add that to its relatively strong economic performance within mainland Southeast Asia and open government, and Thailand offers a possible vision of the future for museums in the region.

Leapfrogging into the 21^st Century

We sometimes think of museums in the West as in search of their second life, a return to some – perhaps nonexistent – point in the past when they enjoyed widespread popularity. For the majority of museums in Asia, the second life they are building is really a first life: until recently, many of them were essentially public storage facilities and archives.

Development economists talk about technology leapfrogging, in which emerging economies bypass earlier stages of technology use. For example, rural villages may skip entirely over having landlines in their homes to use smart phones, or skip over dial-up Internet and start with wireless. With increased opportunities to collaborate on shared challenges, leapfrogging may catapult Asian museums directly into the future, perhaps with Western museums along for the ride. Institutions around the world can benefit from grappling together on issues such as cultivating first generation audiences, stretching limited institutional resources, enriching visitor experience, representing underrepresented or misrepresented groups, motivating reluctant staff to rethink the role of museums in society, promoting social inclusion and diversity, and creatively seeking funding.

Some organizations already facilitate this dialogue. Through the Asia-Europe Foundation, an international nonprofit based in Singapore with nearly forty member countries, the Asia-Europe Museum Network ASEMUS collaborates on the mapping of Asian collections, supports staff exchange, and hosts a biannual conference. Though no formal US-Asia museum-specific organization exists, the American Alliance of Museums, which has been involved in supporting international programs for over twenty-five years, is expanding its international museum work and now includes a US-China Exhibition Exchange. And a number of individual programs have been building valuable bridges. The Asia Society has hosted several events bringing together museum leaders from the West and Asia, such as the 2012 US-China Museum Directors Forum and last November’s Arts + Museum Summit in Hong Kong. The Asia Foundation sponsors the Asian Art Museum Fellowship in Asian Art, and the Asian Cultural Council supports artistic exchange between artists and arts professionals in the US and Asia.

How could we embrace even more collaboration? One possibility would be to create an international non-Western certificate track in graduate museology programs designed for American students who would ultimately either work in Asia or specialize in Asian art at museums in the West. In addition to general courses in museum studies, the track would involve coursework in cross-cultural leadership, non-Western heritage practices, and language study. Through partnerships with museums in Asia, students would have summer internships in the region; after graduation, some would have the opportunity to go back to work for the host institution as a visiting specialist. Local staff would then have the opportunity to receive training from the visiting specialists in their own countries from individuals with knowledge of the local context. American universities that already have satellite campuses in Asia might be a good place to start.

Another idea might be to set up an organization similar to PUM Netherlands Senior Experts, a nonprofit that provides consulting services to small and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets. PUM’s 3,200 volunteer specialists are matched with assistance requests and deployed abroad for up to several weeks to work on discrete projects; host organizations just pay for local accommodation and food. The advantage of this model over a traditional museum consultancy firm taking on international work would be its affordability, allowing even financially-strapped museums to participate, and focus on overall self-sufficiency.

As attention focuses on the museum landscape in Asia, it’s important to realize that the changes taking place there are as diverse as the region itself. In some places, evolution is rapid; in others, measured. But across the continent, I have been impressed by the sparks of life that characterize many new museum projects and programs. Asia is home to some of the most remarkable economic growth stories of modern history, including Singapore, South Korea, China, and India. As momentum builds across the region, I look forward to the changes it will bring to the museum and cultural heritage landscapes here.