• A Federal court has overturned the FCC’s “net neutrality” regulations, which have required internet service providers to treat all content equally. Legal details here; implications for artists and ways to get involved here. Meanwhile, AT&T has announced a plan to exempt selected content from wireless data caps; artists are expressing concern.
• How many foundations does it take to keep Detroit’s art in Detroit? Nine and counting: the ad-hoc alliance of funders has pledged to give $330m to reduce the city’s unfunded pension liability if the city’s creditors will agree to allow the Detroit Institute of Art to become a separate non-profit with its collection intact. In a nod to its origins, the Ford Foundation is the largest single contributor. It’s unclear whether this will fly with the creditors, so additional donors are being sought. (This could be part of an alarming trend: the Annenberg Foundation recently had to spend more than $500k to return sacred Hopi artifacts home.)
• Thinking of applying for nonprofit status? You may need to brace yourself for a longer wait time than usual. The recent federal budget agreement gives the IRS $526 million less than last year and mandates the agency spend more time reporting to Congress.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• With Bill de Blasio having taken office, speculation builds around the next NYC Commissioner for Cultural Affairs, with names such as actress Cynthia Nixon, former Alliance for the Arts head Randy Bourscheidt, and Tom Finklepearl being floated as potential candidates to run what may be the nation’s largest arts funder. Meanwhile, Michael Kaiser praises outgoing Commissioner Kate Levin – and says we need her at the NEA.
• Karen Hanan, Executive Director of Arts Northwest, is transitioning to lead the Washington State Arts Commission effective March 1.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• How are arts organizations handling ongoing, recession-related budget pressure? Some are experimenting with curtain times, guerilla art, and other innovations; others are embracing an organizational cultural of abundance. Still others ask, “what budget pressure?”
• On the heels of the NEA’s decision to support collective impact projects for arts education, Ken Thompson of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation observes that despite the flurry of interest from funders, they display an overall “lack of certainty about what collective impact is” and for the most part remain focused on the programmatic rather than systems level. One source of the problem? For all of funders’ efforts to get grantees to collaborate, they aren’t doing much of it themselves.

IN THE FIELD

• After winning hearts and minds across the nation with its making-it-big-in-Idaho story, come this July, the Trey McIntyre Project will disband as a dance company, focusing instead on “other enterprises involving dance, film production, and photography.” Despite TMP’s throwing in the towel, Sydney Skybetter sees a triumph and not a failure.
• In other dance news, choreographer Gina Gibney’s company will take over the former home of Dance New Amsterdam in downtown Manhattan, preserving the space as a hub for dancers from commercial and non-profit companies at a time when space is scarce.
• After a three year lockout (and, as we reported a few weeks ago, an attempt to form their own nonprofit), musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra will return to their orchestra hall next month thanks to a contract settlement that cuts their pay and benefits by roughly 15 percent.
• A painting by Glenn Brown replicating the cover of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel “The Stars Like Dust” has sold for almost $6 million, causing many techies to suddenly find themselves in the unfamiliar position of advocating for copyright enforcement.
• Nonprofit theater makes way for film and television: Atlanta’s Woodruff Art Center has sold its three-stage 14th Street Playhouse to the Savannah College of Art and Design, which will use the space to house TV and film degree programs. Woodruff, in turn, donated $1.9 million of sale proceeds to the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta to establish a new grant fund to support local performing arts organizations.

BIG IDEAS

• We nearly missed this end-of-year roundup of “10 trends and 10 predictions” for the nonprofit sector from NonProfit Quarterly. You’ll recognize several of the items, like the emerging national security state and general government incompetence, from our list of the top 10 arts policy stories, but NPQ adds several others to the table (including an emerging progressive agenda at the local government level) and gives arts organizations a special shout-out – for their “struggl[ing]…business models.” Woohoo.
• Over at Barry’s Blog, social media guru and recent Arts Dinner-Vention participant Devon Smith delves into the potential roles of user experience designers, Google glass, and 3D printers in arts organizations, and offers some insights on the need for think tanks (including ours) in the arts.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts has posted a batch of working papers and reports resulting from the inaugural year of its Research: Art Works program. There’s a range of goodies to dig into, including a study of the racial and ethnic composition of arts boards, and another look at the arts as a driver of economic growth.
• The Brooklyn Commune Project is out with a new report “on the state of the performing arts from the perspective of artists.” Researched and written by volunteers, it includes an impressive and cogent summary of the economic challenges performing artists face, and thoughtful recommendations for the sector. At 50+ pages it’s not a short read, but a worthwhile one. (More from Andy Horwitz here.)
  
• Another report from the UK examines how artists can support the development of socially responsible, sustainable economies, and identifies three “vital practices” that allow them to do so: 1) critical reflection around how artists maintain their livelihoods, 2) opportunities for artists to “pool their risk” when embarking on new endeavors, and 3) opportunities for artists to access unused spaces in urban environments.
• Amid increased calls for states to track student access to arts education comes this welcome reminder that determining access is more complicated than counting which schools offer which courses.
• In the latest distant-reading study, analysts have crunched “various linguistic characteristics” of a slew of old books against their commercial and critical success, then applied the resulting algorithms to contemporary writers to find that Dan Brown, William Faulkner, and Philip Roth aren’t very successful. Points for counter-intuitive results, at least.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

“I want change” by m.a.r.c.

Toward the end of the summer, bioethicist Peter Singer raised the hackles of art lovers everywhere with a New York Times op-ed that considered a hypothetical dilemma: should you donate to a charity that combats blindness in the developing world or should you spend that money instead on an art museum? After running through a cost-benefit analysis of each option, he determined that the charity addressing blindness “offers [donors] at least 10 times the value” of the museum.

Ouch.

To no one’s surprise, the arts community didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for the piece, calling Singer’s argument “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” Another round of alarm ensued recently when none other than megaphilanthropist Bill Gates threw his support behind Singer’s thesis. The responses from our field to date have generally coalesced around two broad counter-arguments:

•  Why does it have to be “either/or”? Why can’t we support both? Singer forces a false choice in “assuming charitable giving is a zero sum game.” Weighing the value of saving a life against the value of donating to an art museum is comparing apples to oranges when “both are essential, and if either disappeared you’d be in bad shape.” We need a holistic approach to ensure we don’t “solv[e] Third World crises at the expense of fostering crises right here at home.” Just as we have “multiple passions in [our] lives,” donors can and should target multiple causes and direct their charitable dollars in a “proportionally prioritized” manner. Anyway, we can’t really be sure than curing blindness is more important than inspiring the next Jackson Pollock, and even if we were, concentrating all our resources with one or two tried and true nonprofits runs counter to the “messiness and power of America’s [decentralized] approach to charity.”

• Saving lives is all fine and good – but only if those lives have meaning. If we’re so concerned with making sure that people can see, shouldn’t we also try to make sure they have beautiful things to look at? Singer’s logic is dangerous because he fails to acknowledge the “creative outlet[s] and emotional oas[e]s that only art museum[s] can provide.” If all philanthropic dollars were channeled toward alleviating disease and poverty, arts and culture would languish, society would become monochromatic and dull, and life would cease to be worth living.

As satisfying as these rebuttals may feel to arts advocates, they unfortunately miss the point. The crucial assumptions behind Singer’s argument are that

1. “there are objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more good in one [sector] than in another,” and
2. we have a moral obligation to make choices that do as much good as possible.

It’s important to understand this perspective in the context of “effective altruism,” a relatively nascent but growing area of applied ethics that has been featured more than once on this blog, not to mention a recent edition of This American Life. Besides Gates, fellow philanthropic heavyweight and past Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest has declared himself a fan. “Effective altruists,” or EAs, are on a quest to “do good” by way of hard-nosed rationality. “Doing good” doesn’t mean recycling a little more, or occasionally doling out spare change to a beggar on the street. It doesn’t mean foregoing a high-powered corporate career to work for a nonprofit. It means taking the time to analyze how to do the most amount of good possible with the resources available – or, to use a more nerdy turn of phrase, to “[use] science and rational decision-making to help as many sentient beings” as they can.

Most funders are already in search of a big “bang for your buck,” but in trying to identify the objectively best causes to support, effective altruists stray from the conventional wisdom of mainstream philanthropy. EAs cast a global net when determining where to focus, and often settle on supporting causes in faraway parts of the world, the results of which they may never see in person. They also believe that while human lives are created equal, philanthropic causes are not. Those causes that can save or improve the most lives must take first priority.

How does this play out in practice? Let’s say you donate to the free medical clinic in your area. You do this for good reasons: you care about inequities in the American healthcare system, and want to give back to your community. You like the feeling you get when you walk by that clinic every day. Maybe you even know people who benefit from the services the clinic provides. The clinic gets its donation, and you get warm fuzzies. Everybody wins. Right?

Not so, an EA would counter. Despite your good intentions, your donation amounts to a near-waste of resources:

We understand the sentiment that ‘charity starts at home,’ and we used to agree with it, until we learned just how different U.S. charity is from charity aimed at the poorest people in the world. Helping people in the U.S. usually involves tackling extremely complex, poorly understood problems… In the poorest parts of the world, people suffer from very different problems…

We estimate that it costs [Givewell’s] top-rated international charity less than $2,500 to save a human life… Compare that with even the best U.S. programs… over $10,000 per child served, and their impact is encouraging but not overwhelming.

EAs advocate making evidence-based decisions even if they don’t resonate on an emotional or intuitive level:

Effective altruism is consistent with believing that giving benefits the giver, but it’s not consistent with making this the driving goal of giving. Effective altruists often take pride in their willingness to give (either time or money) based on arguments that others might find too intellectual or abstract, and their refusal to give suboptimally even when a pitch is emotionally compelling. The primary/driving goal is to help others, not to feel good about oneself.

If this approach leaves you with an empty feeling in the back of your throat, it is by design. “Opportunity costs” – the costs of choosing not to behave in a certain way – weigh heavily on EAs. Every time you make a donation, considering where your money could have gone is as important as considering where it will ultimately go (emphasis mine):

In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease…  Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people … But these people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

Weighing choices isn’t limited to how we spend our money – it also applies to how we spend our time. Just as EAs dispute the notion that people should support whichever charities they feel “passionate” about, they question whether channeling those passions into a nonprofit or medical career is the best way to make a difference. Many suggest instead that people “earn to give,” saying they “might be better off…in a high-earning job and making a deliberate commitment to give a large portion of what [they] earn away.“ The organization 80,000 Hours, founded to “become the world’s number one source for advice on pursuing a career that truly makes a difference in an effective way,” elaborates,

Working at a non-profit can be a great way to make a difference. But it’s no guarantee. Amazingly, lots of non-profits probably have no impact. And do workers at [a] non-profit have more impact than the people who fund them? The researchers who push forward progress? The entrepreneurs who transform the economy? Policy makers? Maybe. No one stops to ask.

Putting ideas like these on the table is a great way to make those of us in the arts squirm. While there are echoes of the effective altruism movement in some recent trends within our field, like the “universal call” for better data on the impact of the arts and the pointed questions about who ultimately benefits from arts funding, the arts are chock-full of people – artists and arts administrators alike – who were drawn to their work by that same passion that EAs claim clouds our judgment. The idea of allowing cold rationality to dictate and limit our quest to “do good” flies in the face of our artistic sensibilities, and challenges the assumptions many of us made when we entered the nonprofit sector in the first place – even those of us who have a sincere desire to address social inequities.

Tempting as it may be, it would be short-sighted to dismiss the EA movement as the pet project of a bunch of aesthetically stunted curmudgeons. It’s hard to dispute the notion that we could improve the human condition if only we could get our act together and commit our resources to a data-driven approach. After all, the nonprofit darling of the moment, collective impact, is based on the same premise. What effective altruism does is counter our cause-specific argument for the arts with a dizzying moral appeal for cause agnosticism. And to be honest, it’s hard to see how the arts win if they play the game by the EAs’ rules. The “both/and” argument mentioned previously is unlikely to sway an effective altruist who weighs each decision as a choice between two different futures, one in which a museum gets funded and some lives get saved and one in which the museum struggles and more lives get saved. Even if the museum shut down completely, its patrons could probably find or create an alternative “creative outlet and emotional oasis,” while the people dying of malaria can’t very well make the mosquito nets themselves. The “we give lives meaning” argument likewise rings hollow when we’re talking about lending privileged lives (anyone living on more than $2 a day is privileged in a global context) a dose of incremental “meaning” at the expense of giving others a shot at basic survival. It also comes across as incredibly condescending to those others considering that they would likely never get the opportunity to visit or benefit from Singer’s hypothetical museum. In any case, art is hardly the only possible delivery mechanism for meaning. In the words of one effective altruist,

Trying to maximize the good I accomplish with both my hours and my dollars is an intellectually engaging challenge. It makes my life feel more meaningful and more important. It’s a way of trying to have an impact and significance beyond my daily experience. In other words, it meets the sort of non-material needs that many people have.

Whether the EA movement sputters or gathers steam, taking the time to engage with its principles, even critically, is a healthy exercise. The bottom line is that EAs may actually be onto something when they argue it’s possible to make a bigger dent in one sector than another. Rather than insisting otherwise or dodging the argument altogether, we could heed the call to examine how altruism really manifests in our work, particularly when examined through the lens of what benefits the people we engage, rather than what benefits our organizations or our donors. Might we, too, have objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more “good” in one program, or with one population, than in another? Do we, too, have a moral obligation to maximize that good? How would that change how we operate and who we serve? Do we want to change how we operate?

If the effective altruism debate makes anything clear, it’s that to be able to make art, not to mention argue about it, is to be fortunate. Taking a hard look at our assumptions about what draws and keeps us to this work may not be easy, but if we squirm a little, so be it. In the grand scheme of things, a little squirming is a luxury too.

Central Calgary’s Main Historic Street – photo by flickr user Stephen Colebourne

(This essay was originally written in my role as an outside consultant to the city of Calgary’s cultural plan. For this entry, I was asked to reflect on the possibility of developing a collective impact model for the arts in Calgary. You can read all of my contributions to that process here.)

Through its #yycArtsPlan process, Calgary has the opportunity to pursue what may be the first full-fledged collective impact model in the arts. Will it take the reins?

Collective impact is a term coined by John Kania and Mark Kramer of the consulting firm FSG Social Impact Advisors in 2011. In a nutshell, the concept is this: the social sector is best positioned to accomplish real change through centralized, strategic, and coordinated action, rather than through decentralized and isolated interventions that can often work at cross purposes. This seemingly obvious insight is fleshed out in substantial detail in Kania and Kramer’s original collective impact article as well as many follow-up publications. Kania and Kramer outline five essential elements of any collective impact initiative, as follows:

Since the publication of the original article, collective impact mania has swept across the North American nonprofit sector. And yet, of the collective initiatives that have sprung up in response to this wave of interest, not one so far has specifically focused on the arts. This gap opens up an opportunity for Calgary to blaze a new trail yet again, but in doing so local leaders should be mindful of how collective impact differs from run-of-the-mill collaboration and consider the barriers that have kept the arts sector from fully embracing collective impact until now.

Collective Impact: A Giant Leap Forward

Some of the requirements of the collective impact model may seem familiar to arts leaders at first glance. For example, it’s true that most large metropolitan regions in the United States and Canada benefit from a municipal or regional arts council, whether structured as a government agency or independent organization, and that these entities are the obvious candidates to provide the “backbone support” ingredient of the collective impact recipe. Likewise, cultural planning efforts (such as Calgary’s) aspire to create a shared vision around priorities and goals, much in the same way that collective impact requires a “common agenda.”

Nevertheless, even in the most collegial and infrastructure-rich arts communities, there are some key ways in which collective impact raises the bar for coordinated action. A major weakness of many cultural plans is that, once the document is written and the funded process for convening stakeholders has come to an end, it is difficult to sustain energy and motivation to implement the resulting recommendations. The three elements of collective impact not mentioned in the previous paragraph – shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, and continuous communication – are all about providing this missing link.

We should not underestimate the extent to which a fully implemented collective impact model represents a radical departure from the status quo. Collective impact is about more than just collaboration when it’s convenient and working together on isolated projects that happen to lend themselves to shared action. Collective impact requires the full commitment of all participants to a concrete set of goals, and alignment toward making those goals a reality through whatever means are most appropriate. It requires participants – including the so-called “backbone organization” leading the effort – to put the goals, not themselves, first. Jeff Edmondson, leader of perhaps the highest-profile collective impact model, Cincinnati’s Strive Network, puts it this way (emphasis mine):

…[C]ollaboration is often one more thing you do on top of everything else.  People meet in coffee shops or church basements to figure out how to do a specific task together and in addition to their day job.  Collective impact becomes part of what you do every day. It is not one more thing because it is truly about using data on a daily basis – in an organization and across community partners – to integrate practices that get results into your everyday contribution to the field.

Arts-Specific Challenges to the Collective Impact Model

So why is it that the arts haven’t more rapidly embraced collective impact as a strategy? I can think of a number of possible reasons, ranging from the practical to the philosophical. On the practical side, the arts are an under-resourced field generally. And within the arts, unlike other areas of the nonprofit sector, philanthropic dollars tend to flow most readily to direct service delivery (i.e., local institutions and ensembles) rather than large infrastructure organizations (i.e., the arts equivalent of the American Cancer Society or UNICEF). As a result, arts practitioners and funders alike often find themselves making do with shoestring budgets that don’t easily accommodate the level of staff attention needed by a collective impact initiative. Furthermore, the arts are not as well integrated with the rest of the nonprofit sector as other cause areas such as education, the environment, and social services, and thus have been slow to pick up on similar trends in the past.

I do believe, however, that the practical barriers to collective impact can be overcome given sufficient motivation to do so. I’m more interested in what I see as philosophical barriers: reasons why arts stakeholders may feel resistance to collective impact due to a perceived conflict with their values. I will go through each of these perceived conflicts and discuss why I feel that they need not be conflicts at all.

Formulating the Problem

Kania and Kramer define a common agenda as follows: “Collective impact requires all participants to have a shared vision for change, one that includes a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving it through agreed upon actions.” Note that vision under discussion here involves solving a problem. This is one reason why the arts often don’t fit in easily with other nonprofit causes: what problem is being solved, exactly, by the Calgary Stampede or the EPCOR CENTRE? The arts are usually best presented as an opportunity rather than a problem: an opportunity for human beings to express themselves to the fullest and for others to witness, experience, and take part in that expression. Fortunately, the language of economics gives us a way of drawing an equivalence between problems and opportunities in the form of opportunity costs. By neglecting to take an opportunity available to us, we miss out on it, and that is a problem if it leads to a worse outcome. Thus, while the problem-solving language of collective impact may feel somewhat alien to arts stakeholders, conceptually it should not stand in the way of forming a shared agenda for the arts.

Measuring the Unmeasurable

Collective impact’s emphasis on shared measurement systems is not just about measuring progress towards a goal – it’s about holding participants accountable for moving a vision forward into reality. Otherwise, vague conceptualizations of the road ahead leave open the potential for multiple and self-serving interpretations of how far we have to go, or if we’re even still on the right path.

The arts, however, have a particularly fraught relationship with measurement and data. One explanation lies in the resource challenges described above – measuring things takes time, money, expertise, and effort, and arts organizations are often stretched for all four. But I believe there’s another factor at play as well, which is that many in the arts simply bristle at the idea of their work being reduced to a number or a statistic. They have seen quantitative data being misused in other contexts, and are afraid the same thing could happen to them. And besides, how can you express the pure joy of creation in a bar graph?

These concerns are understandable. But a truism of measurement is that if it matters at all, it can be measured. That doesn’t mean that measurement is always easy–but the tools we have available to us for research are remarkably flexible and adaptable to almost any situation. It’s applying them in a scientifically valid manner that is the challenge. So-called “intangibles” are very much measurable, and people have been measuring them for centuries. If the arts really are healing souls and changing lives, that is going to show up in the data if the right data is being collected.

It’s important to note that, in order for a collective impact model for the arts to work in Calgary, the #yycArtsPlan process will need to get much more specific about defining concrete data points to associate with the values articulated in the cultural plan. Right now, the plan articulates five goals, some of which readily lend themselves to quantification (“every Calgarian under 18 has the best possible opportunity for arts participation and education”), and some of which don’t (“create a new postcard of Calgary!”). Regardless, it is agreement on these common goals and ongoing tracking of the associated measures that will create the environment of accountability needed to see the vision through.

Diversity vs. the Borg

Critics of collective impact have enjoyed comparing the model to the Borg on Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Resistance is futile.” The reference conjures up an image of faceless robot-like entities that have no individuality, but are instead controlled by some unseen “hive mind.” Such a nightmare vision seems antithetical to the values of the arts, which celebrate diversity, variety, and above all, individual expression. Wouldn’t a collective impact model, with its shared goals and need for structure, interfere with the essence of what the arts are all about?

Actually, I don’t think it needs to – if that model is implemented well. Collective impact means that everyone is working towards the same goals, but contrary to a common misconception, it does not mean that everyone is doing the same things. Just as a homemade meal tastes no less delicious if one cook chops the vegetables while another marinates the meat, collective impact implies a division of labor among participants that nevertheless are all committed to a common goal. Thus, it’s not a problem for one organization to focus on presenting classics of the Western canon while another creates opportunities for immigrants while yet another celebrates the creative achievements of our brightest four-year-old minds – as long as they all understand precisely how their work fits in to the broader puzzle of a creative Calgary and can make decisions accordingly.

Looking Ahead

Much work still needs to be done before Calgary will truly be ready to take on the first arts collective impact effort. And yet Calgary has already made great strides in building a supportive environment for this sort of collective action. In addition to firming up the will and buy-in among local participants for moving forward, Calgary arts leaders will need to translate the #yycArtsPlan’s goals into clear, quantifiable targets that the entire community can rally behind. They will need to set up structures for regular communications among relevant parties and shared data and knowledge networks that directly relate to the vision’s targets. And they will need to define a set of mutually reinforcing activities that the existing arts community can map on to, pinpoint what gaps lie between the current reality and the desired outcomes, and formulate specific strategies to close those gaps that take maximal advantage of the community’s assets. It’s going to be an ambitious ride, and I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

Roy Hargrove, a popular jazz jammer, at work on his horn. Photo courtesy of Eddy Westveer via Flickr.

This is the second post in a series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Four talented young musicians step on stage at a West Village jazz jam. Each faces competing pressures: helping make the band sound tight and showing off her own skills. With this information, and a little bit of formal logic, we could conclude that this situation is hopeless (as we did in the previous piece of this series). Each member of the band faces a pair of incentives that together push her to overplay–meaning simply, as in Pitfalls, playing for a longer period of time than would normally be appropriate for the given tune–and make the music worse. Jazz jams from New York to LA are plagued by this fate, but many avoid it. Some, like the one at Fat Cat in New York City, host some of the best music around.

In order to achieve their goals, arts funders often need the organizations they support to work together. Many of these on-the-ground organizations face a set of incentives similar to the jazz musicians. Yet in the real world, successful collaboration is not unusual for arts organizations or jazz artists.

Why are some shared goals realized when incentives appear to be aligned against them? Doctoral degrees, book deals, and Nobel prizes have been awarded for attempts at answering this question. People and the institutions we make up are difficult to understand. Though there does not yet appear to be a consensus on a single set of factors that generate solutions, simplified versions of the theories posited by diverse academics like Elinor Ostrom, Robert Axelrod, Robert Sugden, Antonio Demasio, George Lakoff, and Daniel Kahnemen from economics, political science, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, and mathematics can help funders move toward a fuller toolkit of productive impact strategies.

Jazz Jams That Listeners Can Enjoy

Looking at how a jazz jam works and how the members avoid failure helps us better understand which strategies foundations should be choosing. A jazz quartet that plays well together could draw on one or a combination of the following scenarios:

Cooperative Strategies: Jazz jams can be quite draining. A series of bad experiences can scar a player for life. Only the musicians who get a lot out of playing stick around to teach jazz to the next round of youngsters. Teachers have learned through experience that they are happiest when they get to play extra time and when no one else overplays. They also learn that pretty much everyone feels the same way. Since it is unlikely that they will run into a lot of players that feel differently, they need to develop a strategy that can work for them throughout the years and keep them energized to go onto the next jam.  Over time, musicians start to develop a simple plan: 1) the first time you play with a new group, don’t overplay. 2) If your bandmates overplay, you can overplay next time as payback. 3) If they don’t overplay, reward them by going along the next time and not overplaying. Cooperation is the best possible option for the group as a whole, so this simple strategy is able to gain momentum over time and become the dominant approach. The four musicians who show up at the West Village jazz jam have all been trained well and know this strategy. If they follow it, the players and the audience will leave happy enough to return another night.

Psychological: It is not often that jazz musicians are accused of being abnormally rational. Each player’s approach to the music is organic, complex, and deeply emotional. Even in everyday life, aside from the creative and culturally cooperative setting of the jazz jam, recent research suggests that no one always acts completely rationally. Our West Village jazz musicians are no different. Each of the players has interests and goals. These incentives can be understood by analyzing the individual musicians’ situations as if they were happiness-maximizing robots. The problem is that players in this group also have brains and bodies, and those don’t always work like a computer.

As the trumpet player reaches the stage, a lot is going through her mind. 98% of it is subconscious. Her fellow musicians start to play. Before she has even picked up her instrument, she hears the chord changes and watches the guitarist strike his instrument. Her brain mirrors this; her mind’s fingers are playing all of those chords. Though she is only observing, her neurons are quietly firing, providing her a subconscious empathic connection to her bandmate. She begins to play and comes to a decision point: should she overplay or play along with everyone else? Her decision draws on a number of simple rules for mental processing. One, called framing, tells her to use the information she has, as it is presented, to make the decision. She was just telling her friend how one of the players earlier in the night was a “ball hog.” The metaphor she used equates “overplaying” and “being a ball hog” and sets the frame for her: jazz is a team sport in which each member should sacrifice for the goals of the team. Using this framing, she decides to pass the ball to her teammate.

Social Context: Jazz musicians are members of social networks outside of just the jazz jam community. The social norms jazz musicians learn outside of jazz—whether in their homes, schools, or places of work or worship—matter inside jazz. When the bass player takes the stage, he is behaving in a way he finds appropriate given his upbringing and social context. Though he feels the urge to take off his shirt—it is hot after all—he probably won’t. He has learned that in this society, when you’re at an upscale music venue, you don’t take off your clothes even if you’re overheated. The same logic applies to his decision not to overplay. His society has conditioned him to appreciate teamwork and cooperation as important virtues. He decides to limit his playing to one turn over the chord changes, because he knows doing otherwise would be seen as inappropriate in his society.

Rules: There’s a sign on the wall of our imaginary West Village jazz haunt: UNLESS YOU’RE CHARLIE PARKER, KEEP IT UNDER 2 CHORUSES! As new players arrive, the doorman makes sure to point out the sign and let them know that they’ll have to pay a fine if they break the rule. When these fresh-faced jazz jammers reach the stage, overplaying doesn’t cross their mind. They know they have to play by the rules and do their best within their time limit.

Unspoken Rules: A young alto sax player walks into a bar on Frenchmen Street hosting a jazz jam. He sits down to watch a few songs and sees that certain players are getting kicked off stage, while others are allowed to stay on stage tune after tune. He notices the difference between the two types of players: the ones who get pushed off are overplaying, and the ones who get to stay are team players. A few songs later, he gets called to the stage. When he gets the chance to overplay, he decides against it because, even though the rule is unspoken, he knows that there will be costs to overplaying.

The Rules that Set the Rules: At the beginning of every jazz jam it hosts, a club in Harlem asks every non-playing person in attendance to vote on the rules for the night. Those in attendance raise their hands and voices in support of a reasonable limit on how long solos can be. They decide that musicians who break the rules can’t play the rest of the night; they’re the customers after all. The rules as determined by the audience constrain the freedom of the musicians to play what they want, but they do so in the interest of everyone there.

A Well-Intentioned Intervention at Our Dreamed-Up Jazz Jam

As one further complication, we could add to our hypothetical jazz jam the existence of an organizer. The person responsible for bringing the whole event about could use her power to influence where the jam is held, what the rules are, and who is allowed in. She could also draw on cognitive scientific, psychological, and game theoretic evidence that using the right language and setting the right context for the jam could change the outcomes. By facilitating the jam with this awareness, she could ensure the jammers work together to the benefit of all involved.

Funding Successful Cooperation

Foundations often use grant-making as a way to structure the incentives available for achieving their goals. Often times, the goals require collaboration among organizations they are funding and other organizations with a similar purpose. Foundations can be more successful if they learn how collaboration works and integrate this knowledge into their grant-making strategies. The simplified jazz jam situations I previously laid out provide a window into how organizations and people come to cooperate.

Foundations that select organizations for funding by assessing marginal costs against marginal social benefits may incentivize organizations to work against shared goals (see The Pitfalls of Shared Goals). Providing grants on this basis carries an implicit theory: the value organizations create together is worth no more than the value they create on their own. The alternative belief, that the value organizations create through collaboration is greater than that which they provide alone, suggests a broader range of strategies.

The Collective Impact approach, as described by John Kania and Mark Kramer in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is an important first step toward solutions. Kania and Kramer suggest that foundations should set a shared agenda, develop a common measurement system, work with organizations to help them fit into their highest-impact role, encourage cross-organization communication, and fund an institution to manage this process. These suggestions draw on the idea that, by changing the rules that make the rules and increasing the visibility of an organization’s failure to contribute to the shared goals, foundations can get closer to achieving their desired outcomes. Each of these suggestions is valid, but other strategies exist as well.

Foundations and other funders of the arts could turn to the varied explanations (above) of why people work together to define strategies that fit their unique needs. Take, for example, a funder seeking to increase the diversity of art making in their community. The funder may choose to fund an organization working to provide performance spaces for women and a separate organization working on offering music classes to underserved communities. Each of these organizations are important, but by emphasizing the individual impact they have on their focus, e.g., how many people became instrumentally proficient per dollar, the funder misses the opportunity to promote shared goals. Instead, the funder could attempt to reframe the work each organization does by offering combined team trainings with all of its grantees in attendance. It could set a standard that any organization which appears to not be working in concert with other organizations is barred from funding for a certain number of years. It could offer trainings on cooperative strategies, like the tit-for-tat strategy explained above, such that the organizations they fund would self-enforce cooperation. And it could even change the language it uses in the grant-making process to ensure that it helps organization leaders think of their organizations as one piece of a bigger puzzle.

In reality, many foundations do this sort of thing every day without knowing it. They consider long-term objectives and make decisions based on audacious goals rather than just near-term impact. They bring diverse coalitions together to discuss shared goals. While a short-run cost-benefit analysis may not see the value in time spent at a bar with other organizations in the community, the cooperative model we’ve been discussing makes sense of its importance.

The strategies foundations and other funders develop are particular to their mission. By understanding how collaboration works in a simple setting, funders can tweak their social impact strategies on the big stage to be more aligned with the evidence on how we reach shared goals.

For more on these topics, check out:

• “Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• “Spontaneous Order” by Robert Sugden
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• “Behind the Looking-Glass” by Antonio Damasio and Kaspar Meyer
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
• Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources by Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

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

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

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

• The Detroit Institute of the Arts, having convinced residents in three counties to pass a property tax supporting the institution in exchange for free admission, is facing a lawsuit on the basis that the deal doesn’t include special exhibits.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Richard Dare, the head of the Brooklyn Philharmonic (previously profiled here on Createquity) and controversial blogger, has taken the top post at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.
• Glenn Lowry, the famously well-compensated director of the Museum of Modern Art, has been elected to the board of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

IN THE FIELD

• RIP Orchestra Nova, a 29-year-old chamber orchestra in San Diego.
• Ouch: the locked-out St. Paul Chamber Orchestra recorded a nearly $1 million deficit last season, its first in a decade. Looks like Sarah Lutman got on the lifeboat just in time.
• The Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University is hosting what looks like a bangup creative placemaking symposium on April 12. And Man About Town Michael Hickey reports on a creative placemaking panel he moderated in New York City.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Interesting and entertaining perspective on collective impact and the need to support direct-service and backbone organizations simultaneously, with response by FSG’s Emily Gorin Malenfant.
• More examples of transparency in action: Kevin Bolduc and the Center for Effective Philanthropy are revamping their flagship product, the Grantee Perception Report, in response to feedback from customers – and blogging about the process.
• Peter Singer (author, The Life You Can Save) on donating to the arts:
  

  “Philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious,” he writes in his book.

  He has heard two counterarguments repeatedly since the book came out in 2009. One points to the work that, say, art museums do with disadvantaged children. “I can see how that would be a worthwhile thing to do,” he said. “I’m not sure how well it compares with saving kids from dying from diarrhea or malaria.”

  Then, there are the crumbling buildings again. “I’m certainly not suggesting that when the roof of the Met starts to leak that you don’t repair it,” he said. “But I would not give a penny to the Met to buy another painting.”

BIG IDEAS

• Clayton Lord (can I still call you Clay?) is upping the ante with a couple of recent blog posts about support for the arts at the federal level, including this lovely graph showing the NEA’s appropriations history in real and nominal dollars along with percentage of the budget and party in control of the White House and Congress. It seems that who has the House of Representatives may be a bigger driver of the NEA budget than previously acknowledged. Be sure to check out Clayton’s analysis of framing vis-a-vis the charitable deduction as well.
• Meanwhile, the “new models”/future of the arts discussion is flaring again, with a post by Michael Kaiser spurring another round of response by Diane Ragsdale and Adam Huttler, and lots and lots of discussion in the comments.
• Watch a museum exhibition go up before your eyes (in slow motion) at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Also: Attendance is not the only measure of demand, museum version.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), an annual survey of arts training program graduates, has published “Painting with Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of an Arts Degree,” a supplementary report on the 2010 survey results by Danielle Lindemann and Steven Tepper.
• Maribel Alvarez offers a review of Maria Rosario Jackson’s latest for LINC, “Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities.”
• The James Irvine Fund has released a report on the its Arts Innovation Fund grants (undertaken under its previous program strategy last decade), conducted by Slover Linett Strategies. The report is accompanied by a nifty tablet-friendly interactive highlighting key findings.
• The Future of Music Coalition is leveraging its Artist Revenue Streams data to engage in some mythbusting regarding how musicians make (or don’t make) money.
• Arts education data in Los Angeles shows a complex picture of trends over the past 15 years.
• Wow. Did you know that more than half of the US patent lawsuits in 2012 were brought by “non-practicing entities” – also known as patent trolls? These companies obtain patents with no intention of actually using them for inventions, but instead to “threaten young companies with lawsuits as soon as they obtain funding; or hamstring older companies, forcing them to divert cash into costly licenses for absurd patents rather than pay for costly defenses in uncertain, patent-friendly jurisdictions.” Good to know for anyone (such as Richard Florida types) relying on patents issued as a measure of innovation. Yuck.
• As mentioned here previously, the Twin Cities is currently suffering a symphony drought, with both the Minnesota and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras shut down in the midst of labor strife. This probably isn’t the most empathetic response imaginable, but my first thought upon reading the headline “Orchestra fans getting restless” in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was, wouldn’t this be a great natural experiment for measuring the value of orchestras to a community? I mean, you don’t realize how much you appreciate something until it’s gone, right? The evidence presented in the article suggests that some audience members are finding substitutes (“a few classical groups have noticed a spike in ticket sales”), but a substantial number are staying home. Independently organized concerts by locked-out members of the Minnesota Orchestra are selling out quickly, though obviously in an environment of substantially reduced competition. I could imagine all sorts of possibilities – a rare economic impact study that actually takes into account opportunity costs, for example, or a more scientific survey of orchestra subscribers to find out what they’re doing with themselves at night.

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

IN THE FIELD

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

BIG IDEAS

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

ETC.

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

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

THE MYSTIQUE OF CITIES

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

THE (NOT SO?) DISMAL SCIENCE

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

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

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

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

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

ETC.

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

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Congratulations to the South Carolina Arts Commission, whose funding was preserved when elected representatives overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the commission’s entire budget. An additional veto that would have invalidated a one-time $500,000 increase for the commission was also overturned, so all in all the Arts Commission will see a significant bump in its budget this year. It’s the third time in three years that the Arts Commission has staved off an elimination threat from a South Carolina governor.

ART AND PLACE

• Hot on the heels of ArtPlace’s similar announcement, the 2012 Our Town grants have been announced. The geographic distribution is striking, and quite literally all over the map. In contrast to last year, there were no grants to New York City, Los Angeles, or any of the nation’s other largest cities with the exception of Dallas, and more than half the grants are going to communities with fewer than 50,000 people. The NEA also held a series of webinars about the awards, which have been archived and are available here.
• Richard Florida, Darren Walker, Rocco Landesman, and Dennis Scholl participated in a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival called “Making Cities Sing.” Partial video from the event is here.
• In the wake of debates about whether Portland, Oregon is truly a creative class success story or not, Barry Johnson offers an interesting perspective on the role of the creative economy in that region.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Jacob Harold, program officer for philanthropy for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who has been appointed the next president of GuideStar (succeeding Bob Ottenhoff). Harold had previously been on GuideStar’s board of directors, as well as a funder.

IN THE FIELD

• The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance, a first-of-its-kind amalgamation of the region’s SOBs (symphony, opera, ballet) into a single organization, is officially live. Good luck to them – it’ll be interesting to see whether the arts scene finds it easier to coexist with one performing arts behemoth instead of three.
• Congratulations to Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch for being named one of the NonProfit Times’s Power & Influence Top 50 for the first time. Lynch is the only 100% arts person to make the cut, though Lisa Paulsen, president & CEO of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (which supports social and medical causes), as well as the leaders of the arts-supporting foundations American Express, Pew, and Knight, are on there as well.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

•  The Philadelphia-based William Penn Foundation will retain its local focus, despite a recent infusion of money that has made it one of the largest foundations in the country.
• Barry Hessenius has an interview with the Knight Foundation’s VP of the Arts and man about town, Dennis Scholl.
• An interview with outgoing Hewlett Foundation Vice President (and #2 under Paul Brest), Susan Bell.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, or SNAAP, has released its annual snapshot of arts graduates and their careers. SNAAP’s Sally Gaskill has more at ArtsBlog.
• Americans for the Arts held a blog salon for its Arts & Economic Prosperity IV report earlier this month. I tweaked the premise of AEP IV in the last Around the Horn, but I don’t want to take away from the fact that a lot of work on the part of many, many people went into creating it. Ben Davidson tells some of the behind the scenes tales, Maria Munoz-Blanco draws a picture of impact, and Createquity superfan Paul Tyler describes the power of mapping in Kansas City.
• Data alert: Nina Simon dissects her museum’s attendance growth over the past year.
• “Simply put, price seldom impacts demand in the arts.”

ETC.

• Stanford Social Innovation Review has an article about the value of “backbone organizations” in a collective impact context, based on the experience of FSG consultants working with the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. The article is in four parts: I, II, III, IV. It’s not the sexiest topic, but if you believe in the relevance of infrastructure to the arts, as I do, it is worth a read.
• More on the Collide@CERN project that Shane Crerar wrote about for Createquity earlier this year.