• The National Endowment for the Arts has spearheaded the formation of a new coalition of private funders to support its creative placemaking agenda. Called ArtPlace, the collaboration features Carol Coletta as its fearless leader, and has the backing of such significant national funders as the Ford, Knight, Kresge, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations. Grants and a $12 million loan fund are administered through the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a nonprofit lender and financial consulting organization. ArtPlace has already made a set of 34 grants in “record time” totaling $11.5 million to a range of projects in the Our Town vein (including one to Coletta’s former employer, CEOs for Cities, in an cool-looking collaboration with GOOD Design.). Thankfully, after a closed-door process for this first round, ArtPlace is opening up next year’s grants through a letter of inquiry which is due November 15. Coletta has more at the Art Works blog.

PHILANTHROPY

• A couple of weeks ago, Sean Stannard-Stockton asked a seemingly innocent question: who should be the Hewlett Foundation’s next president? I was surprised to see Sean wrote a follow-up in which he shares that “emails I’ve gotten from very senior members of the philanthropic community – people whose opinions I respect very much – suggest that my hosting this discussion is far more controversial than I might have guessed.” Apparently, according to these Very Senior People (none of whom, Sean notes, are Hewlett employees), speculating about who might ultimately be the driving force behind the distribution of hundreds of millions of tax-exempt philanthropic dollars a year should be off-limits to plebes who are not on the Hewlett Foundation Board. Thankfully, Sean elected not to listen to this silliness and has gone ahead and published the suggestions that have come in, which include some very interesting names.
• Speaking of Hewlett, Emiko Ono will be the new Program Officer for the Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, replacing Marc Vogl. Ono was Director of Grants and Professional Development for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
• Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has announced a first-of-its-kind “Initiative on Impact Investing.” Officials at the school’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) will be developing a new course, case materials, and working with practitioners to explore impact investing in more depth in an academic setting.
• Ouch: the Center for Effective Philanthropy reports that community foundation leaders are far less strategic in their work than their rhetoric would suggest. In particular, “CEOs who are strategic in their donor work focus explicitly on how donor contributions will benefit the community. In comparison, nonstrategic CEOs focus on how donor contributions will continue to flow to the foundation.”

IN THE FIELD

• After a decade of planning and building, Kansas City’s $326 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts has opened – one of the last products of the performing arts building boom of the 1990s-2000s.
• Doug Borwick, the Association of Arts Administration Educators president who has a new blog on ArtsJournal called Engaging Matters, writes a love letter to the much-missed Community Arts Network.
• And here’s an inside look at Yerba Buena’s personalized membership program, YBCA: YOU, with more from Borwick.
• Words I’d never thought I’d write department: congratulations to Philly’s Mural Arts Program, which landed a cover story…in AAA New York Car & Travel magazine!
• Composer Nico Muhly offers an insider’s perspective on the byzantine restrictions faced by orchestral composers seeking access to recordings of their own work.
• Sally Gaskill, who runs the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project at Indiana University, interviews Angela Myles Beeching, director of the Center for Music Entrepreneurship at Manhattan School of Music, about preparing musicians for careers outside the academy.
• And speaking of professional training degrees for artists, excuse Poets & Writers magazine for trying to give people some sense of how to choose a creative writing MFA program. According to an angry group of writing faculty, the fact that the rankings take financial aid too heavily into account is enough to break out the pitchforks.

THOUGHT BUBBLES

• A very interesting interview with John Kreidler about his cultural policy simulation game, Medici’s Lever.
• Cool true-life story of the birth of an internet meme, conceived by the arts blogosphere’s own Chris Ashworth.
• Clay Lord offers a rare look at the neuroscience of audience response to theater.
• Arlene Goldbard offers her vision of how the arts could play a role in a new stimulus.
• Plagiarism appears to be on the rise in the internet age, even among doctoral students: a study of 120 dissertations in psychology turned up instances of plagiarism (defined as using 10 or more words from another source verbatim without attribution) in a shocking 80% of them. If even the future teachers are plagiarizing, what does that mean for the long term trend?
• Surprise, surprise: when you raise prices 60%, you might lose some customers.
• Two months ago, shoemaker Converse opened up a free recording studio in the ultra-hip neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The New York Times spends a day there talking to the artists taking advantage of the service. A competitive process is used to identify musicians, and as with Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love” (see below), artists are chosen “less for their talent than for their viral energies — their presence on MySpace or Facebook, their hustle in pursuing their careers.”
• I found this live improvised playwriting experiment between Neil Labute and Theresa Rebeck kind of cool, despite the hokey setup.
• I’ve never understood why anyone would want a tattoo, but it seems buyer’s remorse is at an all-time high. Unfortunately, tattoo-removal-seekers are finding that it’s not so easy to turn back time.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In connection with the Artist Revenue Streams project, Future of Music Coalition and the Field are co-hosting (along with a boatload of other organizations including Fractured Atlas) a workshop for musicians on “accounting for creatives” in NYC on Monday, September 19. Check the link for info.
• Nice to see an organization that just released a research report (the Center for Effective Philanthropy, in this case) openly discussing how response bias might have affected the results. We need to see more of this kind of transparency in reporting research results.
• I was intrigued to hear of the formation of a new music research and composition e-journal series on the Social Science Research Network database, led (mostly) by Boston University faculty.
• Andrew Taylor points us to a new book by the Curb Center’s Steven Tepper on protest and the arts.
• Two economists estimate the “psychic value” of a work of art (as distinct from its investment value) at 28% of its overall price.

LOOKING BACK

(the following are some “retro” links from the past 12 months that for one reason or another didn’t make it into the around the horn wrap-ups the first time around.)

• Joshua Phillips lays out a very serious and detailed proposal (and justification) for a public policy game show.
• It’s not too often that I see a coherent conservative case against arts funding, but here’s an example for those who might be curious. Main arguments: the evidence of the arts’ economic impact is flimsy, and government funding makes for worse art.
• It was hard to suppress a wry smile upon learning that Leona Helmsley’s precious dog Trouble, to which she left $12 million in her will (disowning two of her grandchildren in the process), has passed away. The funds held in Trouble’s trust have reverted to Helmsley’s charitable foundation, which is one of the largest in the world.
• Wondering where our nation’s sudden income inequality came from? Since 1992, super-wealthy Americans’ effective tax burden has plummeted by more than a third. Over the same time period, the effective tax rate for all taxpayers has dropped only 6%.
• Is subway pop-up theater the new flashmob-chorus/dance/opera-in-a-mall?
• I found this quote worth mulling over, from the NYTimes Magazine’s writeup of Kickstarter last month:
  

  I sat in on a meeting where the [“Projects We Love”] newsletter picks were made. During the half-hour or so Strickler and the team discussed the choices, I was struck by how often they talked not about the projects but about the pitches. “His video is so boring.” “What are the rewards?” “Why is this cool?” They were focused on the project ideas through the filter of “the Kickstarter project” as a form. “We have values,” Chen told me, and they boil down to prizing creators who respect its proc­ess. They favor creators who think through the rewards for backers, get the word out and engage an audience. In other words, the process doesn’t shape the aesthetic. It is the aesthetic.

• The third annual Barry’s Blog listing of the top 25 most influential arts leaders came out recently, and this time to my surprise I’m actually on it. I’m tied for #21 along with two other “emerging leaders” who I respect very much (Marc Vogl and Edward Clapp), kind of in the peanut gallery towards the back where Barry starts grouping people according to his whim. Barry allowed each of the 60 nominators, of which I was one, to put their own hat in the ring if they wished, but since I didn’t, that means at least one other person out there must have thought of me. It’s strange to be mentioned in the same breath with those names, but I was gratified that to see that two “emerged” leaders who are nevertheless in their early 30s, my boss (Adam Huttler) and Future of Music Coalition’s Jean Cook, both made the list at #8 and #11 respectively. Fun fact: when I was getting ready to leave New York three-plus years ago to go to business school, I reached out to the two smartest people I knew in the arts to get their take on what I should look out for as I began my education. Their names? Adam Huttler and Jean Cook. Must have been doing something right back then.
• Barry is also putting together a campaign to have the gubernatorial candidates in California answer questions about their support for the arts. Some very smart people are working on this, and you can read more here.
• Another arts advocacy campaign to watch: 1% for Culture in New York City. (Yes, that’s 1% of the entire city budget for arts & culture. The current figure is less than a quarter of that.) Here’s Grantmakers in the Arts’s Janet Brown, who knows as much about arts advocacy as just about anyone, with her thoughts on the subject. And look out, world: Robert Lynch has a blog.
• Uh oh: in Britain, two-thirds of the public agrees that cutting public arts funding by 25-30% in that country would be a good idea. In case you haven’t been following this story, the Conservative government led by David Cameron is proposing moving to an American-style system of private support for the arts instead of the current hybrid approach used in the UK. It’s worth noting that even an arts system that relies on public funding still costs a pittance. We’ll have more on this story here soon.
• Research compilations galore! First up, here’s a summary of current research data from the theater world, courtesy of Tom Loughlin. Next we have Brigid with a round-up of recent psychology and neurobiology experiments involving philanthropy (along with her caveat about them). With the blog’s new page menu structure under development, I’m thinking about putting something similar together one of these days. Special mention in the research compilation category goes to this excellent-looking article from Theatre Bay Area’s Clay Lord on (lack of) diversity in audiences for the stage, into which I am looking forward to digging further. It’s already begun provoking discussion around the office.
• Mapping madness! My colleague and friend Ron Ragin at the Hewlett Foundation, himself an emerging leader to watch, guest blogs at the Center for Effective Philanthropy Blog and name-drops the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map along with several other data-driven Hewlett initiatives. Arena Stage gives a preview of the user functions of the New Play Map, currently under development. The University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute (aka Richard Florida’s shop) comes out with a map of the “creative class” in Canada’s largest city. Judith H. Dobrzynski reports on the Foundation Center’s new interactive map of arts grantmakers by state. And check out this boffo analysis of the top 10 ZIP Codes by startup venture capital per resident (via ReadWriteWeb).
• Data delight! Today’s selection of studies, charts and graphs includes an explanation of why misunderstanding statistical variance might have cost the Gates Foundation a whole lot of money; a rundown of how musician salaries at top orchestras have fared during the recession; an examination of how personality type affects taste preferences in entertainment; an evidence-based look at what dance moves most impress the ladies (hint: engage the head, neck, and torso, not just your arms and legs); and what a dating website tells us about stuff white (and black, and Asian, etc.) people like. Here are the top arts- and entertainment-related results for each race/ethnicity & gender: white men, Tom Clancy; white women, Nicholas Sparks (unless you count “mascara”); black men, Menace II Society; black women, The Color Purple; Latino men, merengue; Latino women, also merengue (both the top results overall); (East) Asian men, The Rock; (East) Asian women, “love story”; Indian men, Shantaram; Indian women, Bhangra; Middle Eastern men, The Sopranos; Middle Eastern women, The Kite Runner (unless you count “scarves”); Pacific Islander men, The Rock; Pacific Islander women, Alicia Keys. Love the OKCupid blog!
• Crowdsourcing continues to enter mainstream thought, to the point where one begins to wonder when we’re all supposed to have time to do our “real” jobs. The Brooklyn Museum is hosting the first-ever visitor-curated Target First Saturday on October 2; website visitors are both nominating and voting for their top choices. Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is commissioning composers and programming concerts based in part on Yelp-style reviews and comments. You know this shit has hit the big time when even humanities scholars are trying it out for their precious peer-reviewed journals! Standing firmly behind the expert-curated model, meanwhile, is Apple, which has published guidelines for its iPhone App Store that sternly warn against the online marketplace becoming “amateur hour.”
• One positive trend I’ve been seeing recently is a greater willingness among grantmakers to share their thinking and, increasingly, their actual source materials, with the world. Witness, for example, the publication of the McKnight Foundation’s Grantee Perception Report, conducted by the aforementioned Center for Effective Philanthropy. (The results were remarkably similar to the Hewlett Foundation’s, as disclosed by Ron Ragin in another guest post.) Meanwhile, over in the public sector, there was a minor kerfuffle regarding the new federal Social Innovation Fund’s transparency practices that resulted in the SIF releasing the entire set of scores and comments from the application review process. I’ve never seen that level of disclosure from a private funder not named GiveWell.
• Speaking of GiveWell, the founders are temporarily working out of Mumbai, India, and Holden Karnofsky is wondering if he wouldn’t be practicing better philanthropy just by walking into poor neighborhoods and randomly giving out cash.
• And Ken Berger of Charity Navigator, GiveWell’s longtime nemesis, has co-authored an article exploring what philanthropy can learn from baseball’s statistical revolution.
• RIP Community Arts Network. The website will be archived by the Open Folklore Project at Indiana University. Back when the recession first hit, many people predicted we’d see a ton of closures of nonprofits and, more interestingly, mergers. I think it’s fair to say at this point that those predictions have not come true, but two organizations that have merged are the Cape Cod Conservatory of Music and Arts and the Cape Cod Symphony.
• The Nathan Cummings Foundation has hired Maurine Knighton as the new Program Director for Arts & Culture.
• Social media is the new NYC. That is, if it doesn’t become totally lame first. Or are those mutually exclusive?
• Attention USA: we’re going to need to raise taxes. Get used to it.
• Oh. My. God. Vice Magazine is doing classical music reviews. “Like if one day you visited Vivaldi’s apartment and discovered some bassoon-shaped nipple hasps or jelly dongs, would you honestly be that surprised?” Indeed. (h/t Life’s a Pitch)

• More beating the drum for a high-level arts policy director position in the federal government. The arts policy document I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is now up at change.gov. Isaac offers a cogent vision for cross-departmental government arts support, and Adam responds.
• A new resource center for program-related investments debuts at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship. Hitting a number of themes discussed during the recently concluded Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference, the center “will work to expand the field of mission investing through the sharing of tools, best practices, lessons learned, and ideas for products and services that could move the field forward,” according to its press release.
• I missed this one the first time around, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy posted a list of its most widely-read articles from the past year. One of these was a screed by Mark J. Drozdowski about bad fundraisers who keep getting hired again and again and again. A few observations:

This is definitely a real problem, not just with development directors but with executive directors as well. It’s all too easy for people to “fail upwards” in the arts (as in other industries as well).

I can’t help but feel that this is what happens when the availability of development positions outpaces the kind of proven, reliable talent that organizations usually seek. The explosion of nonprofit organizations and the expansion of development departments at the nonprofits that already exist worry me for this and other reasons.

Fixing this problem is probably going to take some drastic changes in the field. Probably the easiest, and the one that already has the most momentum behind it, is for organizations to place more trust in emerging leaders (i.e., millennials and young Gen-Xers who are still in their first decade of experience in the field). They come cheap and often full of idealism, and as the Obama campaign proved, can be extremely effective despite their inexperience if organized properly.

I don’t think that’s going to be enough though. Grantmaking organizations are going to have to work aggressively together to simplify the application process and make it less resource-intensive for organizations to run fundraising operations. Funders could help to stem the tide by taking more responsibility for the financial success of the programs that they sponsor; that is, by either (a) being open to fully funding program costs if it is within their budget to do so, or (b) playing an active role in facilitating funding coalitions with peer organizations on the program’s behalf. Either approach would take some pressure off of grantee organizations’ own fundraising operations, which in certain cases could be beneficial.

Finally, infrastructure to allow organizations to share fundraising staff and back-office operations, an extension of what some theater and dance companies are doing with office space, could open up some economies of scale and make fundraising more affordable and efficient.

• Community Arts Network has two recent postings of interest: a history of arts-related public works projects from the Great Depression forwards, and a syllabus for a course at Goucher College in Baltimore called Cultural Ecosystem: The Arts in Community.
• Finally, via PhilanTopic, an online directory of fiscal sponsors from the San Francisco Study Center has debuted. Learn more about fiscal sponsorship here.