• In a major victory for New York’s arts education advocates, Mayor Bloomberg signed a bill requiring the city’s department of education to report on the availability and accessibility of arts education in each of its schools. This annual report will make public the degree to which schools meet current instructional requirements in music, dance, theater, and visual art. This wasn’t an aberration for Bloomberg, whose legacy after three terms as mayor includes an impressive record of support for the arts.
• Meanwhile, arts groups prepare to woo his successor, Bill de Blasio, who has followed national precedent and failed so far to appoint a new Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Some speculate – or simply hope – that he will apply his populist spirit to the culture sector.
• Reversing an earlier position, the United States Copyright Office now recommends that visual artists receive a portion of profits when their work is resold. Congress hasn’t taken up resale royalties for visual artists since 2011, when a bill sponsored by Representative Jerrold Nadler failed to gain traction.
• ‘Tis the season of Top Ten Lists, and The Future of Music Coalition has a comprehensive roundup of 2013’s music and technology policy developments, including Congress’s ongoing review of the Copyright Act, a changing of the guard at the FCC, and the looming court decision in the momentous net neutrality case between the FCC and Verizon.
• Construction for major government-supported art facilities in Abu Dhabi — including sparkly new Guggenheim and Louvre campuses — is booming on the backs of migrant workers from Pakistan and Bangladesh, many of whom had to pay a recruitment fee to work on the projects and now toil under atrocious conditions. The International Trade Union Confederation is urging western museums to step in, and a coalition of artists and activists has formed to support the workers.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Steven Tepper, research director of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) and associate director of Vanderbilt’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, is the new dean of Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• George Zimmerman is once again in the media spotlight for selling a painting he made on eBay. The patriotically themed piece sold for $100,099.99, prompting outrage from some and a web-sale response by artist Michael D’Auntuono. In a move the artist calls “hypocritical,” D’Auntuono’s attempt to sell his response piece, and donate part of the proceeds to a charity advocating for crime victims, was censored by the auction website for violation of eBay guidelines.
• Acknowledging that less than 5 percent of its grants for repertory development have gone to women over the last quarter century, Opera America is launching a grant program targeting female composers.

IN THE FIELD

• Is Facebook’s new donate button “good, bad, or ugly” for nonprofits? Beth Kanter argues it does more harm than good, and rallies for a Facebook Ad Grants program similar to Google’s.
• In its quest to make culture “the spirit and soul of the nation,” China opened more than 450 museums in the last year alone, bringing the total number in the country to nearly 4,000.
• Did you finish 1984? New all-you-can-read book services are compiling data on not just what we read but also how quickly we do it, how long we linger over which passages, and whether we finish specific books. (Turns out people are more eager to learn how biographies end than business books.)
• Mara Walker, chief operating officer for Americans for the Arts, reports on her experience as the only American participant at this year’s International Arts Leadership Roundtable, organized by the Hong Kong Art Development Council.

BIG IDEAS

• You’ve Cott Mail readers offered bold predictions for the arts in 2014: ballet will relocate to London, we’ll all stop saying “outreach” (but do it more in our communities), and new artist-led theater collectives will rise up to seize the means of cultural production, among other prophecies.
• The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout, meanwhile, predicts audiences’ growing “on-demand” mentality will continue to spell trouble for nonprofit theater companies, and urges them to embrace and market the “intimacy [of the] small scale, handmade art form.”
• In an interview with Barry Hessenius, WESTAF Executive Director Anthony Radich unpacks his longstanding call to “reimagine” state arts agencies (i.e., embrace more flexible staff structures and find ways to get “free from the negative undertow of state restrictions while retaining that still-important connection to the state government”) and offers insight on the future of state support for the arts.
• Providence, RI has acknowledged how much the city’s future depends on its four main nonprofit higher-ed institutions: Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Johnson & Wales, and Providence College. Financially reliant on an industry that isn’t requited to pay local taxes, the city of Providence has negotiated an attempted economic revitalization plan that has the schools make sizable contributions to the city in exchange for sweetened deals on land usage and campus expansion.
• Createquity’s own Talia Gibas lays out three different conceptions educators, artists, and advocates draw on when they talk about “STEAM” as the intersection of the arts with science, technology, engineering, and math. She argues that art may primarily represent aesthetics and design, curiosity, or creativity, and that there are important differences among the three.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Foundation Center’s annual “Key Facts on U.S. Foundations” report is out in time for the New Year. Giving is on the rise: the approximately 82,000 foundations in the U.S. gave $45.9 billion in 2010, $49.0 billion in 2011, and an estimated $50.9 billion in 2012. The report also breaks down the largest grants by the largest foundations for 2011 by issue, geography, and a host of other dimensions, revealing among other things that the top 1% of recipients captured half of these grant dollars.
• The McKnight Foundation has released its findings in a study it conducted, with help from the Center for the Study of Art & Community, on artists supported by its fellowship program since its establishment in 1982. The study asked artists six questions that gave them an opportunity to “reflect on the environment, conditions, and motivations that affect their work.”

Tell us a little bit about your radio show – what is it? How did it come to be, and how did you get involved?

Endless Possibilities is a weekly radio program I have hosted since 2008 on WRSU, the college radio station of Rutgers University. I began hosting shows on WRSU in 2005 with a wildly free form show called Trivial Pursuits. My initial motivation was to interact with music in a very non academic way because I was beginning to feel some conservatory burn out. As fun as it was to segue Pierrot Lunaire into London Calling into Hauschka, I eventually limited the format of my show and renamed it Endless Possibilities. While I don’t restrict myself from playing any specific genres, the core of each show is decidedly contemporary art music.

You announced an open call for submissions recently. What kind of response have you gotten? What is your process for evaluating what comes in through the door?

I’ve actually had an open call for submissions to a semi-regular segment of the show, Explorations, for about as long as Endless Possibilities has existed. The original motivation was to highlight great new music that may not have the shine of professionally made recordings or a publicity budget. This has long been one of the best parts of college radio, and I was hoping to do a little bit of that for new music. Additionally, I was looking for music that presented me with a new idea or fresh approach to an old one. I am more concerned with the idea than execution, and I hope to give the audience, which I assume to be college radio listeners more than new music insiders, the opportunity to connect with something they haven’t been previously exposed to.

A large majority of the submissions have been more polished than I expected. Upon reflection, the music has to survive the composition, rehearsal, and performance stages before it can even exist as a recording, and then the submitter has to be proud of the result. The bar is a lot higher than a call for scores, and I have no shortage of air time. As a result, I’m able to program a little more than half the works I am sent. While I’ve received a diversity of submissions, one thing that is clear is that most of the music I receive comes from people who have an affinity for self promotion.

Do you feel like you’ve “discovered” any artists through your submissions process (i.e., that nobody knew about before)? Do you ever try to promote their work beyond the radio show?

One composer I featured was solicited the following day for a commission. Another composer, Nat Evans, wrote a piece for a chamber group I run, and we’ve performed the piece multiple times. I certainly haven’t catapulted any composers from obscurity to household name, but I am pretty sure I have raised the profile of some musicians, including International composers who do not seem to receive attention in America. Additionally, I’ve kept tabs on the composers I’ve programmed and mention them on my website when they are promoting new projects.

You mentioned that the recordings people send you tend to be more polished than you expected. On the one hand, that perhaps makes for a better listening experience, but on the other, it perhaps gets away a little bit from the original vision for Explorations. How do you negotiate that tension in your curation process?

It is interesting, to me at least, that I’ve had to be more concerned with creating a ceiling for the segment than a floor. Luckily, I have space during the rest of my show to feature music I don’t find appropriate for Explorations, and I have played submissions outside of Explorations as a way to promote a piece and maintain the spirit of the segment. Clearly there is a lot gray area in making this determination, but over time my familiarity with the new music world has made this judgement a lot easier.

How much of your time do you spend listening to people’s submissions? And what keeps you going?

Submissions for Explorations don’t really follow any week to week pattern, but I’ll listen to each piece 3 or 4 times to get a firm grasp of it before deciding if it is appropriate. These submissions also have priority over the albums I receive from labels each month for regular airplay (which is generally about 10 hours of music a month), and the time I spend on soundcloud/twitter/etc. seeking out new music. As for what keeps me going, I am pretty addicted to finding new music and hearing things for the first time, so I’m generally excited to sit down and hear some fresh sounds.

What do you consider to be “good” curation? Is it about ethics, is it about filling a gap, etc.? What kinds of shortcuts do you think are permissible, and which ones do you not let yourself take?

I think any curator, whether creating a concert series or publishing a monthly short story series such as One Story, needs to have a clear focus of the type of art it is trying to feature and what makes his or her space unique. There is literally more music out there than hours in the day, and as a curator I’m attempting to create a virtual space that a listener can approach and quickly recognize the space’s identity.

I also have to deal with the critical mass of music being created. My social networks help limit the amount and quality of music I come in contact with. For example, Paul Bailey’s alt-classical has been a great source for finding new material. I don’t think this solution would work for any other medium, but I rely on iTunes Smart Playlists to filter music: Some of these playlists help me cycle through tracks within genres, while others keep the newest albums I’ve received close at my fingertips (as well as cycle out older tracks) and shuffle the pieces to explore how music would fit together for airplay. These playlists took a while to set up, but have saved me countless hours by targeting the most important music to listen to, as well as varying the tracks to keep my interest.

Here’s an excerpt:

What changed me the most [at business school] was the exposure to an endless panoply of other areas of human life beyond contemporary classical music. Sure, I learned about assets and liabilities and how to read a cash flow statement, but I also learned about the auction for 3G wireless ranges, competition between Target and Wal-Mart, why Turkey is an emerging power player in the Middle East, and how colleges and foundations manage their endowments. […]

In the course of this sudden immersion into what the rest of the world thinks about and does on a daily basis, I came to realize that my former existence had been focused like a laser on about 0.00001% of everything that matters. It was like the veil had been lifted on my life: the choices I faced when I voted in an election or needed to buy produce or searched for an apartment to rent or, yes, chose a graduate school had all been determined by somebody, or more often a collection of somebodies acting in somewhat predictable ways. It became clear to me that I was never going to have control over my own destiny unless I had the capacity to see and understand the external forces that were influencing my circumstances. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, too. So here are a couple of vignettes from my own journey into the belly of the capitalist beast, which I offer in the hopes of connecting my experiences (and perhaps some of yours) to the bigger picture. After all, we are just variations on a theme.

Read the rest over at NewMusicBox.

The second chapter of Outrageous shines a light on the sadly pitiful economic status of most playwrights. Holy Moses, it’s depressing. The numbers as presented are pretty stark: more than 60 percent of surveyed playwrights bring in less than $40,000 a year from all sources; more than half of that income comes from sources unrelated to their work as a playwright; and a mere 15% of their income comes from actually writing plays. Even the most successful of all playwrights, we’re told, are lucky to earn as much as $20,000 a year over an extended period of time from playwriting itself.

I’m currently making my way through William Baumol and William Bowen’s seminal 1966 study Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (note: Baumol served on the Playwrights Project Committee in connection with this book from 2001-2009), and it’s striking how similar the story was then to how it goes today. I unfortunately don’t have the book with me at the moment, but suffice to say that, back then as well, if playwrights were to strike it rich it was going to be from the sale of movie or television rights to their work, and in the meantime, they supplemented their income with money from lots of other sources (including spousal and family wealth). [UPDATE: I’ve checked the book, and indeed, the average playwright in the mid-50s earned less than a tenth of his or her income from plays, and about 40% from non-writing sources.]

As others have pointed out, the playwrights interviewed by the authors of Outrageous Fortune don’t exactly represent a random cross-section of the playwriting community in the United States. The top-down-driven sample is heavily biased (as the authors fully recognize) towards playwrights who have “made it” to a certain degree, regardless of their career stage: either by being produced regularly, winning awards, graduating from pedigree MFA programs, participating in well-known workshops, etc. I actually don’t think this is much of a problem for the purposes of the study: the point, after all, is how much it sucks economically to be a playwright, and the authors of Outrageous Fortune can point to these results and say, “see? even the successful ones can’t make a buck in this town!” It’s also pretty comparable in that sense to the Baumol and Bowen study, since I believe similar methods were used to identify playwrights.

Among the more poignant findings is that even when playwrights do get productions of their work, it can be an economic bane as much as a boon. A month is taken from their productive lives during which their compensation may not make up for the expenses they incur being in an unfamiliar place. And when they get back, they haven’t been writing or hustling for gigs in the meantime.

The chapter offers a brief examination of playwright-reported differences in earnings and productions by race and gender. Interestingly, the qualitative and quantitative data diverge somewhat here; while a strong frustration with perceived barriers to minority and female playwrights was conveyed in focus groups and interviews, the surveyed respondents reported no major differences in the actual money they earn from their professional activities. It should be noted that this sample of “successful” playwrights was underweighted compared to the United States population of African American and Latino individuals, so it does seem fair to conclude that fewer people of color “make it” as playwrights, either because fewer of them try or because of discrimination of some sort. However, the same could not be said of female playwrights, who made up nearly half of the sample; nevertheless, female playwrights were more likely to describe themselves at an earlier career stage (it’s not reported how this matched up with age or number of productions). It also seems likely that there are things not being captured by the study, such as many respondents’ perception that minority or female playwrights show up more often at venues or showcases specifically designed to highlight “underrepresented” work and less in more “mainstream” contexts; it could be the case that this is so but that the money nevertheless works out to be  more or less the same.

The chapter devotes additional attention to the problems with the professional “track” for playwrights going through MFA programs, including the now-famous stat that 90% of the playwrights in the survey who had received advanced professional training got it from one of seven schools (the total is 42% of all surveyed playwrights). A bit of lip service is given to the  moral quandary of asking aspiring playwrights to pay tens of thousands of dollars for training in a field where the remuneration potential is hardly robust. The term “emerging” comes in for some abuse, and the authors lament that there is no room for the mid-career artist.

The few bright spots appear to be teaching in academia (writers enjoy it and the schedule suits them, though it obviously feeds the beast that is the Professional Playwright Track) and working in television (where stimulating creative possibilities abound, though in a different sort of sense than the nonprofit theater).

All in all, it sounds like a pretty huge clusterfuck to me. I don’t know why anyone would try to be a playwright for a living. But then I hang out with composers, so what the hell do I know.

Okay, let’s try for some more intelligent analysis than that. This all fits in with and supports some things I’ve written before about the burgeoning ranks of committed amateurs and its implications for the sustainability of the arts ecosystem. Outrageous Fortune‘s answer for “what playwrights want” boils down to productions: not workshops, not readings, not “development,” but real productions. Preferably with the same company multiple times, so that an ongoing artistic relationship can be cultivated. Problem is, if such accommodations are made, it makes a very few playwrights very happy and shuts out everyone else in the cold. There’s no way to go both broad and deep without radically increasing the number of theaters and the resources available to them. Either that or a whole bunch more playwrights are gonna have to quit, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. This vise of competition seems to grip all artist categories, but I’m starting to think that it’s especially tight around the creators: the composers, the bandleaders, the playwrights, the choreographers, the poets. Most in this category don’t have a union or collective bargaining agreement to protect them, because the demand for their services is coming, most of all, from within. So they end up being the ones to drive movement forward on their careers, and are willing to sacrifice almost everything to do so. It’s beautiful and sad and frustrating and it’s one of the few things about the arts that makes me throw up my hands at a complete loss for how to address it.

First things first. Outrageous Fortune is, at its core, a book about new plays. It is billed as a study, but my initial sense (and I should clarify that I am still making my way through the book) is that it is closer to a work of journalism than of science. Sure, there are a couple of surveys involved, but the number of respondents is not overwhelming; most of the information presented is gleaned from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with hand-selected participants. So it’s a qualitative investigation into the life of the working playwright and the life of the new play, examined from the perspectives both of those who write the plays and those who are responsible for bringing them to the stage.

Outrageous Fortune paints a none-too-bright picture of the environment for new plays in America. Of principal concern are the economic challenges faced by playwrights and the lack of opportunity for making one’s living through playwriting; the gap in support for mid-career playwrights; the inauthentic professional relationship between playwrights and artistic directors; and the creeping institutionalization of theater that hamstrings true artistic leadership. There’s a lot of nostalgia for bygone eras and erstwhile heroes, from Eugene O’Neill to Joe Papp, the likes of which (it’s implied) we’ll never see again. Broadway and the commercial theater has ceded responsibility for new play development altogether, we’re told; playwrights complain that unconvention in form is brutally punished at the box office, if it ever gets programmed at all; how are writers supposed to develop, the question is posed, if they don’t see their works produced?

It all sounds pretty bad, particularly on economic grounds, and my instinct is to turn a sympathetic ear, but then I put my composer’s hat on and find myself re-evaluating. Wait a minute, I’m thinking, you’re complaining that theater is hostile to new plays when, according to Terry Teachout, the top 9 and 10 of the 11 most-produced plays of the past decade were written after 1993? You’re complaining that artists aren’t nourished when even at regional theaters, a play can expect to be seen most every night for several weeks?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the land of orchestras. A wondrous nation where you’ll find almost every concert (especially at the regional level) dominated by dead white guys, most of whom did their writing before 1893. A vast field in which there is exactly one full-size orchestra dedicated exclusively to music by living composers (the American Composers Orchestra), doing so on a shoestring budget. An environment in which a composer can perhaps hope for several hours of rehearsal time with a new work, so that it can be performed a total of three times, or twice, or once. Ever. In which union regulations often prevent said composer from distributing or even hearing the recording of that one performance for future reference. In which less than one-seventh of those who consider themselves professional composers actually make a living from their work. And for all you diversity kids, get a load of these stats for composers: 80% male and 85% white! (Actually, those numbers are for all composers reached by that particular survey – I’m sure they’re even worse for those who specialize in orchestral music.)

I don’t mean to start an interdisciplinary pissing contest about which artists have it worst off. My point, rather, is this: whatever else is said this week about the problems facing contemporary theater, let’s not forget that many of these issues are common to the arts as a whole, not just the stage. The glut of amazing work that never gets read because there’s no one to evaluate it? Talk to a composer. The rat race and ever-expanding degree requirements to make it in a field that will never pay you money? It’s the conductor’s lament all over again. And as you’re working out your frustration over the system, keep in mind that there may be aspects of how the theater works that actually do work well, and that may even serve as models for other disciplines. For example, I think it’s great that the nonprofit theaters serve (or at least used to serve) as a “farm team” of sorts for the major leagues, aka Broadway. I don’t see it as a problem at all that B’way rarely takes on risky new work; after all, they’re businesses, what do you expect? All I think is, wouldn’t it be awesome if Hollywood plucked its composers from the ranks of the concert music crowd more than once in a blue moon? And what’s so bad about having a play done in multiple locations across the country, reaching different audiences each time? Isn’t that kind of good for live theater, in that it opens up the possibility for a common, shared experience/conversation around specific works among people in different geographic areas — the way such possibilities currently exist for movies and television and books and recorded music and other mass media? Doesn’t that raise awareness of theater as a whole?

Isaac Butler, who wrote the post linked above, also offers some analysis of the situation that I totally agree with, especially this paragraph:

Let’s think for a moment about why this might be the case. There aren’t a lot of full-time, salaried staff positions for composers—essentially none, unless you count the advertising industry (and even then it’s heavily commission-based) and university faculty positions. What little money organizations do have available to pay musicians for creating new work tends to be concentrated in the hands of a very few highly successful individuals, because only those with established names and reputations can really help drive sales or put butts in seats. To put it another way, the market—even taking subsidization from charitable sources into account—only really supports a limited number of serious musicians, i.e., the ones at the very top. It supports those few quite generously, to be perfectly honest (I’m sure Lorin Maazel isn’t complaining about taking home $2.5 million a year), but once you get past the very top of the ladder, the pickings become very slim indeed. Barriers to entry for new artists are low; competition is so fierce as to practically commoditize the music, making a middle-class existence as a non-superstar composer an extremely difficult goal to achieve and highly vulnerable once it has been attained.

In an industry with so many undesirable attributes, an economist would expect suppliers (i.e., the composers) to exit—stop composing and do something else with their lives—until the overall supply was reduced enough to affect the overall dynamics of the field. This is especially the case since the costs of stopping (barriers to exit) are essentially zero. And yet, what we see is the exact opposite. It’s an accepted truth in the new music world that there are more composers today than at any previous point in history. Music schools are churning out graduates at record rates, and new departments and conservatories are established on a regular basis. Not only are there more artists than ever before, but because of the intense competition and extensive training available, the quality of those artists (or at least those at the top of their field) is arguably at an all-time high as well. Meanwhile, technology and the Internet have combined to make it very easy not only to create content like this, but also to ensure its ongoing survival in the public sphere even at an extremely low level of visibility. Thus, new content not only competes with all of the other material newly created by this unprecedented population of artists, but also the entire back catalogue of recorded material created in the past—a collection that can only increase in size and scope over time. Which is all to say that it’s a completely amazing time to be a composer, as long as you don’t care about making any money or getting more than a few dozen people to listen to your music.

One thing that’s become clear to me since starting business school is that composition is far from the only industry that is experiencing some variation of this phenomenon. I blogged last month about commonalities between symphony orchestras and the newspaper industry: the Internet is driving an explosion of interest in “citizen journalism,” yet full-time, salaried journalist positions are steadily disappearing across the country. Meanwhile, journalism schools are thriving, dutifully preparing students for jobs that don’t exist. We see similar patterns across all of the arts, including dance, theater, visual arts, literature, film, and so on, not to mention commercial analogues of these fields (such as the mainstream music industry). Generally speaking, it’s a good bet that almost any endeavor involving content creation is experiencing more freelancing, lower average salaries, and an intense level of competition for the good jobs.

That’s why I expect that we are going to start seeing more and more of the kind of “semi-professional” approach and cost structure that Fractured Atlas is using in its RFP for online courses. Such an approach is aimed squarely at the middle of the long tail of content creators in a given field: bypassing the superstars and their reputation-inflated price tags/egos, while employing incentive and filtering systems to identify the best of the rest and secure their services at a considerable savings. It sounds coldly capitalistic, but I actually think it could be a very good thing for the field in that it fights the increasing stratification between the superstars and the nobodies. It helps to create a middle ground where it’s possible to make something doing what you love even if you’re not famous. Given the realities discussed above, would that not be preferable for those who don’t already have it made?