I basically retired from conference blogging two years ago, but the opportunity to bring together our hot-off-the-presses editorial team in one place and try out a new medium for us (video) was enough to drag me out of the attic for this go-round. Once you’ve attended any conference for several years in a row, it’s easy to get jaded and start to care more about reconnecting with old friends and making new ones than about the session content. This phenomenon probably reached its peak for me during last year’s conference in, of all places, Miami Beach, where I arrived to discover a hot tub in my room and one of my coworkers got randomly upgraded to a swim-up bungalow. Kind of hard to concentrate on PowerPoint slides in that kind of environment; I remember hanging around the pool with colleagues right after presenting one afternoon, wearing my nametag over a full suit and tie and feeling like a very sweaty idiot. I figured I wouldn’t have quite the same sorts of distractions to contend with in Philly, but still, it was another year of GIA and what promised to be another year of what have become some very familiar conversations.

Many conferences have formal “tracks” corresponding to industries, sectors, topic areas, and so forth, so that if you identify with one of those tracks you can easily navigate your way through the content that is most relevant to you. The GIA Conference essentially has implicit tracks that pop up every year: arts and social justice/cultural equity, arts education, technology, support for individual artists, creative placemaking, and so forth. I’m more invested in some of these topics than others, and it had become my practice at GIA and other conferences to gravitate towards those topics and engage with the kinds of people who get invited to speak on them. Nothing wrong with that, except that over time I found myself learning less and less from these sessions; I was already pretty on top of whatever conversations were going on and had met most of the people there were to meet. I’ve now been to not just GIA but also the Americans for the Arts Convention five times each, and my most positive experience at each conference was my first, in 2009 – when I was new to this corner of the field and everything was fresh.

So this year, I decided to switch it up a bit and deliberately attend some sessions that were outside of my comfort zone. The first of these was the Arts Education pre-conference, which you can hear about in our first video blog if you haven’t watched it yet. I’m going to focus here on two sessions during the main conference that blew my mind for two very different reasons, neither of which I had a chance to talk about much during our in-the-moment recaps.

On Monday, I attended “Invisible » Visible: New Native Voices on the Forefront of Change,” organized by Reuben Roqueni of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. That morning, GIA had unveiled its much-ballyhooed IDEA LAB, a series of TEDx-style short presentations, and the initial round of mini-keynotes were all delivered by artists or curators. While some of these talks were compelling, most of them ended up being about the artist’s individual work or the importance of art in general without much connection to grantmaking practice or the broader themes of the conference, and felt like tangents as a result. I came to this artist-centric session bracing myself for more of the same, but I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Rulan Tangen of Dancing Earth started things off with a full-group movement and sound exercise which managed to transcend the awkwardness of our windowless hotel room setting. Poet Natalie Diaz followed with two riveting readings from her work, and media artist Cristóbal Martinez demonstrated two of his creations (one live and one via slides). The difference with this session is that not only was the artistic content engaging in its own right, it led seamlessly into a fascinating discussion about how to support, respect, and engage creatively with indigenous communities around the globe. Tangen’s participatory dance workshop helped to bring us closer to the subject matter, Diaz’s poetry laid bare the tensions between ancient traditions and modern realities that make up her daily reality, and Martinez told us of a remarkable installation in a Sydney art gallery that involved cutting out part of the floor to allow voices from the earth to echo through the space. Each of these artistic explorations, in their own way, showed a different side of the clash between Eurocentric and Native worldviews, of the power imbalances inherent in that clash, and of the halting and uncertain efforts to call to account and heal the rift. Because philanthropy itself is at the center of not only the clash but the healing, the artistic connection was not just a feel-good reminder of why we’re all here, but intimately woven in to the conversation itself.

The distance between that session and Tuesday morning’s “Alternate Funding Tools: Program-Related Investments” shows the range of GIA at its best. Deena Epstein and Robert Jacquay of Cleveland’s George Gund Foundation offered a down-to-earth, relentlessly practical, and admirably candid take on their own experiences offering lesser-used tools such as low-interest loans, equity investments, and more to arts groups in their community. The topic wasn’t uncharted territory only for me: session organizer Regina Smith from the Kresge Foundation kicked things off by asking who in the room had direct experience with PRIs; only a couple of hands went up. After a brief review of the history of PRIs, Jacquay described the Gund Foundation’s work with this tool. About 3.5% of the foundation’s investment corpus is held in this asset class, with examples of investments in the arts including a low-interest loan to the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art to help the institution secure a New Markets Tax Credit for a new building, using an equipment purchase as leverage with the landlord of an organization that was at risk of losing its lease, and (my favorite) depositing $25,000 in a local credit union that gives loans to working musicians. Epstein and Jacquay reported that despite a perception of PRIs as risky and unfamiliar on the part of some institutions, their experience has been that the due diligence process is “not a huge mystery.”

The theme of this year’s GIA Conference was “The NEW Creative Community,” and conference organizers made a concerted effort to deliver new thinking to its attendees both in the plenaries and the choice of breakout sessions. That effort wasn’t 100% successful in an absolute sense, as emcee Ben Cameron pointed out on the second day of IDEA LAB – when you try to make room for the new, a lot of times what you get is old ideas in new clothes. But attendees can nevertheless make room for the new in a relative and personal sense by taking a risk and giving unfamiliar topics a chance. I’m following up my GIA experience this week by attending the American Evaluation Association Conference in Washington, DC. This is my first time at this event and it is providing a rush of stimulation due to its dramatic differences from GIA and any other conference I attend regularly: over 3000 attendees from all over the world (I shared an eight-person table on Monday with people from Germany, Brazil and Indonesia), 1000 sessions (sometimes more than 50! at a time), dozens of workshops, and very little arts content. I’m getting a lot out of the experience because I’m stretching myself to learn things I don’t already know. So if you think you’ve seen and heard it all, take it from one who has learned his lesson and consider how you too can make room for the new.

Wouldn’t you know it? Of the nearly ten pages of notes I wrote over those three days, almost half are about public education.

So much for that break.

I did go to a few sessions specific to education: an update on GIA’s Arts Education Funders Coalition’s advocacy efforts, for example, and a session about the Hive Learning Network‘s support for digital learning. Most, however, didn’t explicitly have much to do with K-12 classrooms. One described a multi-city performance festival. Another shared lessons learned from one foundation’s attempt to coax a bit of “ridiculousness” from its grantees. They were fascinating in their own right, but as I listened I kept writing vague questions to myself about “evolution,” “innovation,” and “the system.” Something was nagging at me, and I didn’t know what it was.

Then Ethan Zuckerman made my head explode.

Mr. Zuckerman’s keynote on day two of the conference was the perfect cerebral counterbalance to the soul-stirring meditations provided by Quiara Alegria Hudes and Nikky Finney on days one and three. (Kudos to GIA for lining up not one, not two, but three exemplary plenary speakers for this gathering.) He talked about how digital media is changing our interactions with one another, changing what it means to be an engaged and globally-minded citizen, and changing how we access and filter the information and opinions that shape our understanding of the world. The upcoming generations of “digital natives,” he said, are raised with a “pointillist” worldview. They seek and expect constant participation and engagement in the causes they think affect their social circles. They want immediate impact. They risk falling into an echo chamber of ideas that support their existing conception of the world. They are suspicious of institutions. They engage via social connections, not broad issues. To them, “the idea that [their] job as a 20-something is to read the newspaper every day and every two years elect someone to represent [them] is bullshit.”

I don’t have a Facebook account but I don’t live in a cave. The idea that the Internet and social media are changing how we consume information isn’t new to me. However, Zuckerman hammered home both the speed and uncertainty with which the world is shifting beneath our feet. We can’t yet judge whether these changes are for good or ill, but must be flexible in our understanding of what things like “citizenry” and “creativity” mean. Creativity, according to Zuckerman, isn’t just about creation. It’s about settling into a space between concepts, actively seeking divergent points of view, drawing connections between people and disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with one another, indulging in an “import-export business” of ideas, and resisting the temptation to lapse into homophily.

For the rest of the conference, everything I heard and discussed was about “the space between.” I went to an off-site session at Drexel University, where fashion majors work alongside engineering majors to create wearable pieces of circuitry, and students in a music and technology engineering lab stay up to the wee hours figuring out how to program robots to play drums for a tongue-in-cheek video rendition of  “Come Together.” As one of the presenters quipped, showing us a visual map of men and women with “hybrid competencies” working between disciplines, “the tree of knowledge has been cut down and replaced by a network.”

It was pretty darn cool.

It was also clarified my vague musings about “evolution” and “the system.” In arts education we seek “systemic change,” trying to determine the structures we must put in place so all students have equal access to studying visual art, dance, etc. Those structures are based on our own understanding of the artistic disciplines and our experiences with “the system.” In light of what Zuckerman described, however, they seem, well, rigid. To give one example, our advocacy efforts often make clear that “the arts” refer to four specific disciplines – visual art, dance, drama, and music. (With the advent of new national core arts standards, a fifth discipline, media arts, is getting its due, though the fact the word “digital” is missing may be testament to just how far our efforts lag behind student experience.) We do this because our field is a “big tent” and we want to be sure no one is left out (unless, like both our plenary speakers on days one and three, you happen to work in the literary arts). So we are careful to call those four-or-five disciplines out as separate-but-equal, and maintain that students should have high-quality learning experiences in each.

Those decisions make sense to us. But do they make sense to our students? Do they align with their “pointillist” worldview?  Will they be relevant in 2020? Will they be relevant in 2016? How on earth do we craft policies that have the “teeth” to get to issues of equity, but not the rigidity that will render them obsolete? How do we take a “systemic” view to support students with a “pointillist” lens? What if a “pointillist” generation doesn’t want or care about four-or-five separate artistic disciplines? What if our desire for policies and definitions that reflect how we think about our work are getting in our way of supporting what they need?

Uncomfortable thoughts, but not unwelcome. I came to Philadelphia thinking I would lend a newcomer’s perspective on foreign topics. I left with those foreign topics challenging my longstanding perspective. The “space between” is interesting indeed.

A Voice from the Other Side of the Grant

Two remarkable artists gave plenary talks that not only moved and inspired everyone I spoke to in the audience but also demonstrated the speakers’ facility with the written and spoken word. Each is the kind of artist any of us would be proud to have supported, the kind we have in mind when we think about artistic excellence. And, in the course of retelling her own development as a writer, each offered important lessons for how to think about grant program design.

Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of Water by the Spoonful and In the Heights, grew up “in the barrio” in Philadelphia; among her family, she was “the one who got out,” though not the only artist: a cousin was inspired by her success to write his first novel from prison. He has just finished his third. That inspiring success was enabled – or at least facilitated – by three critical grants, one received when Hudes was a sophomore at Yale, one when she was a graduate student in playwriting at Brown, and one when she had achieved enough commercial success with In the Heights to face the hard choice between signing up to write for the screen and re-devoting herself to less remunerative but more personal writing. In each case, as she put it, it was the length (one to two years), quantity (enough to allow her to quit the jobs she held to pay the rent), and quality (no strings attached) of the grant that made it transformative. At least in this case, it seems that the best thing a grantmaker could do was spot a potential talent, give her the gift of time, and get out of her way.

These grants worked differently from each other in an important way, it seems to me. The first freed a young artist who had thrown herself into theater at college from the need to work over a summer, offering what may have been her first chance to get lost in a single project; the second gave force to the eternal promise of the MFA as an uninterrupted opportunity to focus on craft, to experiment, and to produce. Both awards encouraged an early-career artist in important ways: they were bellows to a spark that, for all anyone could know in advance, might have sputtered out rather than catching.

The third grant, by contrast, emboldened an artist in full command of her powers to turn down a lucrative screenwriting gig – “my agent fumed,” Hudes gleefully recalled – to pursue a project with much less commercial promise that she couldn’t quite get out of her head. The result was the Pulitzer-winning Water by the Spoonful, the second play in what is now a trilogy. This third grant was a different kind of gamble: by this point, we could be pretty sure Hudes was going to make something wonderful (television and film are both vibrant media, after all), but the grantmaker presumably believed she would make something more wonderful without financial pressure.

It’s hard to know what might have happened without any one – or even all three – of these philanthropic interventions. Hudes clearly has immense inner resources to complement her immense talent: she had made it to Yale before the first of the grants she mentioned, and from the lectern she conveyed such mastery and conviction that it was hard to imagine her not creating art and amazing audiences. If cultural philanthropy did not exist, perhaps Hudes would have made the time and mental space to make equally acclaimed work. Or perhaps she would have followed so many of her classmates into business or medicine or law and put her art on hold, for a few years or a lifetime. Ultimately, we can only celebrate what did happen, and take Hudes seriously when she says that the support she received – long-term, sufficient, and unqualified – was crucial for her.

Considering How We Give

We can also think hard about what Hudes’s example tells us about how we select grantees. Of course we do our best to assess talent, but is there a way to know in advance who has the grit to persevere in a life dedicated to art, which can be hard even with grant support? Is there a way to identify the established artist who has a new, brilliant idea that won’t attract commercial support, that she can only pursue with philanthropic dollars? How can we nurture the excellent art that otherwise might not happen?

Expertise and judgment must be the answer, and, thanks to IRS rules, it is almost always the expertise and judgment of panels that determine which individual artists and arts organizations receive grants. I moderated what seemed to be one of the more tactical of the breakout sessions, in which Createquity’s own Ian David Moss and Ed Harsh of New Music USA presented on ways of “Rethinking the Grant Panel.” Diane Ragsdale has an excellent summary of the presentations in her final post from the conference, so I will only say here that there seemed to be a hunger to discuss the specific changes that some funders are making to their panels. Some of the questions that we could only touch on (or didn’t even have time to) in the one-hour session include:

• How can we use technology effectively to expand grant panels to fairly evaluate the work of a growing number of artists?
• What kinds of expertise are most important on grant panels? Should a jazz pianist’s proposal be evaluated only by other jazz pianists?
• At what stage and by whom should different criteria (artistic excellence, project potential, financial sustainability, etc.) be evaluated?
• How can we balance the advantages of a model that requires consensus among judges (e.g., fairness, direct comparison of applicants) with the advantages of a model that gives weight to the passionate advocacy judges may feel for an especially strong applicant?
• What should be the role of deliberation, face-to-face or otherwise, in selecting grantees?
• From a technical perspective, should we account for “easy” and “hard” graders among panelists?
• Who wins and who loses when we adopt new techniques like dispersed panels or applications that emphasize public presentation through a website?
• What promising innovations is no one trying yet?

We plan to continue the conversation about these and other questions; leave a comment if you’d like to be a part of it.

We actually know surprisingly little about how private arts funders give to individual artists. Grantmakers in the Arts publishes an annual report on the state of giving to arts organizations that, despite the imperfections of the data, is an excellent guide to the field. GIA is now a year into a similar project covering giving to individuals, which was the subject of a breakout session at the conference and a plenary discussion at the “Support for Individual Artists” preconference. GIA’s Tommer Peterson (the quiet heart of the conference) is leading work with Alan Brown and Claudia Bach to catalogue the various ways funders can support individual artists, from outright cash grants made directly to artists to the provision of a variety of in-kind services through a financial intermediary. Once a taxonomy is established by March 2014, the real work will begin, as data is collected from pilot sites to test the system before GIA establishes a national database. Within a few years, we may learn much more about the tools available to us as funders and how those tools are currently being used. In the meantime, GIA has collected articles on the topic and provides updates on what they’ve learned so far on their website.

Who Will Support the Sensitive Child?

And, of course, we can continue to learn from artists what makes the difference to them. I want to close by returning to the second artist who gave a plenary talk at this year’s conference, National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney. Finney opened with a quote from Willa Cather: “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” She spoke movingly about growing up as a “sensitive child” and the editorial attention of a high-school English teacher who helped her realize that her intense experience of the world was something to be treasured, mastered, and recorded. (Hudes spoke of similar attention, from a local street musician who give her a crucial cassette and an unforgiving Russian piano teacher.) Toward the end Finney posed a question that was also an exhortation (roughly transcribed): “Who looks for and seeks the sensitive child before she needs money to make her art? Call out her name to let her know she has been loved and cherished. Make her know that what she has witnessed – whatever it has been – greatly matters in this world.”

For those of us with our heads fully in the technical construction of grant panels by that final breakfast, Finney was, as she said artists must, “saying the hard thing beautifully.” This was a plea to consider the stage when an intervention – philanthropic or otherwise – can make the most difference in fostering excellent art: the stage when a child is learning how to confront and express the creative impulse within her, is accumulating unbeknownst to her the resources and materials that will fuel her art for years, and is making the choices that will one day turn her into a professional poet.

There is a clear message here for those who grant in arts education, but there is also an important lesson for those of us who support adult artists. It matters that we give; it matters to whom we give; and it also matters when in their development as artists we give. There is something special about support that comes early enough to turn the sensitive child into an artist – or that, later, comes at a moment when the artist must choose between art and another of life’s demands. As we strive to improve our grantmaking, how can we more effectively intervene with the right person at the right moment to make possible the commitment to a potential masterpiece – or to a lifetime of creating excellent art?

We’ve had a great time in Philadelphia this week. Look out for additional wrap-up posts in this space coming soon!

September 27
Town Hall: State of NYC Dance Snapshot and Trends
organized by Dance/NYC
92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Avenue, 2nd Floor
New York, NY
5:30 – 7pm
Info and registration (it’s free)
(I’ll be co-presenting with Dance/NYC Executive Director Lane Harwell the results of Dance/NYC’s new study, “State of NYC Dance (2013),” which I co-authored with Fractured Atlas Research Fellow Sarah Lenigan.)

October 5-9
Grantmakers in the Arts Conference
Loews Philadelphia Hotel
1200 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA
More info (not free, but it’s sold out anyway)
(In addition to blogging the conference, Daniel and I will be participating in a session called “Rethinking the Grant Panel” on Tuesday, October 8 from 11:10am-12:10pm.)

October 14-19
Evaluation 2013
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC
Info and registration (not free)
(My first time at the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference, and I’m looking forward to it! I’m presenting an IGNITE talk about ArtsWave’s recent transformation on Thursday, October 17 from 8-9:30am.)

October 30
Third Annual Arts and Education Symposium
hosted by The Educational Policy and Leadership Center and the Pennsylvania Arts Education Network
The State Museum of Pennsylvania
300 North Street
Harrisburg, PA
Info and registration (not free)
(I’ll be delivering the keynote address at this conference, focusing on the role of metrics and assessment in arts education and beyond.)

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The US Bureau of Economic Analysis, following new international standards, has adjusted the official method for calculating GDP to “include the amount of money business invest in … intellectual property.” This involves some tough calls: development costs for hit TV shows with potential for syndication and even greeting cards count, but journalism and blogs are deemed perishable. Some commentators interpret this as refreshing and official recognition of the economic value of creative productions.
• Back in April, Createquity explored what might happen if the federal tax deduction for charitable contributions went the way of the dodo. At the federal level, the debate rages on, but various states – including Hawaii, Minnesota and Kansas – have recently decided against capping charitable deductions within their states, citing negative impact on the nonprofit sector.
• Across the pond, it looks like economic arguments for the arts are becoming increasingly influential. Britain’s Culture Secretary preserved most of the UK’s £450m-plus culture budget in part by highlighting the arts’ role in driving economic growth. Not everyone is on board though: the Scottish Secretary of Culture responded by reminding Scots of this fall’s referendum on independence and declaring that Scotland “doesn’t measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in pounds and pence.” (Bonus: this recent post recaps the rise of “Art Works” justifications for subsidy in the US.)
• Why it’s important to pay attention to policy: an arts educator is California is “shocked” to learn his state requires the arts to be taught in schools. (Psst: so do forty-four others.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Darren Walker, currently a vice president of the Ford Foundation, has been named the foundation’s next president. His portfolio as VP covered arts & culture, and he was instrumental in the formation of the ArtPlace creative placemaking funder collaboration.
• Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.Com and intellectual crush of data geeks everywhere, is leaving the New York Times for ESPN. Good news for baseball fans, bad news for political wonks, though Silver will continue to cover elections via ABC News.
• Don Rosenberg, longtime music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been laid off along with 49 other employees of the paper.

BIG IDEAS

• Americans for the Arts has launched a new project to study America’s 600+ “Cultural Districts,” updating their 1998 Cultural Districts Handbook. As part of the kickoff, they hosted a blog salon last week.
• Are organizations that eschew dynamic pricing “punishing [their] staff[s] in the service of an ideal the community may not be aware of“?
• FSG is launching a Next Generation Evaluation project. An initial post summarizes three long-held assumptions about evaluation and three “game-changing approaches” that could challenge them: Developmental Evaluation, Shared Measurement, and Big Data.
• With the backing of the Haas, Hewlett, and Packard Foundations, Shiree Teng has launched ImpactRising.org, a website designed “to help bring a level of standards to the consulting industry, to raise the quality of social sector consulting, and to to have some measure of accountability.” It includes tools and resources for organizations working with consultants and for consultants themselves.
• A scientist-turned-artist reflects on the differences between the two cultures.
  

  From funding levels (‘I write grant applications for research and it’s like taking an arts grant and adding a couple of zeros’) and the culture of peer review (‘It’s all about surviving the gauntlet of people trying to tear your ideas apart – that doesn’t happen with an arts audience’), to scrutinising outcomes (‘In science, they really care about the outcome of their funding – I don’t get the same impression in the arts’), institutionally, science and the arts are still very far apart.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• We know the Common Core State Standards aren’t cheap; states across the country are scrambling to figure out how much the newer, “smarter” tests will cost them. But beyond that, the Common Core is also prompting some borderline-creepy partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit educational entities. Beginning in 2014, the American Council of Education, which administers the GED, is joining forces with textbook giant Pearson. The upside? The GED is getting re-written to align with Common Core. The bad news? The cost of taking the GED will almost double. Way to reduce barriers to a high school diploma, guys.
• Hyperallergic has a helpful summary of five approaches artists have taken in attempts to guarantee fair wages and benefits. And while he doesn’t explicitly mention artists, Adam Davidson uses the example of a wannabe-hair-metal-rock-star-turned-accounting-“cliff jumper” to illustrate how hard it is to determine the financial value of ideas.
• Bloomberg Philanthropies announced in June a $15m, 3-year grant to 5 major cultural institutions to support the development of mobile apps. The Guggenheim recently released its free, Bloomberg-funded app; others will follow through the end of 2014.

IN THE FIELD

• Is this the future of professional conferences? The ever-intrepid Nina Simon recently hosted seventy-five designers, museum professionals and artists in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art for a 2.5 day “camp” for participants to “take a risk” in creating exhibits. Beyond sounding super fun, the experiment generated reflection about what “taking a risk” even means in a museum environment.
• Abe Flores (recent winner of Americans for the Arts’s Emerging Leader Award) shares his thoughts on the distressing lack of racial diversity among respondents to AFTA’s recent report on salaries in local arts agencies.
• While the fate of Detroit’s art collection is still up in the air, the Wall Street Journal offers two arguments for keeping the works where they are, and the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts insists it’s too soon to panic.
• Jon Silpayamanant writes about what declining attendance at sporting events – and the measures teams have taken to preserve revenues – can tell us about the similar problems faces by live performances in the arts.
• Meanwhile, demand for classical music on Pandora (and iTunes) has been growing – and outperforming the company’s expectations based on market share. But lest we get too excited about our digital saviors, Spotify – the streaming service that musicians love to hate – is hardly rolling in cash; those pitiful payments to artists offset nearly all of its equally-pitiful revenues.
• Allan Kozinn chronicles the “sea change” in music conservatories as courses are added in the business of music, covering the use of digital technologies, the art of networking, and how to build a personal brand as part of a career.

RESEARCH CORNER

• This puts a twist on arguments touting the economic impact of the arts: new research from the Corporation for National and Community Service indicates people who volunteer their time with organizations have a 27 percent greater chance of finding employment, with the link strongest for those who traditionally have the hardest time finding work. Per the NEA’s Director of Research and Analysis, “If volunteerism is indeed a pathway to employment, then arts organizations, venues, and activities could be hotbeds for this crucial transition.”
• The chance that a child will earn her way into a higher class than her parents’ varies considerably across major American cities – her odds are better in New York or several California cities than in, say, Ohio. The driving forces seem to be not higher tax credits for the poor or taxes on the rich, but greater geographic integration of the poor and middle class, more stable families, stronger K-12 education, and higher civic engagement.
• Researchers in Ireland have found that listening to music from different cultures may prompt you to “denigrate outsiders” if the music sounds particularly unconventional to you, and conclude that “attempts to celebrate and share diversity may have the reverse effect.” Isn’t that also an argument for exposing children to lots of different kinds of music, all the time?
• Market research by IMPACTS into visitor-serving organizations like zoos, symphonies, and museums suggests that overall satisfaction is driven much more by the “entertainment experience” than the “educational experience” – entertainment is four times as important to visitors. (The linked piece does not define “entertainment,” so it is possible that really fun education may fare better.)
• Any idea how much you’d have to pay the Rolling Stones to cover “Brown Sugar” on your debut album? According to preliminary results from a new set of music-and-copyright quizzes hosted online by the Future of Music Coalition, fewer than a quarter of respondents can tell you – though we don’t know how many of them are aspiring musicians. Or Mick Jagger.

• 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.

Monday, April 29
“GOOD Community Engages the Arts”
organized by Think Local First DC and Listen Local First
Tropicalia
2001 14th Street NW (under the Subway)
Washington, DC
6:30 – 9pm
Info and registration (it’s free)
(This panel features a whopping 8 participants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Cultural DC, Council Member Tommy Wells’s office, and more. In a literally underground dance club. What’s not to love?)

May 19-22
American Alliance of Museums Annual Meeting
Baltimore Convention Center
1 West Pratt Street
Baltimore, MD
Info and registration (not free)
(I’ll be around for the day on Tuesday, May 21 and then participating in Nina Simon’s Risk and Reward talk show the next morning, which looks like a can’t-miss event!)

June 13-16
Americans for the Arts Annual Convention
David L. Lawrence Convention Center
1000 Fort Duquesne Boulevard
Pittsburgh, PA
Info and registration (not free)
(Createquity is taking Americans for the Arts by storm! First, former Writing Fellow Katherine Gressel is presenting on her evaluation research during the Public Art Preconference on Friday, June 14 from 9-10:15am at a session called “Like • Comment • Share.” Later that day, I’ll be moderating and presenting at “The one about your community’s cultural ecosystem” from 4:30-6pm. And finally, Talia Gibas will drop some knowledge at “The one about how community partnerships can advance arts education” [yes, all the titles are like that] on Saturday the 15th from 10-11:30am.)