Photo by E. Briel

In early 2014, President Barack Obama addressed workers at a General Electric gas engine plant. “A lot of young people don’t see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career,” he said,  “but I promise you, folks can make a lot more… with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”

That simple remark sent arts advocates into a letter-writing and tweeting tizzy. When the president apologized a few weeks later, via a hand-written note to an art history professor, the gesture was hailed by arts ed advocates as a victory that acknowledged “the untapped potential of [arts] industries in helping to improve the economic growth, jobs creation, and trade surplus of the United States.”

But the apology, while well-intentioned, didn’t reflect a change of heart. In the letter, Obama admitted that the arts were a source of joy in his life, but explained he was trying to “mak[e] a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history.” According to him, it’s not that art history doesn’t have value; it’s just that its value has more to do with joy than dollars – or practical skills.

Obama, like most high-profile leaders in education, frequently trumpets the need to cultivate an “innovative” workforce. While the definition of “innovation” has long been squishy, the president’s earlier statements suggest he sees an innovative workforce as one with “makers of things, not just consumers of things.” One would think the link between arts education and workforce development would be easier for him to grasp, particularly with reports on the impact of “creative economies” popping up left and right. Yet the link may seem more tenuous than arts educators would like to believe. Take, for example, the 2013 Otis Report on the Creative Economy. Released annually since 2007, and focused on the Southern California region, the report attempts to quantify the economic impact of “creative professions and enterprises that take powerful, original ideas and transform them into practical and often beautiful goods or inspire us with their artistry.” Not surprisingly, the report shows that those professions and enterprises are a big, and lucrative, deal in the region.

Arts education advocates hail these findings as evidence of a huge market for the skills taught in arts classes. Yet it seems that the very for-profit leaders who hire for such creative economy jobs are skeptical of the relevance of arts education. According to “LA Creates: Supporting the Creative Economy in Los Angeles,” which was released as an addendum to the 2013 Otis Report and features a synthesis of interviews with leaders from the creative industries,

While public and nonprofit sector participants were in near unanimous agreement on its importance, private sector participants expressed a fuller range of skepticism about the benefits of seeking solutions through support of arts education, and often didn’t see arts education as a priority among a hypothetical set of specific strategies that would improve the ability of creative businesses to expand and thrive.

What’s going on here? For-profit CEOs rank creativity at the top of their lists of important leadership qualities; arts education advocates have been arguing that their work provides a direct pipeline to the “creative economy” for years. Why, then, does the link between arts education and workforce development seem so difficult for people – even those working in the “creative industries” – to grasp?

One explanation may lie in the disconnect between arts educators’ rhetorical embrace of creativity and the constraints they, and all educators, face in traditional K-12 classrooms. Arts educators have fought hard for inclusion and respect within the public school system, and have dutifully adopted many trappings of that system along the way. The most obvious example is content standards, such as the Common Core, which outline what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. The standards movement started in the 1980s and continues to the present day, when forty-five forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have established them in the visual and performing arts. While arts educators variously embrace or chafe against those standards, they’re widely accepted as best practice, in large part because they allow the arts to demonstrate parity with other disciplines.

But does “demonstrating parity with other disciplines” at the K-12 level foster the best environment to nurture 21st-century skills like creativity? After all, “creative studies” programs in higher education– both bricks-and-mortar and virtual offerings of which are growing in number – are designed around the idea that creativity is not content-specific:

Traditional academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity… “The new people who will be creative will sit at the juxtaposition of two or more fields,” [the director of a creativity center] says. When ideas from different fields collide… fresh ones are generated.

Meanwhile, most K-12 classrooms are still structured with each discipline, be it math, reading, or dance, in its own bubble. Despite efforts by the writers of the Common Core and the soon-to-be-released national arts standards to provide more flexibility across disciplines, advocates in all content areas are pushing for students to receive a minimum amount of guaranteed instruction in whichever discipline they support.

This raises some questions for arts educators. If the economy of the future will require that students demonstrate more applied problem-solving than content-specific knowledge, our hope that schools address discrete, and traditional, arts disciplines during the school day may not the most obvious choice for our future “innovative workforce” – if cultivating that workforce is indeed what we hope to do. Is teaching the arts a more effective means of teaching 21st-century skills than a framework like the Buck Institute’s Project Based Learning, which puts a heavy emphasis on hands-on, interdisciplinary problem-solving but doesn’t yet have a strong arts focus? If our top priority is “cultivating a 21st-century workforce,” should we be arguing that every student should have, for example, forty-five minutes of violin instruction per week? Are we missing a broader opportunity to get ahead of what may be a long-term shift toward a more interdisciplinary approach in education?

Some arts educators are embracing the interdisciplinary approach via the “STEM to STEAM movement,” a promising offshoot of our renewed focus on workforce development. While broad STEAM rhetoric is as muddled as it is popular, certain STEAM school models, particularly those at the high school level, are pretty friggin’ fantastic. Current interest in STEAM from government and certain business leaders provides an opportunity to investigate research on creativity and problem-solving in a deeper way, expanding our understanding of how creative people work and enabling openness to how “creativity” is taught in non-arts contexts.

Whether we like to admit it or not, the arts do not have a monopoly on 21st-century skills. Nor should those skills have a monopoly on our arguments for why arts education is important.  Perhaps the more willing we are to examine the link between the two, the more likely we are to uncover what the full impact of arts education can be.

• The backlash against unpaid internships has spread beyond our borders: Ontario’s Ministry of Labour has ordered two high-profile Canadian magazines to immediately end their internship programs. The Ministry also announced it plans “an enforcement blitz this spring focused specifically on internships across a variety of sectors.” (NB: while nonprofits are generally exempt from the US Department of Labor requirements for unpaid internships, state laws, including New York’s, can be more stringent.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• After nearly 30 years as CEO of National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Jonathan Katz is set to make his exit soon.
• Margit Rankin has resigned as Executive Director of Washington State’s Artist Trust. The Trust plans to “focus on internal efficiencies and statewide reach before hiring [her] replacement.”
• Carolina Garcia Jayaram was recently appointed the new CEO of United States Artists, and will be taking the Los Angeles-based organization back with her to Chicago.
• Miguel M. Salinas, formerly Program Director at the Adobe Foundation, is moving into the newly-created position of Program Officer for Local Grantmaking at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. His portfolio will include arts funding for Northern California’s Monterey County and surrounding region.
• Ken Cole of the National Guild for Community Arts Education will be taking over the role of Vice President of Learning and Leadership Development with the League of American Orchestras.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Detroit Institute of Arts saga continues. Not to be outdone by the “grand bargain” that would offer the city (and its creditors) over $800 million in exchange for taking the art museum (and more importantly, its art) off the table in bankruptcy negotiations, one of those creditors, Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. (FGIC) is now soliciting bids for the DIA’s entire collection. So far, four bids have been received with a high of $2 billion, but they’ve drawn a cool reception from the city’s Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr. Curious why Wall Street types care so much about a bunch of old paintings? Well, one estimate puts the opportunity cost of displaying Breughel’s “The Wedding Dance” at $1,200 per viewer.
• The CEOs of the Hewlett, Ford, and McKnight Foundations got together to discuss the results of a report that suggests a kind of Lake Wobegon effect among foundation leaders: they tend to be pessimistic about their field’s overall progress toward achieving goals, but optimistic about the work of their own foundations. The three executives acknowledged their incentives to demonstrate individual leadership get in the way of the collaboration and coordination to which they aspire and promote to their grantees.
• Speaking of foundation strategy, Daniel Stid, senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, candidly asks on the foundation’s blog whether Hewlett’s nascent bid to advance democracy by supporting both political parties and campaign finance reform makes any sense. Score one for philanthropy transparency – and zero for the rest of us: several days after the post went up, there were exactly no responses.

IN THE FIELD

• In response to an uproar from patrons, the San Diego Opera formed a special committee of the board to explore ways to avert the closure it announced abruptly last month, and a board member has announced a $1-million gift. Also, and we’re not sure which way this cuts, PR doctor Mark Fabiani has volunteered his crisis-management services, putting the Opera in the august company of Whitewater-era Bill Clinton, doping-era Lance Armstrong, and kleptocracy-era Goldman Sachs. Alas, it all seems to have been for naught.
• Portland, Oregon is about to go on a Bard binge: more than fifteen local theater companies are collaborating to produce all of Shakespeare’s works across the city over the next two years.
• Scape Capital, a Russian management firm, has purchased ARTnews from long-time owners Milton and Judith Esterow.

BIG IDEAS

• One possible result of investing in a “STEAM” (science/technology/engineering/math + arts) approach to K-12 education: shifting to a framework of “deeper learning” as amusingly outlined in this recent Hewlett blog and pioneered by San Diego’s High Tech High. High Tech High, incidentally, scores extra awesome points for launching their own MOOCs (with the help of their students) on how to design and build schools using this approach.
• A simple point, but one not made often enough: nonprofits see growth in their costs in part because growth in their revenues makes it possible.
• Are think tanks doomed in the face of human irrationality?

RESEARCH CORNER

• The state of the nonprofit sector is pretty grim, according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund: more than half of surveyed organizations reported they were unable to meet demand for their services, and are operating with three months or less of cash on hand. You can dig into arts-specific data using this interactive tool. Some nuggets: only about a third of arts nonprofits reporting an inability to meet demand, and arts orgs are significantly less likely to regularly collect data long-term data on impact than the nonprofit sector as a whole.
• A new NEA analysis of monthly census data reveals that the unemployment rate for artists continued to drop slightly in 2013 (7.1% vs 7.3% in 2012) and has recovered considerably from its Great Recession peak of 9.5% – though it remains much higher than the 2006 low of 3.6%. Two interesting sidebars: 1) Some findings about those for whom the arts are a secondary job, including the fact that 20% are teachers in their day jobs – and 20% are artists in a different capacity. 2) Although artists are classed as professionals, their 2013 overall unemployment rate was much closer to the total population’s (6.6%) than to other professionals’ (3.6%).
• This handy infographic breaks down the differences between US and UK philanthropy. The gold for sheer size goes the US, where the average person gives almost three times as much and the non-profit sector represents almost seven times as large a share of GDP, but the authors caution their fellow Brits against imitation in the full paper.
• Nifty data crunching suggests that films passing the Bechdel Test — a standard, albeit depressing, measure of gender bias — are actually a much better return on investment than Hollywood execs claim.
• Think there’s no way to judge creativity? Think again: new research suggests that people can be trained to accurately identify “subcomponents” of creativity. Interestingly, the control group  didn’t deem the same works “creative” as the group that received the training. Control group members did, however, tend to identify the same works as other control group subjects, implying they were all reacting to another, unknown component of the art.
• Speaking of assessing creativity, education leaders who bemoan American students’ consistent “underperformance” relative to counterparts in other countries may have a glimmer of hope: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted its first test of creative problem solving and found that American students did much better than they did on standard reading, math, and science tests. The bad news? They still trailed students from several countries like Singapore and Australia, both of which happen to put heavy emphasis on arts education. Hint, hint…

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.

For my second essay responding to the #yycArtsPlan process, I thought I would focus on the last paragraph of the “Summary of Vision Statements from the January 26 Summit”:

The vision of our attendees is that by 2023, Calgary will be a major artistic centre in Canada, in terms of the work it creates and the training it provides, promoting both excellence and access. It will be a city where everyone understands the true value of the arts as an essential part of a well-rounded life—where the arts include everyone, and everyone includes the arts.

It’s a beautiful sentiment, expressed with impressive concision. But the central insight I’d like to offer here is that everyone is a lot of people. Are arts supporters in Calgary truly prepared to extend the olive branch of creativity and expression to every single one of their neighbors? And is it even possible to do such a thing without radical changes to the status quo?

Let’s separate the statement into its component parts. What is needed for the arts to include everyone? As noted in my previous essay, this inquiry will be helped enormously by first asking who is not currently served by the arts, and why. I don’t know the local context in Calgary well enough to answer that question definitively, but if things are at all similar to the situation in the United States, we can guess that relatively underserved populations might include poorer Calgarians, recent immigrants, people without a university degree, and people with disabilities, to name a few. This is not to say, of course, that nobody fitting those descriptions is active in the arts, but rather that if we’re looking for people who are not included by the arts, those are probably good characteristics to start with. Remember, the mandate here is to include everyone, not everyone in theory or everyone as long as it’s convenient for us.

The good news is that it’s likely there are already organizations in Calgary and environs with a specific mission to serve these populations and expand the audience for the arts. And again, if things are anything like they are in the States, they probably aren’t getting the kind of support that higher-profile organizations designed to position Calgary within the national and international arts community do. Which makes sense, in a way: after all, one of the basic realities of a market economy is that it is easier to serve some consumers than others, and so if efficiency is a goal, the consumers that are harder to serve (because they live far away from everyone else, for example) will be more likely to get left out.

At the same time, switching focus to include everyone need not require all arts organizations to change their missions or think only of the lowest common denominator. Just as a complex orchestral program or abstract expressionist art might be intimidating to someone with no previous exposure to these art forms, an introductory dance class is likely to feel limiting for someone who has professional training in ballet. A healthy and truly inclusive arts ecosystem affords opportunities to participate and get involved at various levels that are appropriate to the wildly diverse interests and capacities seen in the population as a whole. I would submit, however, that the efforts of a government-funded “backbone” organization such as Calgary Arts Development might be most productively focused on filling the gaps left by the market economy and private philanthropy in providing said opportunities, whatever they may be.

It seems to me that the second part of the vision, that everyone includes the arts, is rather more difficult to realize. Because now you’re not just talking about reallocating some resources and perhaps creating some new programs, but a wholesale attitude adjustment on the part of an entire population over whom artist, organization, and government alike have limited influence.

You may recall that I talked about ArtsWave in Cincinnati in my previous essay – remember, this was the community-funded grant-maker that re-envisioned its grant-making in response to research revealing a new way of framing the arts as a public good. ArtsWave has supported this strategy not only through funding, but also by taking a central role in communicating the value and relevance of the arts to the general public via this new frame. Besides placing media stories in mainstream sources like local television and newspapers, the organization regularly sponsors both ongoing and special events designed to be visible, extremely accessible, and highly participatory. Two examples of this kind of programming were a Paint the Street event near the ArtsWave office and a flash mob-style “Splash Dance” in the central business district. Both of these events offered citizens opportunities not only to witness the final product (in a centrally located, public place), but also to participate directly in its creation. And with no admission charge in either case, of course.

But these kinds of efforts can only take one so far. Ultimately, we can’t rely solely on democratization of access to change attitudes, because if attitudes are already set, the opportunity to participate in something in which one has no interest is not going to mean much. Instead, we need to dig deeper to understand the motivations and experiences of people who aren’t especially friendly towards the arts, the people who currently act as a barrier to the desired reality, and make some inferences about what could catalyze a shift.

We can start to get a clue to this by reading the bios and statements of the participants in the Citizens’ Reference Panel. It’s probably a stretch to call this a truly random sample of the population, even though great lengths were taken to reach outside of the traditional arts community, since the process represented a significant time commitment and there was likely substantial selection bias observed in the people who chose to participate. Nevertheless, we can pick up clues from the participants’ stories as to how “regular people” can and do relate to the arts in their lives. For example, take a look at these profiles:

Chris Pryce

I’m a firefighter for the City. I am originally from Ontario, where I went to the University of Western Ontario. My father has been a professional artist (he’s a painter) since I was born. I have been involved in martial arts since childhood and have started taking acting classes over the past few years. I also pencil sketch and study psychology and sociology in my spare time.

Mark Sutter

I am family man and father of two young children. Professionally, I am an Alberta Land Surveyor and the manager of an office in Calgary. I have a great love for the outdoors and enjoy escaping to the mountains at any time. Although the arts do not play a prominent role in my life I see value and opportunity for my family. Although very small, I wish to leave an imprint on helping make this city great for all citizens.

Pamela Hansen

I was born and raised in central Alberta. My parents were mixed farmers, raising livestock, hay and grain. My first school was Happy Hill, a one-room school where the teacher taught kids from grade one to grade nine. I got to school riding a pony called Tarbaby. My mom offered me a chance to attend Banff School of Fine Arts, but I did not feel I could make a living as an artist. I chose business machines training instead. In 2002, I came to Calgary to start a new life with my daughters Jessie and Adrienne and granddaughter Shea. While caring for aging relatives, I became isolated, with few connections beyond my family. It is my intention to expand my relationship to art and begin painting. I greatly appreciate this opportunity to connect with and be of service to my community.

Stephen Kohan

I am the father of two boys in elementary school, live in the suburbs, coach minor hockey, and own a minivan and two motorcycles. I’ve been married to the same wonderful woman for 17 years and she still can’t properly explain how I managed to pull that off — so I’ve wisely stopped asking. My interest in the arts likely stems from a musical upbringing — I play guitar (somewhat, and rarely) and took drama in High School (in classes and outside the 7-Eleven along with everyone else) and ended up with a degree in English literature from the University of Calgary. I’ve worked in the Litigation Management Branch of Aboriginal Affairs Canada, in varying capacities, for 20 years.

What strikes me about these peripheral connections to art is how often they involve a) relationships with other people (whether existing or aspirational), b) the direct practice of art (not just appreciation), and c) sustained exposure at a young age, in approximately that order of importance. How well is Calgary’s current arts infrastructure set up to support these kinds of connections?

To inform this inquiry more broadly, I believe it would be instructive to study the plentiful research literature on social movements. While not an expert in that subject, I can’t help but note that in the United States, we are in the midst of one of the most dramatic societal shifts in recent memory: the rapid drive towards widespread acceptance of gay marriage over the past 10 years. This movement will likely be analyzed to death in the coming years and decades, but speaking as an observer, it seems that a few key factors have been crucial in leading to social change:

• Popular conception of marriage and the wedding as a joyful event – specifically, an event in which we are happy for someone else;
• The lived experience of seeing the country “experiment” with gay marriage, first in Massachusetts and later in other states, and the lack of obvious harm to heterosexual marriages as a result;
• The enormously successful “It Gets Better” campaign, which took full advantage of viral platforms and social networks to put a human face on the struggles of gay teens;
• Acceptance and advocacy on the part of Hollywood, starting with Ellen DeGeneres and continuing with gay characters written into popular sitcoms like “Modern Family”;
• The increased visibility of gay and lesbian individuals encouraged, in part, by the previous factors: more teens and adults coming out sooner, to more people, in more social contexts;
• And finally, and most importantly, the impact of the above in helping more people to realize that someone they know is gay and that they want good things for that person – like the “warm glow” of a wedding and marriage to the person they love.

There are a lot of potential lessons in the above, but two stand out to me as particularly important:

• The need to integrate the unfamiliar into the familiar: people were motivated to support gay marriage when being gay became something they could fit into the context of their daily lives and existing relationships, habits and identity. Christine Cheung’s observation that Alberta “spent more than half of its cultural spending ($1.8 billion) on ‘home-entertainment services and equipment’” is perhaps relevant here.
• The power of the younger generation to motivate change: realizing that one is gay is something that typically happens during adolescence, which enabled gay marriage supporters to take advantage of the separate social networks that exist among that age group. Consistently, polls in the United States find that support for gay marriage is highly stratified by age group, with young adults overwhelmingly in favour. And in turn, the adoption of gay marriage as a cause célèbre by young adults has influenced attitudes among older generations, at least if anecdotal evidence is to be believed. Universal arts education is often cited as a potential salve to the arts’ ills, but I think it needs to go beyond that – indeed, the arts need to be seen as an integral part of a healthy society by this critical group of young adults in order to motivate real, long-lasting change.

Expanding the frame of the arts to include everyone is a challenging goal, to say the least. But I do believe it is achievable, if accompanied by the right strategies and a willingness on the part of arts advocates to be somewhat flexible about the real meaning and essence of “the arts.”

• The dreaded sequester began Friday, affecting all federal accounts including that of the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA will lose 5% of its budget, which works out to about $7.3 million. Grants and administration will be reduced by the same percentage. The reductions only apply through March 27, however, which is the date through which the federal government is currently funded. Congress has yet to pass a budget for Fiscal Year 2013, which we’re already almost halfway through. Let’s hear it for democracy!
• John Paul Titlow predicts that 3D printing will be the next big copyright battlefield – and the lines aren’t necessarily drawn where you think. (Here’s more from Public Knowledge.)
  
• “It’s true that without exposure to the arts, it’s difficult to develop an interest in them. But it’s also true that many of the people who had, say, music education back in the 1960s and 1970s are the same people who are not going to orchestra concerts today. Some arts organizations will have to confront the fact that their audiences are declining because of an irrevocable shift in the culture, rather than simply a lack of education.” Anne Midgette explores the recent resurgence of arts education in our nation’s schools. Here is more.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Kresge Foundation has named Ariel Simon to the new position of chief strategy officer and deputy to the president. Simon formerly worked as a senior consultant in McKinsey’s social sector practice.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Poncho, a Seattle public charity that raised money for the arts through galas and other special events, is closing its doors and donating its remaining assets to the Seattle Foundation.
  
• Interesting: in recent years, needy communities in the United States are receiving millions of dollars in aid from an unlikely source – the United Arab Emirates.

IN THE FIELD

• Should museums be looking outside the traditional pipeline for their management talent?
  
• Congratulations to Inocente, the first Kickstarter-funded movie to win an Oscar (for Best Documentary Short).
• Howard Sherman draws very appropriate attention to the lack of consistency in labeling the arts and culture in newspaper listings.
• The Met Opera, long criticized for astronomical ticket prices, is actually lowering them for next year – and not as an “accessibility” measure. Attendance is down, and leadership wonders if the opera’s much-ballyhooed cinema simulcasts are partly to blame.

BIG IDEAS

• I think local programming is one of the more underexplored areas of community engagement for establishment arts institutions – especially outside of major artist meccas like New York and LA. Oregon Arts Watch’s Brett Campbell considers.
• William Deresiewicz reconsiders the is-food-art debate – he had originally come out strongly in the “no” camp, and got, uh, creamed for it.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• The NEA’s Jen Hughes reports on a new white paper and symposium covering the emerging field of design for social impact.
• Keith Sawyer shares notes from a small conference on copyright and patent reform to which he was invited to contribute perspectives on creativity.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Wall Street Journal performs an analysis of US Department of Education data, finds that “median debt loads at schools specializing in art, music and design average $21,576.” This compares to $19,445 for liberal arts colleges and $18,100 for research universities.
• Americans for the Arts is putting out a new ebook series on arts education.
• The IRS will more frequently publish data on which nonprofits have lost tax-exempt status.
• Now that everyone’s talking about walkability, more and more competitors to Walk Score are popping up. We already heard about Walk Appeal, a mostly theoretical innovation by urbanist Steve Mouzon. Now comes Walkonomics, created by Adam Davies, which uses an eight-factor index to judge walkability. The Atlantic Cities’s Sarah Goodyear has a review.
• Keith Sawyer reviews Bruce Nussbaum’s new book, Creative Intelligence.
• Can’t wait for this Barry’s Blogathon on arts research and data featuring some of the leading establishment names in the field.
• Nesta’s Hasan Bakshi explains the UK creative industry classification scheme and a fascinating critique that his organizations developed of the existing classifications. This is a dense read as blog posts go, but Sunil Iyengar helpfully puts it into simpler terms. The whole thing is essential if you do any kind of creative economy or creative industry work, but here are a couple of key quotes:
  

  “The annual DCMS Creative Industries Economic Estimates have shown that Gross Value Added (GVA) in [advertising, architecture, art and antiques, computer games, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, software, and television and radio] has in recent years grown at twice the rate of other sectors, helping to raise their profile with policymakers.”

  After conducting sensitivity analyses and other validity checks, Nesta not only can locate those industries which employ creative workers at disproportionately high rates, it can also show how most creative workers are employed in non-creative industries.

  Importantly, our analysis also shows that there are serious misallocations in the DCMS classifications; this includes a definite group of industries, which DCMS does not currently treat as creative, but which have exceptionally high creative intensities, including ‘Computer programming activities’ (62.01) and ‘Computer consultancy activities’ (62.02), which between them account for over 400,000 people.

• The Future of Music Coalition’s Casey Rae recaps current policy on orphan works (i.e., creations under copyright but whose owners no longer exist), and outlines a solution that protects the original author/performer in such cases. Casey’s post has instructions if you want to file supporting or additional comments with the Copyright Office.
  
• With all the headline grabs about cuts to public funding, we don’t hear enough about the politicians that really do support the arts, who often do so behind the scenes. Guy Yedwab shares some observations from a speech by outgoing Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is now running for city Comptroller.
• California is changing some of its rules for fiscal sponsors.
• Kaid Benfield writes on the increasingly unchecked, government-like powers of local homeowners’ associations.
• Rocco Landesman writes a postcard from retirement; Doug Borwick reflects on his tenure at the NEA.
• I realized last week, to my embarrassment, that the NEA’s official Art Works blog had not been showing up in my Google Reader feed since this past August. This happens sometimes when content providers move to a new platform and change their feed URL – there’s no way for subscribers to know unless you put up a notice on the old feed telling them to resubscribe at the new address. We’ve seen this at ArtsJournal as well as the blogs there have slowly migrated from Moveable Type to their new WordPress platform. If you’re subscribed to any of these blogs in Google Reader, check to make sure you’re still getting updates! I keep a list of such feed changes at my blogroll. Anyway, here are some of the fun pieces at Art Works that I missed over the past few months because of this:
  • Steven Shewfelt and Ellen Grantham describe a new pilot initiative to assess the artistic excellence of activities funded by the NEA, after the fact.
  • Elizabeth Miller interviews Rachel Cain and Anthony Radich about WESTAF’s Public Art Archive software.
  • Sunil Iyengar analyzes the new SNAAP report, “Painting with Broader Strokes,” and another report from the National Center for Education Statistics. (Would be nice to have links to those in the post…)
  • An interview with NEA Acting Chair Joan Shigekawa. Here’s a previous interview with Deepa Gupta, who serves on the National Council of the Arts and was formerly an arts program officer with the MacArthur Foundation.
  • Rich Heeman describes the NEA’s recent efforts at improving data collection and transparency practices.
  • Shewfelt reflects on creativity in arts research, the NEA’s arts research grants program, and arts-related changes to the General Social Survey.
  • Julie Heizer shares an update on the federal government’s national tourism and marking strategy, and details how arts organizations can get involved.

IN THE FIELD

• Michael Kaiser announces his planned departure as head of the Kennedy Center. No word on what’s next for him.
• Four dance companies in Chicago are coming together to share marketing and customer service responsibilities. I’m not sure if the model is as unusual as they seem to think it is, but it’s still one to watch for those interested in shared services as a cure for the 501(c)(3) blues.
  

BIG IDEAS

• The perspectives on race and the arts continue to roll in, with responses from Jon Silpayanamant, Linda Essig, Doug Borwick, and this particularly trenchant one from Trevor O’Donnell (I’d love to get him and Borwick in a room together!). Another lens on this whole thing is a geographic one; a lot of the initial discussion came from people on the West Coast, and the rhetoric in the Clayton Lord post that I originally responded to, arguing that institutions had a moral responsibility to have audiences that looked like their local communities, struck me as very California way of looking at the issue. For better or worse, the powers that be in the East have largely not been pressuring arts nonprofits to diversify with the same ferocity, seemingly for worse in this particular case.
• Oh, and in case anyone was under the illusion that this was only an issue in the United States: “Salvador, with a welcoming Atlantic harbor, was the first capital of Brazil. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, until Brazil ended slavery in 1888, it was the largest port in the New World for the slave trade, and 80 percent of the city’s current population is Afro-Brazilian….African-rooted rhythms propel much of Brazilian popular music. Yet the prime-time face of carnaval is almost entirely white.”
• Seth Godin on the NFL vs. the arts (a subject that came up in other forums as well): “The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don’t point everyone to one bit of content, don’t trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one. The cultural touchstones we’re building today are…mostly not for everyone. Instead, the process is Tribes -> Connections/communities -> Diverse impact….[W]e build our lives around cultural pockets, not cultural mass. Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.”
• Chad Bauman on the formula for subscription success: “great artistic product + best seats + best price + outstanding customer service = more subscribers.”
• “What exactly is the dividing line between respecting your audience’s taste and shameless pandering?” Adam Huttler considers by examining the case of Netflix’s new show House of Cards, which represents a $100 million bet on algorithmically-determined original programming.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Some great resources for measuring the impact of advocacy work.
• Peter Pennekamp (former president of the Humboldt Area Foundation) and Anne Focke consider community democracy as a tool for philanthropy in this occasional paper for the Kettering Foundation.
• Over at the Nonprofit Finance Fund blog, Anjali Deshmukh and Rachel Heitler analyze an evaluation of the Violence Against Women Act. Very interesting reading for those interested in understanding how to bring these concepts to arts policy analysis.
• Southern Methodist University is launching a new Center for Arts Research.
• A new electronic journal from Scotland examines creativity and human development. And speaking of journals, issue #2 of Artivate, the journal for entrepreneurship in the arts, is out.
• An entire webinar on data visualization for philanthropy.
• An interesting take on network effects in the fashion industry.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Three perspectives on the fiscal cliff deal: from Nonprofit Quarterly; from Americans for the Arts; from the Performing Arts Alliance.
• Musicians vs. airlines – and government security. One wonders if the more cello-friendly attitude musicians report encountering in days of yore has anything to do with declining rates of arts education?
• A window into the Turnaround Arts initiative, a high-stakes gambit to amp up arts programming in a few select low-performing schools around the country.
• Rocco offers Barry’s Blog some last words on his way out the door.
• Exotic dance = art? Judith Lynne Hanna makes the case (and part 2).

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Senior program officer Lynn Stern is leaving the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Arts and Cultures program.
• The New York Times‘s veteran culture editor Jonathan Landman has accepted a buyout from the Gray Lady.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Mark Zuckerberg has committed half a billion dollars to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. This is interesting in that community foundations have been increasingly seen as a relic of past generations of donors, with new millionaires and billionaires choosing to distribute their philanthropy with the help of private wealth advisors instead. This gift, coming as it does from one of the scions of the technology world, could change that in a big way. Dan Lyons reluctantly gives Zuck the slow clap.
  
• Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center may be plenty controversial, tearing up as it did significant chunks of the neighborhood, but one thing that’s pretty great about it is that none of the concessions stands are operated by national chains. Instead, “you can get barbecue from Williamsburg’s Fatty ’Cue; Cuban sandwiches from Fort Greene’s Habana Outpost; pizza from Gravesend’s Spumoni Gardens; and, in an inspired old-school-new-school mashup, a confection called a concrete that combines Junior’s black-and-white cookies with ice cream from Blue Marble.” Here’s hoping other developers take the hint and start buying local.

IN THE FIELD

• After a period of impressive growth, Ovation, the only cable channel exclusively devoted to the arts (as traditionally defined), is being dropped by Time Warner Cable. The story is well worth a read, as it is an object lesson on what happens in the commercial marketplace for culture when profit maximization is the goal. Despite costing Time Warner a mere seven cents per subscriber, it (along with other low-rated networks) is being shed to help pay for major increases in the network’s most expensive channels, mostly sports-related. If you’re a Time Warner customer and would like to voice your concern, Ovation has set up a website for the purpose.
• Greg Sandow has been offering an interesting series on “mavericks”/bright spots in classical music, including this profile of the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston.
• More on the mysterious Woodruff Arts Center embezzlement fiasco.
• Crowdfunding French style means helping the Louvre acquire $3 million ivory statuettes.

BIG IDEAS

• Some end-of-year looking back and prognostication: Nonprofit Law Blog recounts the big nonprofit moments of 2012; Thomas Cott crowdsources arts predictions for 2013, and Barry Hessenius says nothin’ much will change this year. (I think Barry’s got it right.) Meanwhile, Tim Mikulski possibly reveals too much in recounting the top posts on AFTA’s ARTSblog in 2012.
  
• Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating interview with Jaron Lanier, an internet pioneer and futurist who has now turned against many of the hacker-derived “information should be free” principles he once embraced. In explaining his change of heart, he cites the music industry as exhibit A of what went wrong.
  

  “I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ “And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

  And then there’s this:

  “To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It’s somebody’s value that’s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it’s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it’s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes—and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.”

  Read the whole thing.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new website called AidGrade might give Createquity fave GiveWell a run for its money. It takes a quantitative approach to aggregating and analyzing randomized controlled trials of various international aid program types (like microfinance, deworming, and bednets), and offers some pretty cool features.
• “It’s all driven by seventh-grade arithmetic and a whole bunch of data.” Rick Lester breaks down patron segmentation and analysis in this podcast from Technology in the Arts.
• Is creativity linked to dishonesty? Keith Sawyer analyzes a new study and finds that the answer may be yes.
• Fascinating interview with Jennifer C. Lena, a sociologist studying cultural economics and the spread of musical taste.
• This was just cool: 2012’s year in maps, from the Atlantic Cities.

ETC.

• Here’s some advice from a pro on live-tweeting events and conferences in an official capacity.
• “My five-year-old could have painted this” is so over. Now it’s, “my pet snake could have painted this!”

• “Kansas arts agencies have been on hold several months, waiting for a clue as to how state dollars allocated by the 2012 Legislature might translate into an economic boon to arts programs.”
• The recent public arts funding update had some grim news from the UK. Here’s one possible reason: an annual study reports that donations to charity fell by a whopping one fifth in 2011-2, though the eye-popping numbers have come in for some scrutiny. Whether true or even just a little bit true, politicians’ assurances that private giving would make up for cuts to Arts Council England and other public bodies have seemingly turned out quite empty indeed.
• Isaac Butler makes some very good points on the copyright implications of the news that Disney is buying Lucasfilm for over $4 billion:
  

  What this means is that Disney is hoarding up the closest thing 20th and 21st century culture has to folk tales and mythology, and locking them up in a safe where we can’t touch it without getting sued. As artists, we should be deeply troubled by this.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Victoria Hamilton has moved on from her post as founding executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Why we need arts policy: multi-millionaire financial mogul, founder of a mysterious firm that makes its money executing high-speed trades to exploit market arbitrage opportunities, has left his day job to focus instead on establishing “free art schools in Anguilla, the Dominican Republic, Pennsylvania, Sri Lanka and Thailand” to teach poor students the craft of photorealistic painting. Said donor thinks this is going to “change the art world” and is developing luxury hotels to put alongside the schools.

IN THE FIELD

• It’s not just nonprofits that have suffered from Hurricane Sandy; Broadway’s losses are estimated at $8.5 million (Book of Mormon still sold out though). Things are rapidly improving in Chelsea, though they are not out of the woods. The Art Dealers Association of America, the New York State Council on the Humanities, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Lambent Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts have all stepped up to help out, and there is a more general New Jersey Recovery Fund as well.
• Cool post from CEOs for Cities listing ten (relatively) simple creative placemaking ideas aimed at enlivening city streets. And Toronto-based Artscape has developed an online toolkit for DIY creative placemaking (h/t Greg Baeker, via Thomas Cott).
• It seems like there’s recently been a spate of articles plumbing the depths of musicians’ finances to a level we rarely see. Franz Nicolay (indie rocker, formerly of the Hold Steady, briefly a coworker of mine) has always been remarkably open about such matters, and a recent blog post of his lays out exactly how much he made (and didn’t) during his years of highest public profile and since.

BIG IDEAS

• I was totally going to write a post-election blog post that was all like, “are arts organizations the Republican Party of the creative economy?” and then Trevor O’Donnell went and did it for me.
• Michael Kaiser has caught a fair amount of flak from arts managers of my generation before, but I suspect they’ll be pleased with this column of his.
• More evidence of Nina Simon’s awesomeness: she’s designing a You Can’t Do That in Museums summer camp (tagline: “You Can. We Will.”) to be held in Santa Cruz next July.
  

  This camp will be a 2.5 day event at which participants work in teams with pre-selected permanent collection objects to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences. If you’ve ever wanted to design an object-based exhibit that really pushed the boundaries, this is the event for you. Registration will be $150 and by application only. We will also offer a half-day series of workshops on July 10 for a wider audience for $50. Yes you can sleepover at the museum to heighten the insanity and reduce the cost. No you don’t have to be a museum professional to participate. Yes you can apply now. Please do.

• And here’s Nina’s TEDxSantaCruz talk on opening up museums (with her own as Exhibit A).

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Last year, I went to the Independent Sector conference on scholarship from the Ford Foundation and had a great experience learning from my peers across the nonprofit space. I wasn’t able to attend this year, but Nonprofit Law Blog’s Gene Takagi went and brings us this report in two parts.
• National Arts Strategies is posting a bunch of videos in connection with the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders – interviews with the young leaders themselves, as well as more established folk like Diane Ragsdale.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Is there a link between creativity and mental illness? A new study suggests yes, but this fantastically thorough analysis by Keith Sawyer urges skepticism of the results.
• The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation has released a report recapping a 2011 convening called “Strengthening the Bones.”
• Phil Buchanan speaks the hard truth: “For Markets For Good to result in meaningful change, a big part of the emphasis must be foundations stepping up and supporting the development of good, credible data and robust nonprofit performance management systems.”
• The Foundation Center has re-launched IssueLab, a repository for research of all kinds within the nonprofit sector.
• The first studies funded through the NEA Art Works: Research program are starting to come out. Here’s one about the link between arts participation and civic engagement in the 2002 General Social Survey. As always, correlation does not equal causation.
• Maria Rosario Jackson’s latest (and, presumably, last) publication for Leveraging Investments in Creativity explores artist-driven spaces in marginalized communities.
• Guy Yedwab demonstrates how it’s possible to create useful graphs from Fractured Atlas fiscal sponsorship data. Good call too to create budgets in the same format that you’ll have to report them in (for most people, this is the Cultural Data Project or something like it).

• Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch has been appointed to the US Travel and Tourism Advisory Board. The advisory board “consists of up to 32 members that advise the Secretary of Commerce on government policies and programs that affect the U.S. travel and tourism industry, offers counsel on current and emerging issues, and provides a forum for discussing and proposing solutions to industry-related problems.”
• Sarah Lutman, CEO of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which has made waves recently with some field-leading audience engagement initiatives, is stepping down at the end of the month.
• Margit Rankin is the new director of Seattle’s Artist Trust.

GETTING HITCHED

• In 2010, the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) took on back office services for the financially troubled Columbus Symphony Orchestra, building a shared services empire that already included several theaters and has since added Opera Columbus. Now, another Ohio city, Dayton, is taking the concept a step further: the three “SOB” organizations (symphony, opera, ballet) are merging into the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. The new organization is billing itself as a “first-in-the-nation” entity.
• Two of Hollywood’s largest unions, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, are set to merge.
• The city of Abu Dhabi is combining its culture and tourism entities into one agency.

GETTING ENGAGED

• Check out this dialogue vehicle created by blogger and theater-maker Guy Yedwab. The second video is particularly interesting, as it combines audience responses to the Broadway show Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and an event designed to question the depiction of Andrew Jackson in the musical. So the video basically makes what was a one-way dialogue bidirectional.
• Joe Patti ponders what it might look like to get arts organizations engaged in arts advocacy campaigns in a deeper way.
• Wait – so Nina Simon’s a boxer too? Could this woman possibly get any cooler? (In seriousness, that’s a very wise post on audience engagement linked there.)

IN THE FIELD

• The Wallace Foundation has made a $4 million mega-investment in arts education on behalf of the Boston public school system. The local education nonprofit EdVestors has been leading the fundraising charge for this initiative, a nice example of a non-arts organization recognizing the value of the arts.
• Michael Kaiser sees dollar signs for American arts fundraisers in Europe and Asia.
• Seemed like a nice idea at the time, but a number of artists are finding that the value proposition of streaming services like Spotify just isn’t there for them and are pulling their tracks from the service.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Rosetta Thurman has a great list of 10 national nonprofit conferences with registration fees under $500, and I was glad to see the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention on there. (I wouldn’t be that surprised to learn that these are all conferences she’s speaking at, by the way.)
• Materials from last October’s 5th Annual World Arts Summit in Melbourne, Australia are now available online, including a summary report of the proceedings and full transcripts of the three-plus days of panels and keynotes – Rocco Landesman was one of the presenters. I’m often struck in reading about international arts policy gatherings how different the tone and content are from American conferences; they are generally more serious/academic and concerned with very different issues, particularly cultural preservation and globalization. Worth a skim if you have the time.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Two book reviews: the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar has a nice analysis of Stanford professor Robert Flanagan’s new book on the economics of symphony orchestras, and Elizabeth Quaglieri takes on Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum.
• What makes a street beautiful? OpenPlans.org is trying to put some data to this question by asking website visitors to engage in a sort of HotOrNot-style comparison of images from Google Street View. Try it: it’s kind of addictive, and will also teach you a lot about your own urban aesthetics.
• Have you ever been in a brainstorming session in which you’re told to “just get as many ideas out as you can,” withholding criticism of any of them? I was just in one of those earlier this month at the Yale School of Management Philanthropy Conference. And yet that same week, Jonah Lehrer had published a fascinating takedown of the brainstorming concept in the pages of the New Yorker. His piece is worth reading in full, but in a nutshell a number of studies of brainstorming effectiveness have concluded that it doesn’t really add value over and above people working alone – and that instead, creativity comes from just the right amount of clash and debate between people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan, for one, says he’s seen the light.

BEYOND THE ARTS

• Yikes! The International Humanities Center, a fiscal sponsor representing some 200 projects worldwide, imploded in scandal over the holidays, causing the evaporation of more than $1 million in donations intended mostly for grassroots activist activities. Some great investigative reporting by Nonprofit Quarterly‘s Rick Cohen in that article.
• Ever wondered how many L3Cs there are in the United States? Turns out there are a little over 550; here’s a helpful breakdown and list by state.
• I have to say, I cracked up at these nerdtastic economist Valentines by Elisabeth Fosslein, writing in response to the #FedValentines Twitter meme. Well done!