Seward Johnson, “A Reason to Smile,” installed at Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ. (Photo by Flickr user Wally Gobetz)

On November 13, gunmen opened fire on approximately 1,500 unsuspecting audience members at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at Paris’s historic Le Bataclan music hall, killing 89. The Bataclan was the deadliest site in a cluster of coordinated terrorist attacks throughout the city that evening for which ISIS claimed responsibility. While U2 frontman Bono described the Bataclan massacre as “the first direct hit on music in this so-called war on terror,” the scale and locations of these attacks only solidified an unsettling new direction in terrorism: concert halls, stadiums, cafes, museums, and other cultural institutions (not just local or politically symbolic international sites) have all been targets this year. Indeed, ISIS’s statement of responsibility indicated that the attack sites were carefully chosen as symbols of “abominations and perversion.”

Leaders have responded by bolstering both physical and financial security for cultural venues. In addition to new safety measures, French cultural minister Fleur Pellerin established a “solidarity fund” of approximately $6 million to protect music groups from “expected declines in business and other financial hardships.” President François Hollande revealed a proposal for France’s museums to temporarily house Syrian cultural objects “at risk” of ISIS looting. Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has pledged 1 billion euros to spend equally on culture and security, which has raised concerns among Italy’s business leaders that a corporate tax cut could be postponed as a result. How to protect concert halls and stadiums, and who will ultimately pay, have likewise come up in New York City: Ray Waddell, a senior editor at Billboard, suggested that more metal detectors and bag checks may mean higher ticket prices.

While questions remain about how best to allocate resources, protecting culture now seems especially urgent in “fighting back against a group that is notorious for destroying cultural symbols and objects it deems idolatrous.”

STEM education just got a little STEAMier: In what arts education advocates considered a “huge win,” the joint House-Senate Conference Committee unanimously accepted a bipartisan amendment to the rewrite of the nation’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) (aka “No Child Left Behind”) that will integrate the arts into STEM education. Introduced by Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), the amendment sets the stage for new K-12 education policy by acknowledging that arts integration can “improve attainment of STEM-related skills” (science, technology, engineering and math). Last week, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that reauthorizes ESEA and includes additional language about the importance of the arts to a “well-rounded education.” ESSA’s more flexible math/reading test requirements and emphasis on state-level decision-making may also be friendly to arts education strategies, according to a detailed analysis by the National Art Education Association. This victory for arts ed advocates comes just after the Arts Education Partnership launched a five-year Action Agenda for Advancing the Arts in Education. It similarly emphasizes the importance of arts integration especially in underperforming and impoverished schools, and recommends incorporating the arts into training for teachers and academic leaders.

A new day in Canada: In a November letter to Minister of Culture Melanie Joly, new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demonstrated his intentions to make good on campaign promises to double the Canada Arts Council budget, provide $150M to CBC/Radio Canada, reinvest in Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board, and provide increased support for indigenous culture and youth initiatives. This is welcome news to arts groups after nine years of arts funding cuts under former conservative PM Stephen Harper. According to the Globe and Mail, Joly’s youth and relative inexperience in government will hopefully be an asset rather than liability in achieving this ambitious agenda while also redefining the ministry with “symbols of progressiveness.” Trudeau also gained popularity with social scientists when he announced in early November the reinstatement of a mandatory national census, which serves as the bedrock of all government data collection.

Ford Foundation’s new inequality-focused agenda will include the arts: In June we reported on Ford’s announcement that the foundation will shift its entire focus to fighting inequality. Three months later, president Darren Walker has revealed more detail on the specifics of the new strategy, which will involve consolidating 35 program areas into 15. While detailed arts funding guidelines have yet to be announced, Ford’s website lists a reframed creativity and free expression program encompassing “social justice storytelling” and “21st century arts infrastructure.” Walker’s “New Gospel of Wealth” essay suggests that the foundation’s ultimate goal is a reformed capitalist system, and creative expression is considered a piece of the puzzle. Ford will privilege initiatives for broader structural change over those providing direct assistance to the poor; discontinued programs include direct cash transfers in Latin America and microfinance, as well as causes like LGBT rights that have gained philanthropic support from other sources in recent years.While Ford’s program to construct new art spaces will also be cut, the foundation will increase its general operating support–with a new BUILD initiative to specifically strengthen the operations of social justice-oriented institutions and partnerships.

Cleveland arts organizations light up on election day as cigarette tax for the arts is renewed: An overwhelming majority of voters passed Issue 8, which will renew Cuyahoga County’s 10-year, 30-cent-a-pack tax on cigarettes to support arts and culture. The original approval of this tax in 2006 turned a region with scant arts funding into “one of the most highly ranked metro areas in the country in local public support for the arts.” More than 300 large and small arts organizations have depended on the $125 million in cigarette tax proceeds distributed since 2008 for both general operating support and special projects. The campaign to renew the levy was propelled by an Arts and Culture Action Committee that raised over $1 million for advertising, but the renewal faced very little visible opposition.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Prince Charitable Trusts welcomes Carolynn Brunette, who will head its Washington, D.C. office as Managing Director and also co-direct the Rhode Island program, beginning on January 1. Carolyn succeeds retiring Managing Director Kristin Pauly, who has been with Prince Charitable Trusts since 1998.
• New Orleans Arts Council CEO Kim Cook announced her departure at the end of 2015; Acting Director Nick Stillman will oversee the organization in the interim. Cook is moving to the Bay Area to serve as Burning Man’s Director of Art & Civic Engagement, a newly created position.
• Longtime theater critic Steven Leigh Morris will assume the role of LA Stage Alliance’s new executive director.
• UC Davis Law professor and international human rights scholar Karima Bennoune has been appointed special rapporteur on cultural rights to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
• The nonprofit sector mourned the sudden November 17 death of Rick Cohen, nonprofit advocate and national correspondent for Nonprofit Quarterly. Cohen previously led the led the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog, and was known for focusing on the needs of low-income and underrepresented populations.
• CERF+, a national nonprofit that “provides a safety net to artists through readiness, education and relief programs,” seeks a Director of Programs. Deadline 12/18.
• The Newark Arts Council seeks a new Executive Director. Deadline January 1.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The new book Making Culture Count: The Politics of Cultural Measurement, part of Australia-based publisher Palgrave Macmillan’s New Directions in Cultural Policy series, explores diverse approaches to cultural measurement and their political implications.
• Nesta, a UK-based foundation, presents a potentially fresh approach for measuring the intrinsic benefits of the arts–including asking people how much they would need to be paid to compensate for the removal of cultural institutions.
• An initial report on spillover effects of public investment in arts and culture in Europe reviews existing evidence and recommends a future “holistic research agenda” for the European Union.
• In the United States, the Nonprofit Finance Fund published an arts-specific analysis of its annual State of the Sector Survey, encompassing data from over 900 arts, culture and humanities organizations. Trends include decreased debt (but ongoing challenges with sustainability), and an emphasis on expanded programming and audience-building, as well as more focus on outcomes measurement.
• The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s new assessment of the nonprofit arts sector spanning 11 U.S. metropolitan areas (using Cultural Data Project data) found that increased earned income is driving many organizations’ recession recovery, but they also face decreased contributed income among other fiscal challenges.
• A Theater Communications Group study indicates that U.S. nonprofit theaters still face shrinking attendance despite increased revenue; offering more family-friendly programming may help. Early exposure to theater could benefit young people in various ways; the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders published findings from a randomized control trial that suggest theater training may boost skills in kids with autism.
• A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia offers a closer look at the pros and cons of gentrification in the City of Brotherly Love, with implications for national urban policy.
• The arts management workforce still does not match the diversity of the general population. Meanwhile, a survey of UK arts professionals suggests a “stark gender pay gap.”
• A Los Angeles County Arts Commission report analyzes the importance of volunteers to arts organizations – and of volunteer management.
• With Adele’s new album enjoying record-breaking sales last month despite not being available for streaming, researchers continue to debate the impact of digital music distribution. The NEA responded to a methodological debate that broke out earlier this year between the New York Times Magazine and The Future of Music Coalition by looking at what two alternative datasets might tell us about the viability of making a living as an artist in the digital age. Meanwhile, an analysis of two years of Spotify data from the Bureau of Economic Research suggests that music streaming “brings virtually no financial gain to the industry, but it also prevents losses.”
• Several reports explored the “dark side of creativity,” with growing evidence that creative people may be more dishonest and prone to depression and an exaggerated sense of entitlement.
• Finally, will there be more to be thankful for than usual this year? A Charities Aid Foundation study found that charitable giving is up around the world, including an increase from young people and men.

Author(s): Sarah Lee and Peter Linett

Publisher: Cultural Data Project

Year: 2013

URL: http://www.culturaldata.org/wp-content/uploads/new-data-directions-for-the-cultural-landscape-a-report-by-slover-linett-audience-research-for-the-cultural-data-project_final.pdf

Topics: research, data

Methods: Theory/assertion, informed by synthesis of comments from a CDP-hosted online forum of researchers (disclosure: I was one of them), results from CDP’s internal strategic planning survey, and a paper by Margaret Wyszomirksi (not available online) “to frame and inventory the cultural data landscape.”

What it says: “New Directions” was commissioned by the Cultural Data Project in connection with that organization’s transition from a foundation-housed initiative to an independent nonprofit, and the strategic planning process that followed. The report was intended to inform that process by situating CDP’s efforts within the larger context of data collection throughout the United States cultural sector. It notes a growing abundance of and interest in arts and cultural data, but identifies six factors that “may be limiting the sector from effectively incorporating data into decision-making processes.” The six factors [paraphrased] are:

• Poor accessibility, quality, and comparability of cultural data (stemming from a decentralized infrastructure)
• Norms about data collection and use, including low priority/importance assigned to the task of data collection in general
• Lack of coordination and standardization among existing data collection efforts
• Skill and resource capacity constraints among cultural nonprofits
• Organizational culture dynamics that inhibit thoughtful decision-making
• A paucity of vision and case studies regarding the successful use of data to drive decisions

To address these challenges, “New Directions” recommends coordinating leadership on cultural data, engaging program and artistic staff in conversations about data, shifting the frame from accountability to decision-making, developing a research and data collection agenda, developing data-related skills among organization staff, and improving the cultural data infrastructure.

What I think about it: While the work relies heavily on the impressions of a small number of experts, Lee and Linett make a number of good and important points. I particularly agree with the notion that what the world needs is not more data collection, but rather better skills and filters to apply to the data and research that’s already there. “New Directions” also calls out the “data first, research questions later” approach adopted by so many cultural institutions (including, arguably, the CDP itself) as an unhelpful norm, and makes veiled but unmistakable reference to the widespread practice of letting advocacy goals take priority over strong methodological standards. That said, the paper’s persistent focus on data rather than the broader concept of research ends up causing it to miss the forest for the trees in some respects. Despite acknowledging in places that new data collection isn’t always the most promising route to greater wisdom, it neglects to consider the role that literature review, calibrated probability assessment, and other approaches not involving primary data collection can play in informed decision-making. The paper focuses on challenges and strategies without the same level of attention to desired outcomes. Because of this, I felt excited by the direction “New Directions” was taking me, but frustrated that it didn’t map out more of the journey.

What it all means: Are we ready to declare a crisis in the field around its data collection practices? Are people who commission or carry out new research without thinking either about its direct tie to decision-making or its strategic place in the literature not just failing to add value, but doing the arts an active disservice? There’s an argument to be made that organizations shouldn’t be asked to collect any data at all, except insofar as it serves their strategic purposes and they know what they’re doing; that, instead, all data intended to serve the needs of the sector should be collected by knowledgeable third parties working under a clear and coordinated research agenda. While “New Directions” declines to do so for us, it’s interesting to imagine what a vastly improved cultural data infrastructure would actually look like, along with how we might get there.

A graphic from the Cultural Data Project report, “New Data Directions for the Cultural Landscape.”

As any internet geek or high-priced consultant will be happy to tell you, we find ourselves today in the age of Big Data. You know, the era when science and numbers are supposed to solve all our problems forever? That one. And yet in the cultural sector, according to a report published earlier this year, we don’t have the data we need; we don’t know what to do with the data we have; and even if we did, we still wouldn’t use it to make decisions. (Okay, that may be oversimplifying things a bit…but not by much.)

So what are we supposed to do? That’s what the Cultural Data Project (CDP), which commissioned the report, wanted to find out. Many readers know the CDP as the folks behind those forms you have to fill out when you’re applying for grants. Its spinoff last year from a foundation-sponsored initiative housed within the Pew Charitable Trusts to an independent nonprofit prompted some organizational rethinking, and “New Data Directions for the Cultural Landscape,” by Slover Linett consultants Sarah Lee and Peter Linett, was one result. “New Data Directions” seeks to situate the CDP’s efforts within the larger context of data collection throughout the United States cultural sector.

The study synthesizes comments from an online forum that CDP hosted in late 2013 with a small group of cultural data experts drawn from academia and the consulting world. (Disclosure: Createquity’s Ian David Moss was one of the participants in this forum and is quoted a handful of times in the report.) It additionally draws from CDP’s internal strategic planning survey, a paper by Margaret Wyszomirski (not available online) that sought “to frame and inventory the cultural data landscape,” and the authors’ own interpretations and experiences.

After citing the benefits that data-informed decision making has provided in other fields, “New Data Directions” identifies a number of factors that it says are preventing us from reaping those benefits, namely:

• Poor accessibility, quality, and comparability of cultural data
• Norms about data collection and use, including low priority/importance assigned to the task of data collection in general
• Lack of coordination and standardization among existing data collection efforts
• Skill and resource capacity constraints among cultural nonprofits
• Organizations’ perceptions of the public and their audiences that inhibit the effective use of data in decision-making
• A paucity of vision and lack of role models regarding the successful use of data to drive decisions

To address these challenges, the report recommends some straightforward steps, including coordinating leadership on cultural data, engaging program and artistic staff in conversations about data, shifting the frame of data use from accountability to decision-making, developing a field-wide research and data collection agenda, developing data-related skills among organization staff, and improving the cultural data infrastructure.

Piece of cake, right? Though the report’s heavy reliance on the comments of a group of data experts might suggest that we’re off to a bad start in terms of “engaging program and artistic staff in the conversation about data,” Lee and Linett nevertheless surface several important and underaddressed issues facing the cultural data landscape. Perhaps the most crucial of these is a recognition that leading with data as the solution before carefully considering the problem it’s supposed to solve runs the risk of creating data that lacks a purpose. In many cases, arts organizations’ collection of data has been driven by the need to comply with funders’ reporting requirements rather than by a desire to collect information that could improve their future decision making. While the databases that have been generated through this process provide rich sources of information, it is not always clear what that information is good for, or how individual organizations can benefit from it. “New Data Directions” deftly calls attention to this “data first, questions second” mindset that appears to be so pervasive across the sector.

And yet to some extent, the report is itself a testament to the difficulty of escaping this mindset. By framing its entire exploration around data, “New Data Directions” inadvertently obscures the role that other forms of information and analysis, such as literature review, strategic goal setting, and probability assessment, can play in promoting better decisions. More to the point, if better decisions for better outcomes are what we’re really interested in, how much is suboptimal use of data really sabotaging that goal? The report seems simply to take it on faith that it is, without providing much evidence for that view or weighing how much other obstacles (e.g., management incentives) may be contributing to the problem. In part because of this focus on the activity rather than the goal, “New Data Directions” does a much better job of describing where we are and suggesting a path forward than imagining what we might find on the other side.

So it seems that last task is left to the rest of us. Without ever quite coming out and saying it, “New Data Directions” challenges all arts administrators to think purposefully about our role in addressing the situation mentioned at the top of this article. Are we ready to declare a crisis around data collection and use in the field? Do the observations and subjective impressions offered in the report resonate with your own experience? What would consistently effective use of data for decision making at the organizational and system-wide level look like in practice? What good would it do for the sector? And what would it take to make change in this particular way?

Your turn.

Cover image: “Data Represented in an Interactive 3-D Form,” courtesy of the Idaho National Laboratory via Flickr Creative Commons license.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies concluded its sixth World Summit on Arts and Culture in Chile earlier this month. Nearly 400 arts leaders and policymakers from 67 countries gathered to address shared challenges facing the arts world.  The summit coincided with the launch of IFACCA’s report detailing arts advocacy campaigns and best practices.
• The NEA’s Director of Design, Jason Schupbach, talks about the agency’s next steps in creative placemaking “in the spirit of openness and oversharing,” and telegraphs a gradual shift in Our Town’s focus from local case studies to national initiatives.
• New Jersey is the first state in the country to include data on student enrollment in the visual and performing arts in its annual report on school performance. Slightly less than half of Garden State high school students are enrolled in a course in one of the four art forms.
• The New York Times provides a glimpse into the capricious process used by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs to review and approve applications from prospective residents seeking to live in lofts legally reserved for artists.
• A proposed noise ordinance in New Orleans drew a musical protest outside of city hall when musicians gathered to ensure their political voices, and their music, are not only heard, but heard at a proper volume.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Joan Finkelstein, formerly Director of 92^nd Street Y Harness Dance Center, is the new Director of the Harkness Foundation for Dance, replacing Theodore S. Bartwink.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• More good news for Gibney Dance: Director Gina Gibney’s dreams of turning their new space previously occupied by Dance New Amersterdam into a resource for emerging artists are $3 million closer to becoming a reality thanks to a  gift from the Agnes Varis Trust to make repairs to the facilities.
• Can an accounting change by SoundExchange impact the ability of middle-class performers and indie labels to create more music? The Future of Music Coalition thinks so.  A frequently disbursed stream of income that pays performers on a monthly, rather than quarterly, basis can help free up musicians to concentrate on their work rather than wonder how they’ll pay next month’s bills.
• Internet radio service Pandora pays nearly half its revenue to performing artists and labels, while only 4.3 percent goes to songwriters and publishers. Think that’s unfair? So does the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) which represents the latter. But it was Pandora that brought suit to lower the royalty rate paid to ASCAP members. At the heart of the issue is whether music publishers can remove their catalogs from digital transmissions, while still using professional recording organizations like ASCAP to represent their work on issues such as collecting money from terrestrial AM/FM radio stations.
• Meanwhile, back in the world of terrestrial radio, this is what happens when you leave cultural taste-making to the whims of the commercial marketplace. More than ever before, radio stations are playing the same damn songs over and over. The article is interesting throughout, including such tidbits as the fact that the top 10 songs last year were played twice as much as the top 10 songs a decade ago, the fact that this trend is an example of data-driven decision-making on the part of radio stations, and this quote:
  

  In the new intensely scrutinized world of radio, said Mr. Darden, “taking risks is not rewarded, so we have to be more careful than ever before.”

IN THE FIELD

• Ever admire the shelves of beautiful art books as you exit through the gift shop? Turns out they rarely turn a profit, so commercial publishers often avoid them. Enter the Artist Book Foundation, a new nonprofit dedicated to filling the gap.
• Norwegian readers are in for a treat: 135,000 titles, still protected by copyright, are going online for free in Norway thanks to an agreement arranged between the National Library of Norway and Kopinor, an umbrella organization of major authors and publishers.
• Sometimes, when you want a concerto, you really want a concerto: during the Minnesota Orchestra’s lock-out attendance at smaller community orchestras jumped noticeably. We won’t know the long-term effects until well after concerts at Orchestra Hall resume on February 7.
• Just as the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra prepare to head back to the stage, the entire board of Minnesota Dance Theater abruptly resigned last week, with no explanation yet as to the reason.
• Confused about the difference between a “cultural cluster and a “cultural district”? Learn more in a podcast highlighting work in Cincinnati led by ArtsWave and the Kennedy Heights Arts Center.
• In a victory for Venn diagrams, Americans for the Arts and 12 other national arts and education organizations have endorsed “A Shared Endeavor: Arts Education for America’s Students,” which defines shared delivery of arts education and identifies advocacy priorities generalist teachers, art specialists and teaching artists can support together.
• Arts administrators take note: Americans for the Arts has announced its spring webinar series, which includes sessions on the NEA, rural and small communities, and assessing social impact.

BIG IDEAS

• American artists are taking note of an international movement to ensure a “basic income” for all as a way of ending poverty. In a model proposed by Swiss artist Benno Schmidt, every citizen would receive a modest monthly check, regardless of need or merit.
• Is a permanent facility an asset or a prison to the modern arts organization? Diane Ragsdale shares four steps to scrutinize and reframe organizational core beliefs, and applies them to commonly-held assumptions regarding building-based arts organizations.
• Founder and CEO of The Teaching Company Thomas Rollins, whose nerd-tastic “great lectures on world history” got an affectionate nod in Createquity’s article on MOOCs and arts education, wades into the MOOC debate himself and finds the idea that they can transform higher education to be “utter nonsense.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• What does the cultural data landscape look like? Get a bird’s eye view from the report New Data for the Cultural Landscape: Towards a Better Informed Stronger Future just published by the Cultural Data Project. Barry Hessenius pulls out key highlights and probes the persistent challenge of educating leaders in our field to make strategic decisions using data.
• AFTA’s Randy Cohen digs deep into the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s recent report on the contributions of the arts to GDP. Turns out, it omits a lot of architecture, design and creative writing at the college level, and many arts grantmakers. Fortunately, the BEA is open to suggestions for improving its strong first cut. Follow the link to contribute your thoughts.
• The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center is out with the second issue of The Digest, which summarizes academic research on the cultural sector from the around the world, which is often inaccessible to a broad audience. The issue examines “creative cities in theory and practice.”
• A new Pew report finds that, although the typical American read five books last year, nearly a quarter of us read none at all. In related news, libraries continue to draw patrons in innovative ways, such as installing 3D printers, shifting collections from the academic to the popular, and offering hog-butchering seminars.
• Big Data may be a boon for marketers, but when does segmentation cross over the line into discrimination? A research fellow at MIT argues that this is the central ethical dilemma of today’s data analysts.

The Thinker at the Detroit Institute of Arts – photo by Quick fix

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past twelve months. You can read the previous editions here: 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world. I am grateful to Createquity editorial consultant Daniel Reid for contributing the entry on the arts and the GDP.

This year provided us with a mix of hope and stress. While boasting its share of concrete triumphs and failures, such as the launch of several field-building initiatives and the very high-profile flaming out of the venerable New York City Opera, 2013 was most notable for providing us with markers along the path of longer-term trends. With the struggles of the Great Recession largely behind us, arts stakeholders increasingly turned their attention to non-financial matters, planning for the future and seeking to invest wisely. Yet the specter of fear and dysfunction in Washington, DC hung over the arts field to a degree not seen since at least the Bush years, sapping enthusiasm from even the most passionate of government idealists.

10. Changing of the guard at ArtPlace

As noted in last year’s top stories roundup, creative placemaking was cruising for a bruising in 2012. While a number of factors contributed to the backlash against the signature arts policy push of Rocco Landesman’s tenure as NEA Chairman, by many accounts, the brusque style of ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta didn’t help. Under her leadership, ArtPlace – a private-sector collaboration between 13 of the nation’s largest arts funders initiated by Landesman and the Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker – came under fire for failing to disclose its funders’ geographic restrictions, missing opportunities to thoughtfully measure creative placemaking’s impact, being cavalier about gentrification and other social justice considerations, and supporting a project that alienated the people it was trying to help. In the midst of all this, Coletta decamped for a VP position at the Knight Foundation in March. Her eventual replacement announced in December, following an interim stint by former William Penn Foundation president Jeremy Nowak, was the NEA’s Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, who had ingratiated himself with arts stakeholders across the country in his now-former position and earned widespread admiration in the process. Change is in the air at ArtPlace (the organization is moving with Bennett to New York, for one), and many eyes are watching the fledgling creative placemaking standard-bearer as we head into 2014.

9. City Opera bids farewell

Amidst near-death experiences far and wide, New York City Opera is the biggest and most famous U.S. arts institution yet to actually fail as a result of the Great Recession. The once-mighty company, which had visions of a $60 million annual budget as recently as 2008, had drastically scaled down its ambitions following a disastrous season during which it presented no full productions, lost its (brand new) general director, and managed to draw down or lose the majority of its endowment. By the time George Steel took over in 2009, most of the damage had been done, and City Opera could no longer afford its just-renovated home at Lincoln Center. A last-ditch effort to raise $7 million (including a first-of-its-kind-at-this-scale “save the opera” $1 million Kickstarter campaign) fell short, and the organization announced it was beginning bankruptcy proceedings in October.

8. Arts’ impact on GDP gets counted

Advocates at Americans for the Arts, the NEA, and elsewhere have spent years touting the arts’ economic impact, on the theory that legislators and executives will find this argument singularly compelling and respond by taking their fingers off the “defund” button. This year, their case got official recognition from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which calculates GDP. First, in July, the BEA revised its methodology for calculating GDP to include the money businesses spend to develop intellectual property, including artistic work like music and film; this added 3% to our nation’s economy overnight and underlined the economic importance of investment in creative work. Then, in December, the BEA and the NEA jointly released the first-ever official tally of the value the arts add to the U.S. economy, which they will continue to track annually (note that this does not yet take into account the methodological changes announced in July). The total – $500 billion a year, more than the entire tourism sector – impressed some mainstream news outlets and was promptly put through the spin cycle by a few creative-industry advocates, especially in Hollywood. But the bigger surprise was how little excitement the story seemed to generate in arts circles – perhaps because of the report’s bad news about the arts’ post-recession recovery, the fact that commercial fields accounted for the bulk of the value, or the omission of ancillary spending (such as on dinner before the theater) that often figures prominently in more localized economic impact studies.

7. The arts (start to) get serious about diversity

Yeah, yeah, I know. Talk is cheap, and our field has been dithering about multiculturalism, demographic change, and the need to diversify boards, staffs, and audiences for decades. Looking beneath the surface of the blogosphere debates, however, one does get the sense that momentum for action is growing. 2013 was the year of the inaugural SphinxCon, a convening on (racial) diversity in the performing arts spearheaded by a man who was almost the next Chairman of the NEA (more on that below), and the leaders of numerous relevant service organizations showed up to put their views on the record. One of those service organizations, Theatre Communications Group, is now a year into an extensive and very public “diversity and inclusion” initiative and the conversation is bubbling up at other service organizations as well now that financial survival is no longer everyone’s first priority. Meanwhile, Grantmakers in the Arts had its entire board undergo training by the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond, a leading purveyor of anti-racist thought. These are small steps in the grand scheme of things, and diversity is not the same as justice, but one can’t help but be encouraged watching the organizations charged with leading the field begin to walk and not just talk.

6. The arts research field makes halting progress toward field-building

Last year, I got so frustrated with the state of arts research that I blathered on for more than an hour to the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center about all of its problems and how to fix them. Fortunately, it turns out that I’m not alone in seeing the need and opportunity for reform of our field’s research infrastructure. The first and easiest step toward a better future was always going to be a way for people working in this area to communicate more effectively with each other, and May’s launch of the Cultural Research Network goes a long way toward checking that box. This was also the year that the arts began to flirt in a big way with Big Data. We saw the launch of two immense arts data aggregation initiatives, Philadelphia’s CultureBlocks (building off of the work of Social Impact of the Arts Project researchers Mark Stern and Susan Seifert) and Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (aggregating data from the Cultural Data Project, TRG Arts, and elsewhere). A third project, the Harvard-led Initiative for Sustainable Arts in America, is set to launch in Detroit and the Bay Area in 2014. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Cultural Data Project is taking a look in the mirror with a gigantic, year-long strategic planning process that looks like it will result in major changes for the organization and the field. We’ve got a long, long way to go, but the progress we saw in 2013 toward a smarter, more tech-savvy, and more collaborative knowledge management infrastructure in the arts is highly encouraging.

5. The NEA remains Chairless

When Rocco Landesman left his post as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in December 2012, there was no reason to think that the leadership transition would be anything but smooth. Senior deputy Joan Shigekawa, who had long been rumored to be the one running the agency behind the scenes anyway, became the acting head, and a search for a new director began immediately. Yet as the year dragged on, the process became murkier, and at this point no one seems to be sure when the Obama administration (which is in charge of the search) might get around to formally nominating a new leader. Sphinx Organization founder and National Council on the Arts member Aaron Dworkin is the only individual to have publicly confirmed being a candidate for the gig and was widely seen as the frontrunner for the post until he pulled his name from consideration over the summer; he would have been the Endowment’s first black chairman. NEA fans can take heart at least in the fact that they are not alone; the National Endowment for the Humanities has likewise been without an official leader since May.

4. A roller coaster year for the DIA

My goodness, where to begin? The Detroit Institute of Arts has had more ink spilled on it in the last two years, it seems, than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. It was just last August that the DIA was triumphantly celebrating the passage of a millage, or property tax, in three counties providing the institution with ten years of guaranteed operating support, allowing it to build its endowment and place itself on secure footing for the future. But then in July the City of Detroit announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, placing the DIA’s art collection – much of which is owned by the city – in jeopardy. The city’s state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has reportedly asked the DIA to come up with $500 million to help appease creditors and lead Detroit out of the doldrums, which is about how much the auction house Christie’s has assigned to the value of artworks purchased with city funds. The most interesting potential outcome has the city and the DIA entering into a “grand bargain” involving an effort to raise the $500 million from a consortium of local and national funders, including the Kresge and Ford Foundations, and turn the DIA into a private entity, free from city control. Regardless of how this one turns out, it’s an object lesson in the potential pitfalls of direct government involvement in arts institutions.

3. Edward Snowden shows us we’re not as free as we thought

A 30-year-old former government contractor running off with four laptops and goodness knows how many hard drives’ worth of secret intelligence documents made for a compelling news story, but its connection to the arts wasn’t immediately clear. After all, the initial disclosure – that the United States National Security Agency was working with phone companies to collect metadata (information about calls, though not the calls themselves) en masse – seemed like it might be No Big Deal. It’s helpful for our national security apparatus not to have to wait for days to know who’s called whom, they still have to get a warrant to figure out what was actually said, and it’s all cleared by the Congress and our courts. Right? But as more and more revelations from Snowden’s treasure trove have come to light, the creepier this whole thing has gotten, and the more it’s become apparent that virtually nothing we do online is secret from the government. The NSA has intercepted the fiber-optic cables that carry Internet traffic to collect information on activities without the Internet companies even knowing; the agency “repeatedly broke surveillance rules,” and there have already been cases of “willful misconduct” like stalking love interests. Here’s what’s important to keep in mind from an arts perspective: the United States has always prided itself as a country of free expression. One of the most important ways in which that freedom of expression has been possible is that the government has intentionally held back from giving itself the means to control it, letting social norms and the marketplace have influence instead. There may be little reason to think that Uncle Sam would be interested in some random artist’s work today, but imagine a change in administration, another war, and a widespread movement for social change in which artists play a big role, and all of the sudden 2013 might start to look a lot like 1983.

2. Obamacare gets off to a rocky start

For years, advocating for health care reform was a major priority of a number of arts organizations. Once the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed, several of those organizations (including the one that I work for) took the opportunity to declare victory and go home. Pretty much no one considers Obamacare to be perfect, but the legislation had been widely praised and its rollout highly anticipated in arts circles because of its promise to better serve freelancers, particularly those with modest incomes (due to the subsidy provided). However, when healthcare.gov couldn’t process enrollments to save its life upon its October launch, it all started to look very, very fragile – particularly the already popularity-challenged individual mandate that is, according to economists, the linchpin to the entire system. It looks like the worst fears about Obamacare’s shaky launch have passed, but not before a small business exchange and the employer mandate were delayed for a year and other concessions were made to mollify angry citizens, many of which are arguably bad policy. Make no mistake, the Affordable Care Act is here to stay – but how much it’ll actually end up improving things is perhaps a bit more in question than it seemed a few months ago.

1. Wait, who elected these guys?

When the dust from the 2012 election cleared and Barack Obama was still president, the Senate was still Democratic, and the House was still Republican, we knew we were in for another two years (and most likely four) of divided government. But I don’t think too many people expected it would get this bad. The hyper-partisan environment, political infighting between conservative and establishment Republicans, petty power struggles between branches of government, and the determination to treat even the smallest difference of opinion as a virtual fight to the death all contributed to one of the least productive Congressional years in recorded history and a 16-day government shutdown that earned the ridicule of the world. As much as this sucked for all of us as citizens, it all but put the kibosh on any dreams of transformative arts policy coming from the Obama administration. With so many urgent national priorities getting in line to be ignored or gamed by a Congress that is far more adept at drafting press releases than passing legislation, maintaining the status quo is about the best that arts advocates can hope for in 2014.

Honorable mention:

• Scandal at the IRS
• Darren Walker lands Ford Foundation’s top gig
• The sequester hits federal arts agencies

Happy 2014 to all!

Vault photo by Ostrograd

(Please enjoy this guest post from Yvonne Lee, a recent UCLA MLIS graduate and information professional specializing in cultural data research. -IDM)

In late July, the National Endowment for the Arts quietly issued a request for proposals for a national arts data repository to serve as a clearing house for “high-quality datasets with arts variables.” Given my experience as a data geek, this news seemed like Christmas in July. I started daydreaming about accessing flawlessly documented datasets (perfect codebooks! detailed workflows and logbooks!) and having a dedicated repository where I could store and share all of the data from my own projects. Most of all, I thought about how this archive might transform our sector.

Many hopes sprang to mind. A one-stop shop for longitudinal and reliable datasets could change how arts researchers document, publish, share, verify, and re-use data, and have implications for policymakers, practitioners, and administrators. For one, we could deepen the current dialogue(s) on arts research and cultural vibrancy indicators to examine their utility and comprehensiveness. This in turn could help the sector develop better frameworks to define arts and culture and more transparent benchmarks for measuring the health and vitality of the arts sector. While several arts and cultural indicator projects like the Urban Institute’s Arts and Culture Indicators Project or ArtPlace’s Vibrancy Indicators utilize widely available datasets, crucial segments of the data and documentation—like the actual methodology used to derive cell phone activity for ArtPlace’s Vibrancy Indicators—are not available for wide consumption. A popular adage in the sciences is to “trust, but verify” research results. Should the arts be any different? If a critical mass of datasets and supporting documentation is included in the NEA’s repository and accessed for re-use, researchers might communicate more openly and make strides toward building a shared framework for how we understand the arts.

Still, as excited as I was, my experience with arts-related datasets has taught me that working with data archives is never rarely as simple as we’d like it to be. In my past role as a data curation consultant, I researched and advised how best to document, select, publish, and deposit research data for potential re-use on behalf of various stakeholders in the arts and humanities. As part of a digital humanities project called Visualizing Statues, I investigated research methods to develop a digital management plan (DMP), a process that is now required for all NEA and NEH research grants. The questions that came up were manifold and pretty universal to the arts and humanities sector—how to properly cite datasets, for example, or how to migrate proprietary file formats so that others could access datasets without using soon-obsolete software. One of the biggest of these questions was what constituted arts research data. The Visualizing Statues project used the National Science Board (NSB)’s Long-Lived Digital Data Collections definition of data as “any information…including text, numbers, images, video or movies.” This definition is a standard among data curators. Its chief advantage is that it provides a springboard for researchers to consider data as something with a wide and changing scope rather than something static. On the other hand, the definition is so broad that it makes articulating the exact provenance of datasets difficult as they change hands from “raw” to normalized and cleaned. In Visualizing Statues, “the data” included everything from photographs to geocoordinates to ArcGIS code to epigraphic documents in TEI XML. Citing the different types and versions of data became a major issue when it came time to select a data archive, as some have policies that are unfriendly to such a heterogeneous mix of formats.

Despite concerns over version control and the wide scope of data in Visualizing Statues, the good news was that the project reflected a trend toward data sharing and access in the arts and humanities. Our researchers uniformly expressed willingness to share and deposit their data in an archive. We were also able to access others’ research data in conjunction with this project, though all of it came directly from the principal investigators’ colleagues. This is pretty typical; in general, access to arts-related datasets varies greatly. Anyone can search for and download files from wide-access or public datasets like the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, but to access datasets from smaller projects, which typically are not publicly funded and rely on third-party consultants, interpersonal connections are often required. Even having friends in high places won’t work for everyone, as some datasets are kept for internal or highly restricted use. Given these roadblocks, arts researchers are often forced to or unknowingly duplicate efforts using precious project resources. The ability to inventory and access current and past datasets will let us better understand the scope of research in the sector while encouraging collaboration between researchers, and keeping past research data relevant.

Certain data archives and collection initiatives in the sector are already trying to address issues of access. Princeton’s Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA), which has been around since 2001, seems an obvious choice for depositing and retrieving arts-related datasets. CPANDA describes itself as the “world’s first interactive digital archive of policy-relevant data on the arts and cultural policy in the United States.” However, its site is like a digital ghost town, with its most recent dataset dated 2011. One reason for CPANDA’s disuse may be the rigidly hierarchical format of its finding aids and directories. Researchers can conduct a simple search of terms used in survey questions or browse by the title or subject of a study, making searches difficult unless the researcher knows exactly what he or she is looking for. Say, for example, that you are a researcher looking for past surveys on how Americans have spent their leisure time since 2008. You could type “American Time Use” in the search bar and retrieve a list of survey questions with the terms American, time, and use in them. Or, you could browse by title, assuming you have a specific study in mind. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.

The Cultural Data Project (CDP), another seemingly obvious choice, is not an archive per se as much as a longitudinal collection of participating members’ financial data. The CDP was first launched in 2004 and states that it is “the emerging national standard for data collection in the arts and cultural sector.” However, the CDP requires data deposits use the CDP’s data collection instrument (the Data Profile) which collects narrowly but deeply on financial and programming data. Unfortunately, access to CDP’s rich datasets is neither public nor wide, and researchers not otherwise affiliated with CDP or its participating members may find their request for CDP data denied.

More recently, Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts and Cox School of Business announced a collaboration with CDP and others on a National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) that “will analyze the largest database of arts research ever assembled.” This “hub for critical [arts research] data” may be more in line with the NEA’s RFP than CPANDA or CDP’s efforts, though whether it will provide wide or public access to its data is unclear. The Center’s focus will be “analysis, insights, and enablement” while data gathering will be on an ad-hoc basis. While NCAR released an introduction to its inaugural report in early December, it’s too soon to tell whether it will yield viable datasets for arts researchers. In the meantime, we have a clear and timely need for an arts data archive that utilizes relevant analysis tools, regularly maintains its datasets, is simple to navigate, and allows users to easily deposit and download data.

Fortunately, the NEA solicitation addresses some of these needs. It specifies that the NEA is seeking “a contractor who has an established data archiving infrastructure and the capacity to create, maintain, update, and expand an archive of datasets, metadata, and links to related literature.” This means that not only the reports, tables, figures, codebooks, and appendices affiliated with the data will be available to the public, but (huzzah!) the actual data as well. Very importantly, the NEA’s proposal states that researchers using the repository should have access to enough resources within it to be able to verify or replicate the data. The standard of replicability is virtually unheard of in arts research, in large part because of our reliance on qualitative research methods. Requiring it for datasets deposited in this archive would go far toward ameliorating some of the trust issues with arts research that then NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett referred to in an interview with Barry Hessenius earlier this year:

I think we generally have a research and data problem in the arts. Our data sets are often not as robust, and our research is not always seen as being as rigorous as other sectors.

In addition, the NEA proposal asks the consultant do the following to ensure a successful deployment and implementation of the data archive:

• Design and develop a website to serve as a discipline-specific archive that stores arts-related datasets, metadata, and references to literature (or citations) that use the datasets
• Acquire and process art-related datasets, metadata, and links to literature currently housed at CPANDA
• Update, maintain, and add to this new archive of arts-related data for a base period of one year
• Communicate the mission of the archive to the public

It seems straightforward enough: if you create a data archive with accurate research documentation, citation tracking, and simple methods for inputting and retrieving data, provide technical assistance on how to use the repository, and alert stakeholders, it should be in high demand. However, the repository will still have challenges ahead, in no small part because of the sector it intends to serve. While I don’t believe that the arts sector is inherently antagonistic to data, I do think there will be some steep learning curves for the community at large (exemplified by the Archive and Data Management Training Center’s hilarious “The five stages to data sharing” based on the Kübler-Ross model of grieving). Despite early calls for an arts database by Alvin Toffler and others, the level of data literacy in the arts sector is low. Even if researchers share their datasets more consistently, there’s still the issue of whether others will feel compelled to (re)use them. While Createquity along with WESTAF’s Barry’s Blog, LinkedIn’s Digital Curation Group, and various ArtsJournal blogs address issues of research and data literacy, the discussion still needs to reach a wider audience in the arts.

As of publication, the NEA has not yet announced the awardee of the data archiving contract, though a source there indicated the agency would “have something to say soon.” Although I am more skeptical now than I was in late July, I am cautiously optimistic that the creation of the arts data archive along with the NEA and NEH’s Digital Management Plan requirements will further data sharing and access in the sector. Although the growing pains are still evident, these measures should stimulate the arts community’s interest in data and collaborative research, and will hopefully thereby cultivate a better understanding of the nature of human creative endeavor. As stated by the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences:

We have remarkable opportunities to bring new analytic and interpretive power to bear on the materials and the methods of the humanities and the social sciences; by so doing, we can advance our understanding of human cultures past, present, and future. In the process, however, [stakeholders] will also have to re-examine their own . . . culture, rethinking its outward forms, its established practices, and its apparent assumptions.

For the arts, this emerging path may be tumultuous, but indicates great promise.

(Acknowledgments to Christine L. Borgman and Laura A. Wynholds’ s bibliography on “Data, Data Practices, and Data Curation.”)

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Australia is relatively fresh off the adoption of a national cultural policy, and with that policy come calls for new ways to measure culture’s intrinsic value.
• Fractured Atlas has created a simple but useful infographic explaining what ObamaCare means to individuals, including artists.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Kris Tucker, Executive Director of the Washington State Arts Commission, has announced that she will step down in January. She has held the position since 1999; her successor will be chosen by the Governor following a search process led by the Commission.
• At Cincinnati-based ArtsWave, longtime president and CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson will step down next August. As part of a standing succession plan, current Chief Operating Officer Alecia Kintner is expected to become President and COO.
• The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City has chosen a new executive director to succeed founder David Hughes: Julie Gordon Dalgleish took up the post this month.

BIG IDEAS

• Why we need a GiveWell for the arts: bioethics professor Peter Singer applauds “effective altruism” or evidence-based grantmaking, and, in the process, slams the idea of donating to an art museum. The article has provoked several responses from Adam Huttler, Janet Brown, Laura Zucker, and Linda Essig. Before we get tangled in semantics (isn’t “effectiveness” beside the point of true altruism?) GiveWell thoughtfully unpacks what the term means to them.
• Nonprofit executives both in and outside of the arts, meanwhile, aren’t putting much faith in data-driven strategies. According to a poll by Infogroup Nonprofit Solutions, executives consider “using data and analytics to drive strategy”  by far and away their least important nonprofit fundraising practice.
• The second batch of guests at the much-anticipated Arts Dinner-Vention Project  — Kristin Thomson, Salvador Acevado, Devon Smith, Lex Leifheit, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Meiyin Wang — weigh in on what a “new movement around the arts” would look like.
• Kerry Lengel explores the challenges and opportunities present in the battle for relevance and ticket sales for arts presenters in Arizona, and everywhere really.
• Think tanks in DC have increasingly focused on advancing a pre-existing agenda, raising funds, and political advocacy. Is there still a place for objective research in policy decisions? We’d like to think so.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Three trustees of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation claim the foundation owes them at least $60m; foundation staff asks, “What are they thinking?” Florida courts will decide.
• Amid the controversies over how little musicians are paid from streaming services, Doug Wolk takes a big-picture look at the revenue flows of sites like Spotify and Pandora to explain who is and isn’t getting paid by whom, and whether it really matters.
• Maryland’s Forum Theater, in an attempt to make its work more accessible, is allowing audience members to determine the price of their tickets next season. The strategy may prove to be wishful thinking, but raises the question of whether it’s more effective to ask audiences to “pay what they can” or to “pay what they each think a performance was worth.”

IN THE FIELD

• Amid national discussion surrounding recent lawsuits by unpaid interns, Fractured Atlas’s Jason Tseng offers concise takes on the history, legality, and possible future models for internships in the arts.
• Another Fractured Atlas staffer, Tim Cynova, interviewed 26 top professional leaders over the past several months about what it takes to attract and retain stellar staff members. He shares their responses in a video compilation here and will be releasing videos of each interview on his #StellarStaff website over the next month.
• Book lovers sound off on the Justice Department’s recent suit against Apple and publishing companies for conspiring to raise e-book prices. Meanwhile, independent bricks-and-mortar booksellers appear to be back on the upswing.
• Good news for cinephiles outside New York and LA: you may no longer need to invest in home theaters. A new website called Gathr allows users to band together to bring independent films to theaters across the country with a Kickstarter-like crowdsourcing engine.
• Bad news for cinephiles outside: drive-in theaters across the country are imperiled by the need to invest in expensive new digital projectors. Honda will save a few based on online votes; some theater operators are turning to the internet on their own to stay in business.
• Non-news for cinephiles: the general public is more complimentary of films than professional critics. How much more? The New York Times has a nifty analysis of Rotten Tomatoes scores from critics versus average moviegoers over the last ten years.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Look out, Rick Perry: the Cultural Data Project is coming to Texas.
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have released two reports on their Leading for the Future experiment, which granted $1m in “change capital” to 10 leading arts organization to improve their capitalization. The summary report highlights factors that contributed to or limited success (stable finances and a well-informed board help; a major recession does not); the more interesting case studies of each organization offers detailed information on how they defined and evaluated success.
• NewMusicBox’s Rob Deemer follows up on our recent item about the NEA’s artist workforce research to argue that there should be a separate occupational category for composers. Meanwhile, the NEA has a new research report out on industrial design. The sector is large, growing, and apparently very versatile: nearly 40 percent of people named in design patents are also named in utility patents, implying they have a penchant for invention.
• A new report on the music industry in Nashville finds that the city has by far the highest number of music industry jobs per capita and the second-highest average salary after LA. This handy infographic breaks it down.
• If you’re looking to get up to speed on everything important that’s been written on the arts and Big Data so far, here’s where to start. Chris also has a review of “Counting What Counts: What Big Data Can Do for the Cultural Sector.”

One intersection of Data and art. Photo by Geoff Stearns.

For all of the predictions flying back and forth about what 2013 holds for the arts and culture sector in the United States, one of the few things we can say with near-certainty is that 2013 will be a year of major transition for the Cultural Data Project (CDP). Our sector’s largest-scale effort to quantify and streamline the “value” of arts and culture across different regions, the CDP is breaking off from its original home at the Pew Charitable Trusts to become a separate nonprofit. Until now, the CDP has been governed by a local Pennsylvania-based board, but it recently launched a national board and announced Beth Tuttle as their new CEO, who will lead a strategic planning process to further evolve its scope and impact. These shifts, according to the CDP, will “put [it] in an even stronger position to serve the arts and culture community” and its “increasingly large and diverse number of constituents.”

As arts organizations are increasingly pressed to demonstrate tangible benefits, this turning point in the CDP’s history provides an opportunity to look back on its trajectory and examine ways to measure the contributions of arts and culture to society.

For those unfamiliar with the CDP and how it came to be, here is a little refresher:

Background of the CDP

The CDP launched in Pennsylvania in 2004 thanks to the collaboration between the Pew Charitable Trusts and a number of local funders. Using the CDP platform, arts and cultural organizations create an annual Data Profile based on their financial audit and quantitative programmatic data, such as the number of exhibitions or workshops held. It is an online tool that aims to help arts and cultural organizations “improve their financial management and services to communities” by streamlining, storing and aggregating data on their financial and programmatic activities each year.

In grantseeking, it functions a little bit like the Common Application for undergraduate college admissions, which some funders have emulated through standardized application templates; once organizations create Data Profiles they can then submit customized reports to multiple funders. Arts organizations also have access to a variety of tools that illustrate trends in their performance from year to year, and can compare their data against other organizations in the region or across all states participating in the CDP.

The tools include:

• A Program Revenue and Marketing Expense Report, which explores the relationship between marketing expenses and attendance figures
• A Personnel Report, which outlines costs associated with staffing, salaries and benefits
• A Contributed Revenue and Fundraising Expense Report, which examines how changes in fundraising expenses effect contributed revenue
• The Financial Health Analysis, developed in partnership with the Nonprofit Finance Fund, which serves as a fiscal health “check up” and provides an overview of financial strengths, weaknesses and business dynamics

Users can tailor comparison reports according to detailed specifications. For example, if you’re a mid-sized theater company, you can see how your programming and marketing expenses compare to those of your peers.  You can also see how they compare against, say, all arts organizations that were founded within a certain time frame and target a specific constituent group. CDP Help Desk Staff assists in running those reports, and with cleaning and checking the data that goes into creating a Data Profile, which consists of nearly 300 questions and requires 15 to 30 hours to complete.

Why go through such a complex process? For one thing, funders get a standardized profile with grant applications that allows them to easily compare organizations. Accordingly, most funders who support the CDP require that nonprofits submit their Data Profiles and a customized report with their grant applications. Furthermore, many funders are interested in research, and the CDP provides a massive data bank. The more funders require their constituents to use the CDP, the bigger the ultimate payoff for researchers: a regional (and, perhaps one day, national) aggregate of information about arts and cultural organizations, updated annually.

As for the cultural organizations that have to complete the Data Profile, those applying to multiple grantmakers requiring CDP reports receive the benefit of being able to submit detailed financial information in one format. If they participate over several years and take advantage of the reports to track and compare their progress, they also gain a better picture of their own strengths. The drawback comes for organizations with limited capacity to devote to completing the Data Profile, or for those seeking to evaluate more qualitative elements of their work. But therein lie the possibilities.

The CDP’s Impact to Date: The Research Perspective

Thirteen states currently take part in the CDP, with sixteen more expressing interest. (A list of participating states with links to their CDP Web sites is available here.) In the near-decade since the CDP launched, how has it benefited the myriad cultural organizations that input data and the researchers who analyze it?

Most researchers to date have used CDP data to try to quantify the broad “impact” of the arts and culture sector in financial and programmatic terms, totaling up the number of people employed by arts and culture organizations in a given area, the number of public events, the number of attendees, etc.  A snippet from Cuyahoga County’s Strengthening Communities 2011 report provides one such example:

The ability to quantify the scope and variety of the nonprofit arts and culture communities has proven invaluable to several advocacy campaigns. The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance used CDP data to lead constituents across the state to successfully defeat a proposed tax on arts and culture activities. ArtServe Michigan’s Creative State Michigan Report, comprised mainly of CDP data, prompted the state’s Republican governor to propose a threefold increase in state arts funding.

Regardless of whether studies like these demonstrate that the arts generate economic growth, research resulting from the CDP has undoubtedly helped make the case for investment in the arts and culture and tell a more concrete story about people served. These efforts have been somewhat limited, however, by the “one size fits all” nature of the CDP’s construction. After all, attributes like financial health and the quantity of public events would be more accurately described as outputs rather than outcome or impact measures. The fact that CDP profiles are optional to fill out for organizations whose funders don’t require it also creates challenges for researchers who wish to generalize from CDP data to all nonprofit arts and culture organizations, since the CDP constitutes a nonrandom sample of such organizations. Recently, funders in California and New York have begun piloting small grant programs to support research projects using the CDP in their states; time will tell if these opportunities lead to a more diverse range of inquiries using the data.

The CDP’s Impact to Date: Arts Organizations’ Perspective

The CDP has been a boon to research and advocacy efforts, but cultural organizations themselves don’t always hear about that work, or take full advantage of the CDP’s resources. In 2012, the CDP conducted a survey of over 1,800 arts organizations charged with filling out a Data Profile every year. Arin Sullivan, the CDP’s Senior Associate for State-Based Activities, said that the survey found that 68 percent of respondents had never read a report that includes CDP data, like Cuyahoga County’s. This implies that researchers, and the CDP itself, need to close the feedback loop between research and the constituents being studied. In addition, according to Sullivan, the survey revealed that more than 40% of participating organizations have never run an annual, trend, or comparison report.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. Organizations simply may not be aware of the CDP reporting features. They may have limited staff capacity to run and analyze reports, particularly after devoting significant time to completing their Data Profile. Or they are aware of the reporting features, but don’t think they are worth using.

No matter what the reasons, these results suggest a range of perceptions about the CDP. To some organizations, it is simply a profile to complete in order to get a grant. To others, it is a resource that can help better inform their practice. The same survey that found nearly half of organizations don’t use CDP reporting tools also found that 45% of participants understood their own finances better as a result of completing the Profile. Of those respondents that did use CDP reports, 40% said it resulted in better transparency, 45% said they had a better sense of their progress and goals, and 56% said they had a better sense of their organization over time.  These relatively low percentages suggest that even organizations taking full advantage of CDP reports do not always find them of substantial benefit.

Yet for some organizations, the CDP has been quite useful indeed. DanceWorks Chicago, for example, changed its entire accounting system to align with the format of the CDP. According to CEO Andreas Böttcher, many small organizations have little expertise in accounting, and until the advent of the CDP had no clear template to follow when setting up their books. Using the CDP was “onerous at first,” he said, “but once you have it, you can build a business plan based on what you have to report.”

DanceWorks has also made use of comparison reports. Böttcher said they’ve shown funders, for example, that not only is DanceWorks unique in its programming (which provides a laboratory for artistic growth to dancers, choreographers, and directors), but it is one of only a few organizations of its size to offer health insurance to dancers. Comparison reports also affirmed other things the company was doing well, despite its relative youth: its 80 individual donors reflect a larger funding pool than those of comparable, older organizations, and its web-based donations are 300% higher.

Other organizations have used the CDP to better track programmatic information, such as their most popular services or types of events. One such organization is the Rhode Island Historical Society, whose Executive Director, Morgan Grefe, used the CDP as an opportunity to make a greater commitment to program evaluation.  According to Grefe, having to complete the Data Profile made program evaluation “the thing you can’t ignore instead of the thing you always put off.” She credits the CDP process with the Society’s increased attentiveness to more qualitative program data, which has had an effect on the organization’s work.

For example, staff members started tracking how many visitors to different historic sites used those sites as a “visitor’s center,” asking for brochures and other tourist information, but not participating in a tour of the building.  Tracking such data enabled the Society to illustrate to public and private funders that the sites hold value to the tourist industry as well as to visitors concerned primarily with historic preservation. It also allows Grefe to make programmatic decisions, such as recruiting volunteers to fulfill visitor center functions or investing in more brochures.

An increasingly data-oriented attitude also led to the Society to launch the Rhode Island History Online Directory Initiative (RHODI). The RHODI Project will be “a comprehensive and detailed survey of Rhode Island’s history and heritage sector, [providing] not only trustworthy data on which to base future grant-funded proposals for such activities as collections cataloging, capacity building advice, preservation projects, educational programming, a virtual museum, but also the much needed impetus for synergies and collaborations.”

Beyond the Numbers: Looking Ahead as The CDP Expands

As these examples indicate, the CDP has shown potential in establishing and tracking organizational success measures that can encourage stronger business operations, advocate for the arts, and guide grantmaking. In order for that success to solidify, however, the CDP must gain buy-in from a broader group of stakeholders, and address the fact that its current ability to gauge the arts’ “impact” is limited.

Of course, the CDP can’t be expected to track and measure everything related to arts and culture. Perhaps in recognition of this fact, and in an effort to integrate CDP data with other available resources, Southern Methodist University recently announced a partnership with the CDP to launch the National Center for Arts Research (NCAR). Among other things, NCAR plans to launch an interactive “dashboard” where “arts leaders will be able to enter information about their organizations and see how they compare to the highest performance standards in areas such as community engagement, earned and contributed revenue and balance sheet health.” Assuming the effort manages to avoid redundancies with existing CDP infrastructure, it may fulfill its vision to become “a catalyst for the transformation and sustainability of the national arts and cultural community.”

At this point in the CDP’s history, it’s worth asking how it can further engage arts organizations, and what role it can play in evaluating more qualitative trends in cultural activities, such as audience loyalty and the evolution of programming. Since the organizations participating in the CDP range from zoos to art galleries, attempting to evaluate these aspects in any standardized way may be an exercise in insanity. What’s the dance education equivalent of a blockbuster museum exhibition? Nevertheless, there may be opportunities for the CDP to help organizations draw connections between CDP data and other reports, and to provide them with a broader toolkit of resources.

For example, for more than 20 years the League of American Orchestras has compiled a report of repertoire played by its member orchestras, including a list of the top 10 most frequently performed works, composers, and soloists. Though sadly only published in dense PDFs, one could track the repertoire of the top orchestras and determine if programming is, for example, becoming more conservative over time. Those same orchestras could make careful use of their own CDP data to make connections between programming choices and financial health.

The community and economic development sector, meanwhile, has attempted to build evaluative tools into a shared measurement system with a platform called Success Measures,  which is smaller in scope but has certain similarities to the CDP.  Success Measures provides its members, most of whom are organizations with little experience or capacity for program evaluation, with a set of evaluative tools (surveys, interview protocols, observational checklists, and so forth).  They receive training on how to use the tools and then, using an online system similar to the CDP’s, upload, clean and analyze their data.

Participation in Success Measures is optional. By contrast, in each state where CDP operates, many funders require it as part of the application process, effectively enforcing participation. Given the CDP’s reach and the strong level of technical support it already provides, it is well poised to develop and disseminate additional tools. Suppose an organization was hoping to understand its audience retention rates, and had the option of accessing standardized survey tools as a CDP participant. The CDP would provide the organization with technical assistance in using the tools, in exchange for the survey results being added to the aggregate database. Such a system could not only strengthen the value of participating in the CDP, but also take a step toward a deeper understanding of “impact.” New tools — even optional ones — can motivate organizations to take a closer look at their activities, perhaps discovering how cultural choices affect their bottom line over time, or if their audience development efforts are truly paying off.

No matter how (and if) it chooses to expand, a few things about the CDP are clear:

• It has propelled an ongoing conversation about the economic role of arts and culture
• It may yet build the capacity of the field as a whole if it more directly engages the arts and culture organizations it aims to serve
• To do so, it needs to clarify and draw greater attention to the existing benefits of using the system, and stay alert to organizations’ needs moving forward

With both for-profit and nonprofit sectors gravitating toward Big Data (and seeking more and more people to help them make sense of that data), the CDP can take a lead in ensuring that aggregate information is not only useful to researchers studying the arts and culture sector, but also to the organizations — large and small, vibrant and struggling — that are its engine.

(Talia Gibas is Manager, Arts for All at the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and a past Createquity Writing Fellow. Amanda Keil is a mezzo-soprano and writer based in New York City.)

So hooray for all that! And now to our regularly scheduled programming…

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Remember the item a while back about patent trolls? Rachael Wilkinson at the Technology in the Arts blog alerts us to a very disturbing case of a troll targeting an arts organization, in this case a theater in Connecticut for using the “Tweet Seats” concept. Looks like it’s time for arts organizations to speak up for patent reform.
• Federal arts education standards do make a difference in practice.
• Danielle Brazell of Arts for LA writes about bringing the arts into the upcoming Los Angeles mayoral election.
• Don’t miss this fantastic interview between Barry Hessenius and NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, one of my favorite people in the arts (and you’ll soon see why in the interview). Side note: I had no idea that Jamie served on the board of a group called the “No-Pants Theatre Company,” but that is just awesome.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Cultural Data Project finally has a new CEO to lead its transition to an independent nonprofit: Beth Tuttle, a consultant with METStrategies.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• One of the big trends I’ve been seeing over the last decade, and that I think we’ll see accelerate in the next, is the slow migration of low-profit enterprises with social value – think jazz venues, record labels, newspapers/journalism providers – to a nonprofit context. That trend includes independent bookstores, and this article from the Toronto Globe and Mail explains why.
• More food for thought on the economics of music streaming.
  

IN THE FIELD

• Catherine Michna has only been a blogger for two weeks, but this post on “how NOT to be a gentrifier with your theater” in New Orleans is certainly a way to make an impression.
• This is some truth right here: “[International Art English] often ‘insists on art’s subversive potential.’ Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors.”
• The Sacramento Philharmonic and Sacramento Opera will merge into the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance, following a model pioneered by the Utah Symphony | Utah Opera and the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. The article has a helpful rundown of recent mergers in the performing arts and what people are saying about them.
• Dallas Shelby at the National Arts Strategies blog: “As in politics, the key to increasing the power of your mandate is to increase the amount of stakeholders’ engagement more than they increase their expectations.“
• My Fractured Atlas colleague Tim Cynova is up at Hyperallergic discussing 7 ways to build a sustainable art career this year. (I can take credit for the “Well-Informed Arts Professional” bit.)

BIG IDEAS

• A fascinating and lengthy essay by Trevor Butterworth on Big Data and its associated necessity, Big Criticism (or as he terms it, Big Crit). Worth a read in full.
• Last month, Jacquelyn Strycker explored the artistic side of food, including the new creations coming out of the field of molecular gastronomy. Elizabeth Merritt from the Center for the Future of Museums considers another angle: the potential intersection between food and 3D printing.
• Doug Borwick offers a very helpful definitional boundary distinguishing community engagement (by arts institutions) from the more commonly-used term audience engagement.
• Bill Ivey is out with a new book (Handmaking America), and Russell Willis Taylor has the scoop.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In which all of our stereotypes about kids and music preferences are shown to be true.
• New research from the Netherlands suggests a link between practicing a musical instrument and lower blood pressure.
• We talk a lot about arts organizations needing to diversify their audiences, but that conversation is all too often painted in frustratingly broad strokes. Clay Lord is experimenting with some ways to lend a bit more definition.
• Interesting visualization and analysis of age demographics in US cities, courtesy of the Urban Institute and Atlantic Cities.
• How the Hewlett Foundation is thinking about evaluation these days (and, as Lucy Bernholz notes, a victory for transparency).
• Wow! The Foundation Center, GuideStar, and Urban Institute collectively spend close to $2 million annually to extract and upload nonprofit form 990 data into databases. A new report from the Aspen Institute argues that the government should have nonprofits fill out those forms online so that they’ll be in a database already, and then make the contents of that database publicly available.
• A new survey and report basically find that a significant portion of nonprofit development directors hate their jobs.

ETC.

• John E. Craig, Jr. explains the whys, hows, and what nexts of foundation archiving (part 1; part 2).
• What is there to say about this amazing article covering the Portland karaoke scene, other than read the whole thing? So many gems in this one, but just to whet your appetite:
  

  Portland does have dozens of karaoke bars, and over the course of six nights we did our best to visit them all. I sang Lee Ann Womack in a honky-tonk in far southeast Portland, Kanye West in a comedy club and INXS in a Chinese restaurant. I watched Emilie, my seven-months-pregnant sister-in-law, sing Melanie’s “Brand New Key” onstage at Stripparaoke night at the Devils Point, a teensy, low-ceilinged club on a triangular lot well outside Portland’s downtown, while a topless dancer worked the pole next to her. Afterward, the dancer — whose bare stomach featured a tattoo of a vividly horrible shark and the word REDRUM — gave Emilie a sweet hug.

  And…

  Chopsticks III: How Can Be Lounge is located between a heavy-equipment rental shop and a Hanson pipe factory. It’s the kind of awful nightspot where if your watch was broken, you could keep time by the diminishing height of the melting heap of ice dumped in the urinal in the men’s room. When the heap of ice read 10:00, Chopsticks III was jammed with 50 people or more: groups of women out for a night away; a dwarf with an Afro who submitted his power ballads under the stage name Micro; a group of four buddies whose Monday-night karaoke club requires them to sing any song a friend challenges them to, blind. Also, a troupe of puppeteers from a local children’s theater, their snakes, ducks and cowgirls laid carefully across a table in the back of the bar.

  This was puppet karaoke.

  And my favorite…

  Correction: January 23, 2013

  An earlier version of this article  referred incorrectly to a puppet that appeared in a show at a local karaoke club. It is known as Señor Serpiente, not Señora Serpiente.

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

THE MYSTIQUE OF CITIES

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

THE (NOT SO?) DISMAL SCIENCE

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

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

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

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

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

ETC.

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