• Welcome Dan Lurie, the NEA’s new Senior Advisor and Director of Strategic Partnerships.
• Nice to see the National Conference of State Legislatures recognizing the value of arts and culture, especially with state arts agencies under such budget pressure this year and state houses having become quite an ideological battleground over the past decade.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• Is this the first example of a political party devoted to intellectual property issues? Germany’s Pirate Party is “built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency,” and is loosely linked to the Pirate Bay torrent-sharing platform. It also just won 15 seats in Berlin’s regional government, qualifying it for federal funding.

AH, ORCHESTRAS

• Although the Detroit Symphony is back to playing concerts after a six-month strike last year, it is still far from out of the woods financially.
• Trouble in symphony-land: the Colorado Orchestra has seen 20 of its board members resign after a dispute with the musicians’ union. I have to say, up until quite recently I have felt a limited degree of sympathy for the union and its members who are employed by the larger-market orchestras – a feeling informed to a large degree, I suppose, by my experiences as a (nonunion) composer in the previous decade. But this story is pretty ridiculous. The Denver musicians just accepted a 9% pay cut – after accepting a 24% pay cut just two years ago. If I understand the article correctly, their base salaries are now down to $37,310 a year – barely half of what their colleagues in Indianapolis are paid. And two-thirds of the board resigned because the musicians union took a few extra days to think about the cuts instead of swallowing them immediately. There is actually a board member quoted in the article saying that those who resigned were “sick and tired of the musicians’ complaining.” Are you kidding me?

GIVING TO THE ARTS (PRIZES EDITION)

• This year’s MacArthur “Genius” Fellows have been announced.
• The Grand Rapids ArtPrize, which was deemed a great success in its debut last year, has expanded to include music.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Irvine Foundation has released a new report on California’s arts and culture ecology.
• I sometimes think of the Arts Policy Library and some of the other work I do on this blog as “research journalism.” If you want to see investigative research journalism at its finest, check out this amazing takedown of a Gates Foundation-funded report that, due to five separate spreadsheet errors, overestimated the cost-effectiveness of a deworming treatment by a factor of almost 100. Note that these aren’t methodological issues, but typos and calculation errors. After some initial hiccups, GiveWell (who published the second look) has really grown into its own as an organization at this point, and the ethic of transparency and intellectual honesty that they’ve embraced is really paying off for them. Congrats.

IN THE FIELD

• Another stellar post from Devon Smith, this time looking at arts incubator models across the country and noting gaps with similar models and other sectors, has provoked chatter from Diane Ragsdale and Linda Essig.
• Remember the Chief Executive Program? The 100 CEOs who will be participating have been announced – and it’s quite a stellar group.
• I’ve been seeing a bunch of commentaries out there on what Facebook’s new changes mean for arts organizations. Here are Colleen Dilenschneider and Jeff Scott to get you started.
• Attention arts marketers: people in their 20s send a median of 40 text messages a day – and blacks and Hispanics text twice as much as whites.

ETC.

• Are hotel lobbies the next third place? (Cf.)
• Congratulations to CultureFuture author and occasional Createquity guest poster Guy Yedwab on his 1000th post.
• I totally invented this in my head back when I was a bandleader. Damn you iPad for coming out five years too late!

On to the news:

YOU’RE FIRED

• The orchestra world has been shaken to the core this month. The largest institution yet to face such troubles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has filed for bankruptcy (the restructuring kind, not the “we’re throwing in the towel” kind). On the one hand, I am sure that the Fabulous Philadelphians’ financial troubles are very real. On the other, it does strike me as curious not only that (as others have noted) an organization with a $140 million endowment would file for bankruptcy, but that the move precedes the announcement of a $160 million fundraising campaign to save the orchestra. Andrew Taylor digs into the bankruptcy filing docs.
• The Syracuse (NY) Symphony Orchestra has filed for Chapter 7 (we’re throwing in the towel) bankruptcy, after canceling the rest of its season a week earlier. Looks like it’s lights out for this one, not to mention the SSO’s 95 musicians and staff.
• Albuquerque’s New Mexico Symphony has filed for Chapter 7 as well. 80 musicians and staffers will lose their jobs.
• On the plus side, the Detroit Symphony musicians are back to work, albeit six months later. The new three-year contract calls for 25% cuts in salaries (to $79,000 base pay, hardly slave wages) and additional funds available for optional community-service work. The orchestra’s size will be reduced from 96 to 85 musicians.
• The artistically successful but financially troubled Intiman Theatre  in Seattle has cancelled the rest of its season due to money problems. Its artistic director, Kate Whoriskey, has now left as well.
• The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival is kaput after 17 years in operation, making it the second major Baltimore arts organization to fold since the start of the Great Recession (after the Baltimore Opera). The article contains this quote that would make Tyler Cowen smile: “‘We started as a non-Equity company, and if we had dropped our contract, it would have cut our costs,’ Toran said. ‘But that’s exactly what we weren’t going to do. You want to pay your actors, just like you pay lawyers and doctors and teachers. Our goal wasn’t survival at any cost.'” So because they wanted to pay the actors so badly, they decided to give them fewer work opportunities?
• The New York City Opera, two years after spending the 2008-09 season inactive and raiding most of its endowment to stay alive, is facing a possible strike and the delay of its season announcement for next year.
• Pittsburgh arts groups are exploring increased collaboration as a survival strategy.
• Meant to write about this a while ago, but Pepsi Refresh has relaunched with a different process and set of rules after complaints of gaming the system last year.

I QUIT

• Ellen Rudolf is stepping down as longtime director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures Program, which she had initiated with the foundation 17 years ago.
• Jeremy Nowak, a noted advocate for the power of the arts in revitalizing communities, will no longer be the President and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund – for good reason: he’s about to become the new head of the William Penn Foundation. (via GIA News)
• Nina Simon, author, blogger, and museum design consultant extraordinaire, is quitting her consulting and speaking business to be the new Executive Director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA. Thankfully, she is not quitting her blog.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

• Whoa…a donor’s estate in Bermuda is withdrawing an £82 million donation to Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival for no reason at all, apparently.
• Chad Bauman riffs on the recent cuts to DC’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission from a marketer’s perspective.
• Michael Kaiser takes a dim view of the trends in corporate giving to the arts. Here are some numbers from the Foundation Center.
• Americans Gave a Lot Less in the Recession Than Experts Predicted, reads the Chronicle of Philanthropy headline. Among other things, this story is a pretty big black eye for Giving USA, the annual report on individual giving that had estimated that donor activity was holding steady or barely dropping during the same period.
• Meanwhile, foundations gave (slightly) less in 2010 than 2009, despite the fact that their assets increased by 5%.
• Why don’t more foundations publicly explain the rationale behind their gifts?
• It looks like the growth of new 501(c)(3)s has finally slowed (and the numbers will actually drop considerably once the IRS releases the names of the nonprofits whose status it has revoked as a result of nonfiling). Of course, this hasn’t stopped composer Philip Glass from founding a new festival in Carmel Valley, CA.

SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE

• My colleagues at Fractured Atlas have a new publication laying out what the health insurance reform law means for artists.
• A new publication from the Boekman Foundation in Amsterdam: Cultural Policy Update. And check out this fab cultural policy blog salon put together by my friends at Emerging Arts Professionals – San Francisco Bay Area, featuring an admirably diverse range of voices.
• Not surprisingly, the social media cognoscenti are all abuzz about the new report from the Knight Foundation, “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks.” Beth Kanter is all over it here.
• CEOs for Cities reports on the residential clustering patterns of the “young and the restless” – college educated 25-34-year-olds. Seems cities’ “close-in neighborhoods” are more important than ever.
• Partners for Livable Communities reports on strategies for arts organization outreach to senior and immigrant audiences.
• Shannon Litzenberger is back with a massive report on cultural policy in the Windy City.
• Won’t you help Devon with her epic Facebook experiment? (It begins tomorrow.)

SEE YOU IN COURT

• David Byrne has come to a settlement with former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who had used the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” without permission during Crist’s unsuccessful campaign for Senate last year. (Seems a rather auspicious choice, no?) The settlement terms apparently included Charlie recording this apology video, which actually almost makes me feel sorry for him.
• Matthew Guerrieri reports on a dispute between the Music Publishers Association (UK) and the International Music Score Library Project.

BEAUTY CONTESTS

• Bubble sort as demonstrated by Hungarian folk dance.
• Eric Whitacre is back with the Virtual Choir 2.0, this time performing his “Sleep” and featuring over 2000 performers. Sounds great, but fair warning: the video is even cheesier than in the last one.
• To draw in new audiences, an orchestra plays for cows.
• I find a lot of public art less than inspiring, but I have to admit, this is pretty awesome:
  

  After more than a decade of disagreement, Berliners have settled on a monument to celebrate German reunification and the 1989 peaceful revolution: a giant, rocking dish.

  The 55-metre, 330-tonne glittering steel wing can hold up to 1,400 people at any one time, but it needs at least 20 people to get it moving.

  The monument to unity is called Citizens in Motion, and is apparently all about people coming together. If you want to make it move, you have to get a group together and all go in a particular direction.

A quick note about some upcoming speaking engagements: I’ll be on a panel next month at the annual Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium hosted by American University, speaking on the topic of “What Makes a Good Arts Leader?” I’m looking forward to sharing the stage with the NEA’s dynamic and ubiquitous Director of Public Affairs, Jamie Bennett, and my good friend Stephanie Evans of Americans for the Arts. The symposium takes place on Sunday, April 3 in Washington, DC, and my panel is in the mid-afternoon (3:45-5:00). Secondly, I’ll be co-hosting a discussion as part of Kathy Supové’s Music with a View Festival at the Flea Theater in New York on March 30, talking about some of the themes raised in my article for NewMusicBox, “Composing a Life.” Come say hi if you’re around!

ADVOCACY UPDATE

• So, Congress reconvened and passed a two-week continuing resolution that features $4 billion in cuts – including the elimination of the $40 million arts education program at the Department of Education. Meanwhile, negotiations are taking place now on the longer-term continuing resolution that will fund the federal government for the rest of the year. The version that the House passed a few weeks ago contains a 25% cut to the NEA. Guy Yedwab has an excellent roundup of reasons to support the NEA (although I do advise leaving any return-on-investment arguments to the professionals). Lex Leifheit suggests that we get our parents and grandparents involved in arts advocacy, a la Sarah Silverman’s Great Schlep.
• Some general commentary on the budget fight: Richard Kessler reminds us that this is not just about the arts, but rather a wholesale attempt to roll back the New Deal, and David Brooks suggests that we should be allying ourselves with other interest groups who stand to lose from cuts to discretionary funding, not fighting against them.
• Obama is also trying again to lower the limits on the charitable deduction donors can take on their taxes. This has some in the nonprofit community worried, and it is worth noting that arts organizations are disproportionately supported by high-net-worth donors most likely to be affected by the changes. I don’t know, though – I am skeptical that the tax deduction is as significant a motivator in donor behavior as most people seem to think it is. (Most of the research I’ve seen on this suggests otherwise.) I think the impact to arts organizations would be real, but not as big as feared.
• There are advocacy doings at the state and local levels too. Governor Walker of Wisconsin, already endearing himself so much to lefty-leaning artists through his union-busting ways, is threatening to severely reduce arts funding in that state as well. At least Chicago’s new mayor – and former ballet dancer – Rahm Emanuel has pledged support. And it looks like our friends in Kansas may have enough support in the state legislature to save their arts council. (That article is well worth the read, by the way.)
• Don’t forget that government advocacy is not the only kind that’s important. The Meyer Foundation, which had long been an arts supporter in the DC area, has adopted a new strategic framework that leaves the arts out in the cold. Obviously many fewer people have the ability to influence the decision-making processes of private foundations than do government bodies, but those who do have that influence should not be afraid to use it.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

• The conversation Rocco started a month ago continues. The most interesting content lately belongs to Scott Walters, who recounted his experience attending a convening of arts leaders at the NEA to discuss the issues at hand; here is more.
• Meanwhile, the NEA released a trio of research reports re-examining aspects of the well-worn Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.  Perhaps the biggest headline comes from the fact that when you expand the definition of arts participation beyond ticket sales at the likes at the symphony, opera, art museum, etc. to include things like engagement with electronic media and personal creation, the proportion of people who engage with the arts rises to nearly 3 in 4. Thomas Cott has a great round-up of the reports themselves (which also examine the roles of arts education, age, and generation in arts attendance) as well as reactions from around the web.

ALL ABOUT ORCHESTRAS

• Man, a lot has been happening in Detroit since we last checked in. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s season is now cancelled, but rumors fly that management is considering hiring replacement players. Now the musicians are proposing binding arbitration to resume the season without a contract, under the terms that management last proposed, and are impatient for a response. Yikes!
• Last year, I predicted that composers would use the method employed by Eric Whitacre to create his Virtual Choir to crowdsource performances for their own pieces. It looks like this is now, in fact, happening, as Canadian composer Glen Rhodes is starting up a “virtual orchestra project” to play an original composition of his. (There’s a nice interview of Rhodes by Tara George at the above link.) Meanwhile, the YouTube Symphony, which is a live-action flesh-and-blood orchestra composed of members who auditioned via YouTube, is having another go-round under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas.

PHILANTHROPY AND GENEROSITY

• Americans for the Arts has joined up with Hyundai for a test of whether slactivism can help the arts: Hyundai’s new ad campaign, “Cure Compact Crampomitosis,” has AFTA as a charitable partner. For each person who joins the Facebook Causes page set up by Hyundai for the purpose, the car company donates 50 cents to AFTA – up to a maximum of $25k. (They are already more than halfway there.) On the one hand, I’m very glad to see a car company choosing an arts organization for support rather than any of the thousands of more traditional charities it could have picked. On the other hand, though, it seems like a pretty damn good deal for Hyundai…only $25k for 50,000 deep impressions? If just a handful of people buy cars as a result of this campaign, Hyundai comes out ahead. (In fairness, Hyundai is also matching donations made through the page, which nearly doubles the commitment as of this writing.) Well, good luck to them.
• Is giving money to the homeless a good way to help after all? Maybe it is, if you just ask them what they want and buy it for them.

THINKING CAPS

• I’m still making my way through Animating Democracy’s excellent Impact Arts site, but I can already tell it’s going to be a tremendous resource for me as well as the field.
• A new cultural policy think tank is in the house, and it wants your input: the Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability. Headed by Paul Nagle, ICSCS (pronounced “Isis”) is an affiliate of the British think tank DEMOS and takes a radically democratic approach to its work. Nagle has two guest posts on the IT Foundation blog that are well worth reading.
• Is extending copyright to fashion designers a good idea? UCLA economist and sociologist Gabriel Rossman says no.

COMINGS AND GOINGS

• Muhammad Yunus, the grandfather of microfinance, is being forced out as the head of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in what many see as a politically-motivated vendetta.
• Ex-Senator Chris Dodd is going to lead the Motion Picture Association of America, taking over for the legendary Jack Valenti.
• Former Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program Director Moy Eng will be the new head of the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, CA.

• First it was the state arts agencies; now the NEA is under attack. It turns out that the federal budget for the current fiscal year was never actually finalized, but instead was paid for bit by bit. As a result, the Republican House has called for a $22.5 million, or 13%, reduction in the NEA’s budget for the current fiscal year. As in, the one that is going on right now, for which grants are already being made. This would be the largest reduction to NEA funding in 16 years. (Not surprisingly, Republicans have since offered amendments to cut things even further…including one amendment from Scott Garrett (R-NJ) to eliminate the agency.) On top of this, President Obama’s budget for FY2012 (which begins October 1 of this year) calls for nearly as deep a cut – despite the fact that other cultural agencies (including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian) did not receive proportionate reductions. This NEA is brimming over with smart, capable leadership and has been moving in some really exciting directions lately; it would be a shame to see that momentum blunted by capricious political winds outside of its control. You can take action here; please do this, especially if you do not live in New York City, Boston, DC, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco. Your voice matters.
• If you don’t like the economic impact-focused arguments at the link above, feel free to use Arlene Goldbard’s alternative letter instead. Arlene makes the moral case for arts support like no other.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Barry Hessenius offers an important perspective on the pragmatic side of arts advocacy. No vote occurs in a vacuum or truly on its merits in politics; everything is a horse trade. It’s ugly, but it’s what those people in the Middle East are taking to the streets for.
• Other perspectives on this: Adam Huttler fires a shot across the bow of our single-issue, NEA-funding-focused advocacy model and argues for more strategic alliances with and awareness of non-arts-specific goals. Arlene Goldbard and Guy Yedwab suggest that if we want to make a good long-term case for public arts support, the term “arts” might not be the most helpful and we might want to make sure  the work we do actually serves the public. And Matthew Guerrieri has this awesome find of a clean energy industry economic impact study that promises substantially fewer jobs created per dollar spent than in the arts.
• Finally, the greatest threat to our public arts infrastructure may not be rabid conservatives, but apathetic progressives. I’ve been frustrated for a long time by the lack of reciprocity between the arts community’s support for the liberal establishment and the liberal establishment’s support for the arts. This week, we have Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, and Kevin Drum coming out as anywhere from mildly to strongly opposed to direct federal funding for the arts, and Tyler Cowen (though not exactly a liberal himself) denying that there’s a liberal case to be made. These are important voices, folks…a lot more important than Bob Lynch. They are thought leaders in the progressive community who don’t get the rationale for why the arts should have a role in federal policy. We need to educate them.

You Say You Want a Revolution

• Is this a game-changer? Kickstarter is letting organizations “curate” pages of crowdfunding campaigns. For-profits, nonprofits, and government are all represented among the current curators.
• I haven’t written too much about the crisis facing the Detroit Symphony; here is the latest news, some analysis from New England Conservatory’s Tony Woodcock, and more from Greg Sandow.
• Diane Ragdsale says in order to solve the supply/demand problem, we need to be able to identify mission-failing institutions and help them die. Sound familiar? By the way, here’s Diane’s manifesto on arts philanthropy and sustainability.
• Meanwhile, Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre goes for a more flexible business model. And a California legislator introduced a bill to create a flexible purpose corporation to compete with B-Lab’s Benefit Corporation and the L3C. Finally, Andrew Taylor writes on the intriguing economic set-up of Carnegie Hall’s upcoming Spring for Music orchestra festival.
• Shocker alert: Rosetta Thurman no longer identifies as a nonprofit professional. Don’t worry Rosetta, as long as you don’t adopt Dan Pallotta’s positions on compensation, you’ll still be okay in my book.
• Turns out the connection between the arts and regional economic growth goes back a long way:
  

  [C]ities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses.

Someone’s Gonna Pay

• The Chronicle of Philanthropy names the top 50 donors of 2010; the LA Times susses out the biggest givers in the arts.
• Mike Bloomberg will once again generously support the arts in New York City.
• Assets for Artists is expanding to new locations. And so is the Awesome Foundation.
• More on supply and demand: Laura Zabel and Rebecca Novick editions.

Figuring Out the Details

• GiveWell is back with a typically thorough self-evaluation. Here’s an overview (bottom line: fewer causes, more “gold medal” charities), top-level priorities, GiveWell as a project, GiveWell as a donor resource, and web traffic stats.
• Andrew Taylor on prize philanthropy and unintended consequences.
• New study from the European Union on the entrepreneurial dimension of cultural and creative industries. And here’s one from Economist Intelligence Unit on the synergy between livability and economic development in urban places – culture is explicitly acknowledged as a component of livability.

Revolutions Can Be Fun Too

• Cool article about the Knight Foundation’s program supporting Random Acts of Culture.
• OKTrends considers the questions to ask on a first date. Want to know whether that hot chick will sleep with you? Ask her if she likes the taste of beer. How about that hot dude? Ask him if he’s ever imagined killing somebody. (I’m not making this up.)
• Congratulations to my friend and colleague Ron Ragin, whose performance on “Baba Yetu,” better known as the theme to the best-selling video game Civilization IV, helped the composer win two Grammys over the weekend. Here’s Ron bustin’ out the pipes for a PBS special on Video Games Live.