Grand Rapids LipDub – photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.

• Sadly, this is what passes for a victory in arts funding these days: the NEA survived the 2012 budget appropriations process with only a 6% cut from last year. This represents full funding of President Obama’s request; yes, that’s right folks, our fearless leader demonstrated his steadfast support of the arts this year by proposing a $9 million cut to a budget that his own handpicked agency head has already described as “pathetic.” The arts in education budget from the Department of Education survived, despite a proposal by the administration to consolidate the program. Other federal cultural agencies, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian, saw their funding hold steady or increase slightly.
• Grantmakers in the Arts is launching a new Arts Education Funders’ Coalition that “will work with an education policy firm in Washington DC to develop opportunities and policies that will enhance arts education at the federal level.”
• A bill has been introduced in Congress that would impose a new royalty in the amount of 7% of any sales of artwork over $10,000 by living artists or other works not yet in the public domain. The royalty would apply to sales at auction houses and the proceeds would be split evenly between the artist (or his or her heirs) and a new federally-administered fund that will help museums purchase works by living artists. To date, I’ve mostly read arguments against the proposed legislation, some of which are more compelling than others, but I still think the best reason to oppose it is that it seems most likely to help established names at the expense of emerging artists.
• The passage of a constitutional amendment in Minnesota tripling the state’s arts funding was heralded at the time as unmitigated good news. But since then, the additional funds have brought their own set of headaches with them.
• Jan Brennan writes about Denver’s newly merged cultural affairs agency, Arts & Venues Denver.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• More on the recently-announced €1.8 billion “Creative Europe” funding program.
• Emilya Cachapero reports on the aftereffects of Palestine’s entry into UNESCO, and the United States’ legislatively-mandated decision to stop funding the agency as a retaliatory action. The funding cut amounts to $35 million annually, or 22% of UNESCO’s budget.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The director of the program that awards the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grants, Daniel Socolow, is set to retire.
• Daniel Kertzner, arts program officer for the Rhode Island Foundation, has been promoted to Vice President of Grant Programs for the community foundation.
• The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance has a new executive director, Jeannie Howe. Former director Buck Jabaily is leaving to become co-founder of Baltimore Open Theatre, which sounds pretty cool.
• Also in Baltimore, Ben Stone is the new executive director of the city’s Station North cultural district.
• Theatre Bay Area has a new managing director, Dana Harrison, who formerly played a key role in managing the Burning Man festival.

IN THE FIELD

• The Fayetteville (NC) Museum of Art is shutting down.
• The contract dispute between the New York City Opera and its musicians is getting ugly.
• With Occupy Wall Street in the rear view mirror, the local musicians’ union in New York City is reviving its Justice for Jazz Artists campaign, which I reported on back in 2009. Two years later, the union has not met with any success in convincing owners of the major jazz clubs in NYC to honor verbal agreements to pass the proceeds from a tax break (which was passed five years ago with lobbying help from the clubs in question) to a musicians’ pension fund.

BIG IDEAS

• The cultural equity conversation continues over at GIA. Barry Hessenius says it’s all about boards of directors. Arlene Goldbard offers her response, and a not-so-modest proposal to shake things up from the very foundations (so to speak).
• Tech toys: this video shows progress in 2011 on Arena Stage’s New Play Map.
• The Emerging Ideas series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council continues with Letitia Ivins’s Pop-Ups for the Populi.
• Minnesota’s Walker Art Center has a new website and it is apparently a trip.
• This has got to be the most epic liveblog I’ve ever seen – one post covering four days of madness at the Doris Duke-funded Continuing Innovation Convening last week in New York City, complete with pics, video, you name it. Karina Mangu-Ward has just declared herself a blogger to watch at EMCArts’s new portal ArtsFwd, which is well worth checking out.

PHILANTHROPY WORLD

• “The typical foundation provides just 22% of its grantees with assistance securing funding from other sources.” I’m actually surprised this number isn’t lower. However, about half of the total is accounted for by simply suggesting other prospects to the grantee, a form of assistance that grantees say doesn’t help all that much.
• GiveWell explains how it chose between its top two recommended charities.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Judith H. Dobrzynski reports on the new Art & Finance Report from Deloitte Luxembourg and ArtTactic.

ETC.

• Andrew Taylor points us to a cool story about the role that South African taxi cab drivers played in curating music consumption in the 1990s.
• Off-topic, but…it’s ludicrous that the penny is still around. I remember calls for them to disappear back when I was a teenager. Can we get some movement on this, finally?
• I named Craige Hoover’s YourTownPerforms.com one of the top 5 new arts blogs in 2010, and the thanks I get is that he disappears for over a year. Luckily, he’s back, hopefully for good this time.

Beyond Dynamic Adaptability was all about the changing nature of cultural participation, a hot topic on just about everyone’s minds these days. In keeping with the theme, the conference itself was organized in such a way as to invite participation, especially towards the end of the day with two-hour “fishbowl” sessions in which “panelists sit in a circle in the center (the ‘fishbowl’) and discuss the topic, with an empty chair for interested audience members to jump in to the conversation.” In addition, artistic practice was more deeply infused into this conference than just about any other I’ve seen, even the performance-happy GIA conferences. A cadre of Bay Area superstars curated the Art Bar, an imbibing-friendly home for performances and readings in an actual bar at the hotel, which at various points apparently involved such shenanigans as Alan Brown getting interviewed by a drag queen and conference participants performing haikus about their experience. Jessica Robinson Love and her team at CounterPULSE also curated and produced several performances sprinkled amidst the morning sessions, one of which was a multimedia extravaganza featuring percussion instruments, portable lighting, and a giant inflatable fish dangling from the ceiling, and another involving 70 arts administrators being trained in African dance. Anyway, let’s just say that on any number of levels, this wasn’t your typical arts conference.

Since Clay and Adam focused most of their attention on the fishbowl sessions, I’ll devote time instead to the opening keynote panel, featuring Ben Cameron from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Josephine Ramirez from the Irvine Foundation, Dante Di Loreto (the executive producer of Glee), and Nina Simon from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, and moderated by John Killacky (executive director of the Flynn Center in Burlington, VT and former arts program officer for the San Francisco Foundation).

The panel began with a snippet from Cameron’s much-viewed TEDx speech from 2010, which posits that we are undergoing an “Arts Reformation” to parallel the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, whose arts giving Cameron heads, has been funding innovation for quite a while now, focusing on new pathways to program leadership that are discontinuous from previous practice – a hard left turn rather than a soft right. Cameron shared that, contrary to common belief, in his experience, the big champions of change are audience members and the biggest obstacles often come from the ranks of board and staff. Yet without money, any talk of innovation is nothing but hot air. Speaking of innovation, in describing the new artist fellowships that Duke is offering over the next ten years, Cameron proudly declared that the foundation “ripped off” (that’s a direct quote, folks) what he considered to be the best elements of various existing artist support models, such as Creative Capital, United States Artists, and others. (Not to skip ahead too much, but it does make me think of the opening plenary of the Independent Sector Conference which I attended a week later, in which speaker Andrew Hargadon argued that innovation is more about synthesizing existing ideas than generating new ones.)

Josephine Ramirez spoke next about the Irvine Foundation’s new arts funding strategy, which is most directly concerned with audience engagement, focusing in particular on new ways of making arts and art-making happen. Ramirez also shared some of her own previous history creating spaces for active participation as Vice President of Programming and Planning at the Music Center in Los Angeles, which included innovations like hosting dances on the plaza, holding flute choir rehearsals in the lobbies, and singalongs in the backroom theater in Walt Disney Concert Hall. As part of her presentation, Ramirez projected the “audience involvement spectrum” from a new white paper commissioned by Irvine and written by Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard of WolfBrown (confessing that she wished it had been called the “audience/participant involvement spectrum”). Createquity readers may remember this white paper from a blog post back in June, which shared a solicitation from the report authors for ideas of participatory arts programs that could be shared as one of the case studies in the document.

Ramirez was followed by Di Loreto, the executive producer of Glee. The show has accumulated a base of rabid fans who recreate the choreography to the week’s shows in their own homes (we were treated to this rendition at the event). Di Loreto maintains that the fan community grew organically and was not actively cultivated by the show, at least at the beginning. In this way audiences can leverage new technologies to become part of the show, although it’s worth noting that creations from earlier generations, such as the Star Wars movies and Star Trek TV shows, have inspired similar creative fan communities. Echoing a theme I’ve written about before, Di Loreto asserted that it’s “so much more fun” to be on stage than participating from afar, and that the content needs to be “truly exceptional” in order to reverse that equation.

It’s fair to say the show was stolen, however, by Nina Simon, who is currently the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History but is better known to readers as the author of the Museum 2.0 blog and her book, The Participatory Museum. Simon is simply an electrifying speaker, and her firsthand stories from her experience as a first-time museum director provided inspiration aplenty. At the time that she took over the Museum of Art & History, the institution was struggling to survive. Few in the community outside of the museum’s in-group even knew where it was (even though it’s in the center of downtown), and Simon and the rest of the staff took 20% pay cuts to help get through the first year. Given the museum’s heavy reliance on and need for volunteers, Simon instituted a novel volunteer recruitment strategy: as soon as visitors to the museum walk in the door, they are greeted by a friendly staff member and invited to leave a suggestion. After they do so, Simon follows up and, if she likes the idea, asks the visitor to lead the suggested initiative. She has steered the museum toward a model in which the museum turns around suggestions from the community to implementation in 72 hours. (The highlight was when the roller derby team got in touch – that was about the coolest collaborator the museum could have asked for!)

Simon reports that her strategy of radical openness requires that she let go a certain degree of control and her own urge to take herself and her institution seriously. When interns create fliers with tons of typos, she doesn’t care.  But it’s been successful: the museum raised $240,000 in the past 6 months.

The positive energy created by the new innovations has been infectious on a number of levels. Simon made a video of a champagne party with her staff to celebrate the first $50,000, and the museum took in a bunch more money as a result. The museum’s board has been supportive as well – as Simon dryly noted, “if you can save a financial situation, they will accept anything.”

A recent initiative involved inviting audience members to help create the labels for items shown on the museum. “It’s ridiculous to imagine that our staff knows everything to know about what’s in the museum,” Simon said, citing a recent surfing exhibit as an example. Simon’s total focus is on the audience – not the artists whose work is featured in her museum. She will not apologize for this. A rearrangement of a space within the museum to a more lounge-like atmosphere led to a public spat with the artist whose work was on the walls, who disparaged the new environment as a “petting zoo.” After seeing that visitors were now spending more time with her artwork as a result of the changes, the artist and Simon reconciled and the former now runs the bike valet for the museum on a volunteer basis. (Did I mention this is Santa Cruz?)

*

Simon’s assertion that she cares more about the people who walk through the door of her museum than the artists whose work is displayed there drew some shocked murmurs from the audience, and provides a useful frame for understanding the rest of the conference. Given the theme of participation, it was impossible for me to avoid thinking about how Beyond Dynamic Adaptability itself worked (and didn’t) to put the audience at the center of the experience, as Nina Simon does in her museum – and whether this was ultimately a good thing.

In her opening welcome address, conference organizer Rebecca Novick explained that the structure of the sessions would begin on the traditional side of things and gradually get more and more “participatory” as the day wore on. Performances with giant inflatable fish hanging from the ceiling notwithstanding, the morning’s sessions were pretty traditional, with speakers on a stage, audience members in a darkened theater, and barely any time for questions. In fact, the first audience question of the day was not asked until over three hours into my conference experience. And yet this portion of the day was the most memorable and enlightening for me, with solid presentations from not only the panel described above but also Alan Brown and Rebecca Ratzkin on the nature of audience engagement; and Jessica Lustig on the history and successes of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.

By contrast, during the afternoon’s highly participatory “fishbowl” session, I found it difficult to keep from checking out, even though the session’s facilitator was the same person – Nina Simon – who had so energized me in the morning! Two crucial things were different about this session compared to the panel described above. First, instead of a darkened theater, the fishbowl took place at the center of a hotel ballroom, which rendered participants awkwardly difficult to see and hear (since someone’s back was invariably towards you). Second, as facilitator of the conversation, Simon naturally took a back seat to her fellow presenters, who struggled at times to grapple with the broad discussion question of “How can we invite audiences to become active collaborators?” in a coherent and concise manner. As advertised, an extra chair was placed the midst of the center circle for an audience member to join the discussion, but it remained empty – instead audience questions were taken from where people were sitting in the room. I am curious how the session might have gone differently if the “open talk show” format had been followed.

Regardless, the day’s events left me with more questions than answers about effective formats for artistry and participation, and the overlap (and balance) between the two. For me, the morning panel was successful largely because of Nina Simon’s unique talent as a performer of her own ideas, which was deployed in a context designed to take maximal advantage of that talent. Similarly, many of the most successful sessions I experienced at Grantmakers in the Arts were effectively one-person shows: great speakers taking on interesting, on-topic subject matter. That’s not very participatory, but it worked. At the same time, as an audience member there is rarely anything so frustrating as to be sitting in a mediocre session with something to say, but without an opportunity to say it. I am left thinking that perhaps participatory formats end up being a sort of insurance strategy: they ensure that the experience won’t be a disaster, but they make it hard for genius to shine through. Does that mean, strangely enough, that incorporating audience participation into your programming is actually less risky than the traditional way of doing things?

First up, an entertaining profile in Slate of George Wein, founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, shows a man still vigorously scouting out new talent and getting in the thick of it:

He goes to New York’s jazz clubs three times a week, keeping tabs on rising musicians, and still performs himself. “I’m not necessarily more modern, but I get into modal playing sometimes, and swing a little differently.” A recent line-up included the 79-year-old drummer Jimmy Cobb and 22-year-old Esperanza Spalding on bass. “I was 82,” he said. “We went in and swung for two shows a night for six nights. We broke up the place. Never stopped, and so that’s where I am with jazz.”

Comparing past and present, Wein identified a peculiar paradox of jazz today. “There are 1,000 nights of jazz every month in New York, but the days when you could fill Carnegie Hall are gone. Jazz is bigger than ever, but there are no big names.”

The audience has changed too. “When I had my club, people drank and they smoked, you could hear the tinkling of glasses. Now you go to a jazz club, it’s like a church service”, he said. “If you say something, people turn round and say ‘sssshhhh’. I get very mad, I’m going there to have a drink and listen to some music.”

Next, Technology in the Arts is out with a white paper on online engagement for jazz and classical music audiences. Written by Carnegie Mellon arts management graduate student Tara George, the document includes profiles of Search and Restore, Revive Music Group, eyeJazz.tv, and the Ninety Miles Project among others.

Finally, the Jazz Arts Group of Columbus, which was mentioned in Jennifer’s article, is spearheading a local Jazz Audiences Initiative funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and involving some big-name partners like WolfBrown’s Rebecca Ratzkin, Jazz at Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, and  the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. The purpose of the initiative is to explore segmentation of jazz audiences and jazz not-yet-audiences, assess the language audience members use to talk about jazz, and convene a community of practice around jazz audience engagement. Now, Jazz Arts Group is setting up a call for research papers to be presented at next January’s Jazz Education Network conference.

The third annual Jazz Education Network Conference, January 4-7, Louisville, KY is calling for submission of research papers related to its theme “Developing Tomorrow’s Jazz Audiences Today.” The research track solicits the submission of original, principled research papers dealing with topics related to audience development for jazz in particular, but also for the arts in general.  The research track will run parallel with presentations by the Jazz Arts Group of Columbus on the Jazz Audiences Initiative. Such presentations will include various track offerings, i.e. Marketing and Messaging; Venues; and Presenting and Producing. During the past 18 months, the Jazz Audiences Initiative has studied fundamental questions related to how and why people engage with jazz. Jazz artists, producers, presenters, and educators nationwide will learn new ideas for building audiences, and infusing the art form with new energy. The research serves as a framework for testing new strategies for overcoming barriers to jazz participation and for building jazz audiences through more targeted marketing and programming efforts.

Deadline is August 15. More info available at the link. Note that you must be a member of Jazz Education Network to submit a paper.