• Americans for the Arts’s Narric Rome provides a vital update on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind), and what it all means for arts education, as it makes its way through the Congressional committee process.
• Proposed copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is mobilizing a lot of opposition from the “geek” community – and within the arts.
• A transportation bill making its way through Congress is potentially bad news for public art.
• This isn’t good: citing “budgetary constraints,” the NEA will no longer accept consortium grant proposals in FY13. It’s one organization, one grant from here on out.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The European Commission is betting big on culture, with a €1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) commitment to film, visual, and performing arts over six years under the name “Creative Europe.” ARTINFO is calling it “the world’s largest-ever cultural funding program,” although that seems doubtful once you take the six-year time horizon and inclusion of film into account. For example, in 2007 alone, Germany allocated more than 1.2 billion euros to culture. (via quiet.quiet.quiet.)
• Arts Council England is cracking down on unpaid internships among its grantees (they’re already illegal in the UK). Good for them.
• The Toronto Arts Council is facing a 10% cut.

PHILANTHROPY NOTES

• It’s giving season, and that means the advice is flying fast and furious. The Wall Street Journal is out with its annual special section on philanthropy, which features some stupid debates like “Should Charities Act Like Businesses?” (Umm, you mean like Lehman Bros.?) This year, as in the past, I plan to entrust my non-arts giving to GiveWell, which conducts the most comprehensive and intellectually honest research on giving opportunities I’m aware of anywhere, a veritable wonky wet dream. GiveWell just released its top recommendations for 2011, and they include two disease control charities, Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
• Philanthropy futurist Lucy Bernholz is out with her annual forecast for philanthropists and social investors, Blueprint 2012. Here’s Lucy on the importance of open data as the building block for the future.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is convening a multi-agency task force to fund and promote research on the arts and human development, and has already published a white paper on the subject. This level of engagement with other agencies of government, centering on Health & Human Services, is unprecedented for the NEA’s research department, and has the potential to turn into a big deal if they stay on it. Sunil Iyengar has more.
• Whaddya know? Two of the ten happiest jobs in the United States, according to the highly respected General Social Survey, are authors (#4) and artists (#7). In fact, every single one of the top 8 exist largely or entirely within the nonprofit and public sectors.
• Speaking of happiness, a new study from the co-creator of the “Mappiness” iPhone app, who happens to be a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics, attempts to determine the association between various kinds of (self-reported) activities and (self-reported) happiness for the app’s UK-based users. Clay Lord did some honest-to-goodness journalism and found out that four out of the six happiest activities are arts-related. (#1 on that list, of course, is “intimacy/making love.”) Linda Essig has more.
• WESTAF has published the proceedings of a symposium called “Engaging the Now” featuring the participation of leading arts research lights Ann Markusen, Julia Lowell, and Steven Tepper among others.
• Theatre Communications Group has published the latest version of Theatre Facts.
• Alex Tabarrok on the problems of regression-based studies regressing to the mean. (Translation: small sample size can be a problem even when your sample size isn’t that small.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Adrian Ellis is stepping down as executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center to return to his consulting firm, AEA Consulting.
• And the arts journalism attrition continues: the Denver Post has offered buyouts to a number of longtime staffers, including at least two arts critics.

IN THE FIELD

• Things that make you go hmm: Knoedler & Company, a 165-year-old New York art gallery that was one of the most prestigious in the country, abruptly ceased operations last Wednesday. The next day, a lawsuit was filed by a collector claiming that Knoedler & Company sold him a fake Jackson Pollack for $17 million. ARTINFO has more.
• Well, it was just a matter of time: Occupy Wall Street Occupied Lincoln Center, with composer Philip Glass joining in a protest outside a performance of his own opera, Satyagraha.
• Videos from the National Arts Marketing Project conference are now available on Livestream.
• The blog series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council on notable trends in the field continues with Gabi Jirasek’s entry on the Grand Rapids Lip Dub project and Ebony McKinney’s analysis of arts incubators.
• Some blog salons going on now: Grantmakers in the Arts is having a discussion of Holly Sidford’s recently published cultural equity manifesto “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” from December 6-16, and Americans for the Arts is hosting its first ever local arts agency salon December 5-9.
• Rachael Wilkinson writes up some of the crowdfunding options available to artists. It’s worth noting that Fractured Atlas has partnerships with both IndieGoGo and RocketHub that allow fiscally sponsored projects to receive tax-deductible contributions through those platforms. For for-profit crowdfunded concepts, a bill making its way through Congress would loosen the investor regulations that currently apply.

ETC.

• The Pittsburgh Steelers have a unusual way of selling season tickets: fans can buy a “personal seat license” that gives them theright to buy season tickets for that particular seat. These PSLs are like real estate – they are durable goods, so therefore they increase in value over time. And boy, are they a hot property – Freakonomics reports that on average, prices have increased over 700% in ten years. And you thought dynamic pricing in the arts was bad! (Actually, could this be applied to the arts?)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Steve Gunderson is stepping down as CEO of the Council on Foundations.
• Social justice groups are freaked out that the previously-reported departure of Gara LaMarche from Atlantic Philanthropies will mean less money for social justice.
• Will Miller is the new President of the Wallace Foundation.
• Luis Cancel is out as head of the San Francisco Arts Commission. There’s apparently some intrigue around this one, as Cancel was under pressure for his treatment of staff and for working too much from home – his second home, that is, in Rio de Janeiro. Vice President JD Beltran has been named interim director.
• Congratulations to Arts Council for Long Beach Executive Director Craig Watson, who has been announced as the new director of the California Arts Council. Culture Monster has more.
• The Joyce Foundation in Chicago has a new senior program officer for culture: Angelique Power. Power replaces Michelle T. Boone, who left earlier this year to become the new commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
• Dave Dombrosky is no longer the executive director of the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, proprietors of the Technology in the Arts blog.
• Finally, a special thanks to Grantmakers in the Arts, from whom I get most of my foundation personnel announcements. Tommer, Steve, Abigail, and Janet have seriously been doing a great job over there this year.

ART AND GOVERNMENT

• The NEA has announced the inaugural round of Our Town grants. Rocco’s signature program got an extra $1.5 million in the end despite midyear cuts to the agency, and a total of 51 awards were announced rather than the 35 originally anticipated.
• In a new partnership with the Knight Foundation, the NEA is funding a new arts journalism challenge grant program. On the NEA’s Art Works blog, Kerry Lengel offers a post-mortem on the recent pop-up journalism experiment Engine28.
• Unfortunately, the NEA’s funding is being chipped away at again by the committee in the House of Representatives that controls appropriations. They’re now looking at $135 million for FY2012, which would be the largest cut in 16 years. Not only that, Congresscritters are now trying to micromanage the NEA’s awards programs. There’s still time to act.
• Finally, some good news from the states on arts agency appropriations: Ohio is looking at a 30% increase, Pennsylvania avoided a drastic cut, and in New Jersey a Republican governor actually removed budget language that would have reduced appropriations by a further 27%. ARTSBlog has the skinny, and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies looks at the big picture.
• Wise words from Think Progress’s Alyssa Rosenberg, in response to those who might think fighting for public arts funding isn’t worth the trouble: “If you’re thinking strategically about the long-term argument between progressive and conservative worldviews, it’s conceding a lot of ground to walk away from programs where government investment is small as long as we think it might still be useful.” Alyssa has been doing the yeoman’s work of looking up the arts records of each of the 2012 Republican candidates or potential candidates for President. I wish there were more of interest to report, but basically they all suck for the one-issue arts voter (of which there are, like, dozens I’m sure). If Mike Huckabee were running, it’d be a different story. Anyway, here are Alyssa’s profiles of Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, Gary Johnson (who?), Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and good ol’ Newt Gingrich. (Speaking of Alyssa, she kindly picked up our Createquity Arts Policy Library block party and offered some commentary.)

ARTS POLICY ACROSS THE WORLD

• Arts Council England unveils a plan to increase private giving to the arts in the UK.
• Simon van den Berg gives a great first-person perspective on the why, how, and what it’s like of recent cuts to arts funding in the Netherlands.

GIVING NOTES

• Alec Baldwin takes to ARTSBlog to talk about a giving campaign from CapitalOne to support Americans for the Arts. I was impressed to read that CapitalOne is actually including an insert with the monthly statement (with him on it) to get the word out.
• Phil Buchanan notes that foundations can’t expect grantees to measure effectiveness without help.
• The fact that the Gates Foundation has a philanthropy program is news to me, but it’s welcome news. Gates’s Darin McKeever posts on Tactical Philanthropy about an 18-month planning process for the program as well as the directions in which it is heading (part I; part II).
• There’s a new Awesome Foundation chapter in Seattle, and this one features Grantmakers in the Arts Deputy Director Tommer Peterson. Read all about it here; the blog is worth reading for other reasons as well.

ETC.

• Wondering what a millennial generation’s approach to dealing with our budget deficit would look like, since they’re the ones who will be most affected by it? The Roosevelt Institute and Peter G. Peterson Foundation did too, and convened a gaggle of 18- to 26-year-olds to come up with a plan (which has been scored by the Congressional Budget Office). Freakonomics has the details here; from the highlights, it sounds center-left and quite sensible.
• Chad Bauman points out differences in how nonprofit and commercial arts organizations approach dynamic pricing.
• Over at Technology in the Arts, Createquity Fellowship alum Crystal Wallis walks us through some examples of participatory performing arts.
• Alex Ross finally weighs in on the NYC Opera meshugas, which seems to be getting uglier by the day. My take: I don’t know that NYCO has much choice but to move from Lincoln Center or drastically change its union contracts, given the disastrous financial situation that George Steel inherited from Gerard Mortier and Susan Baker. I have a great deal of respect for Steel, but he does seem to be losing the PR war, which is an important leadership task. I suspect it would help matters greatly if there were a clearer, longer-term artistic vision expressed than what has been shared to date – and if Steel offered to take a (temporary) pay cut.
• Want.