The biggest news on federal support for the arts is a lack of news. Following the 16-day shutdown in early October, the federal government was reauthorized at last year’s budget levels (post-sequester) until January 15. Which means we get to do this all over again in just a month and a half! Woohoo!

Congress has had its share of squabbles over NEA funding in recent years, but it remains remarkably steadfast in its support for the National Gallery of Art. It increased the Gallery’s federal appropriation by a whopping 70 percent between 2001 and 2011– not exactly a kind decade for arts funding. The secret to the National Gallery’s success? The original act of Congress that required the federal government to “provide such funds as may be necessary for [its] upkeep . . . administrative expenses and costs of operation.”

Meanwhile, in a decision some are hailing as a “huge victory for online innovation,” a federal judge ruled that Google’s scanning of more than 20 million books counts as “fair use” under copyright law – meaning, among other things, that the company need not compensate writers or publishers for making very short excerpts available on the Web. The Authors Guild plans to appeal.

Finally, the U.S. has lost its voting rights at UNESCO, two years after ceasing payment of dues, then 22% of the organization’s budget. National Security Adviser Susan Rice called the outcome shameful, urging Congress to amend the law that bans support of organizations that recognize Palestine as a nation-state. The withdrawal of voting rights is also automatic under UNESCO rules, but it may still endanger the U.S.’s applications for World Heritage status for sites like Poverty Point in Louisiana and Spanish missions in San Antonio.

STATE AND LOCAL

According to Jay Dick of Americans for the Arts, the results of the off-year election contests in Virginia, Boston, St. Paul, and Dayton, OH, among other places bode well for the arts, with several new pro-arts officials taking power. In New York City, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio acknowledged the importance of the arts to the city by including several arts leaders in his newly-appointed transition committee. In other Big Apple news, the City Council held a public hearing on a proposed bill that would require the Department of Cultural Affairs to develop a cultural plan by 2015. Advocates believe this could coordinate cultural resources across agencies, increase available resources, and help keep artists in the increasingly-expensive city.

In other local election news, after fifteen years of attempting to find private funding for a performing arts center, the Myrtle Beach arts community won a victory at the polls this month when 54% of residents supported higher property taxes to raise the necessary $10 million. The City Council must still decide to undertake the project, but now “the rubber has met the road.”

The Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, despite having its budget slashed to the bone in the most recent budget session, has been approved for $560,800 in federal matching funds from the NEA after losing out on that match for two years. The restored federal match unlocked further funding from Kansas’s regional arts agency, the Mid-America Arts Alliance. It’s unclear how the most recent budget shenanigans will affect the situation with the NEA. To raise additional funds, the Commission is trying an arts license plate scheme to replicate the success of a similar initiative pioneered in California. Speaking of California, that state’s Arts Council managed to get a donation check box back on income tax forms for 2013, although the name has been changed from the “Arts Council Fund” to “Keep Arts in Schools Fund.”

INTERNATIONAL

Our friendly neighbor to the north has made it a lot harder for American musicians to perform in small venues. The Canadian government recently established a new fee and permit system for musicians and performing artists visiting from outside of country. Interestingly the fees apply only to artists seeking to perform in bars or restaurants – and both the artists and the hosting establishment have to pony up the funds.

Across the Atlantic, Scotland deserves major props for a) unveiling its first national Youth Arts Strategy (with £5m of funding to boot);  b) releasing aforementioned strategy as a graphic novel; and c) offering open feedback sessions to arts professionals and interested public as a precursor to the April 2014 release of Creative Scotland’s 10-year strategic plan and funding program. The new initiatives coincide with a significant staff restructuring at the agency. Meanwhile, the UK as a whole has just relieved producers of the burden of health-care contributions for entertainers they employ, though it is not yet clear whether this will lead to higher salaries for artists, larger production budgets, or simply smaller losses for backers. Shocker alert: producers and Equity feel differently on the matter.

Speaking of British arts agency planning documents, Chris Unitt went through the just-released second edition of Arts Council England’s strategic framework to see where digital technology fits in. There’s a heavy emphasis on using digital tools to reach new (i.e. international) audiences; less about using them to create new work or collaborate with other artists.

Australians have elected a new government to be led by Coalition, the country’s mainstream conservative party. George Brandis, arts spokesman for Coalition, has announced the party’s arts platform, which condemns an alleged tendency to reward “inwardness, mediocrity and political correctness” and emphasizes excellence, integrity, and artistic freedom. (Under the recent Labor government, arts industries in Australia had been receiving bipartisan support with a broad, positive impact on cultural production.) Brandis claims that the country should return to funding excellence in the arts, criticizing the Labor party for using arts to advance a social agenda.

Not to end on a down note, but freedom of expression difficulties continue in the Middle East. Qatari poet Mohammed Al-Ajami’s 15-year prison sentence for reciting on YouTube a poem celebrating the Arab Spring was upheld by the country’s Supreme Court, although his family can make a final appeal to Qatar’s Emir. Despite pressure from the international community, Al-Ajami is being held in solitary confinement as a potential insurgent. And in Egypt, comedian and talk show host Bassem Youssef, considered the country’s closest analogue to Jon Stewart, had his show suspended after just one episode amid alleged pressure from the country’s new military government.

More than nine months after former chair Rocco Landesman announced he was stepping down, the search for a new National Endowment for the Arts chairperson has stalled – just in time for the fall budget debates to ramp up in earnest. Sphinx Organization founder and president Aaron Dworkin confirms in the article that he was one of the candidates considered for the position earlier this year. Former NEA Senior Research Officer Joanna Woronkowicz tells us not to worry about the delay. Meanwhile, remember that kerfuffle last year about how Kickstarter was on track to provide more funding for the arts than the NEA? Well, not that this is a surprise, but by now it’s actually happened.

The United States cut off its support of Unesco in 2011 after the international cultural agency recognized the Palestinian Authority as a member nation. The measure was required by U.S. law, but was never supported by the Obama administration, which is now trying its darndest to be supportive of Unesco anyway.

STATE AND LOCAL

At long last, we have had a good year for state arts agency funding. With the economy rebounding and the pall of uncertainty lifting over state budgets, a number of arts councils have managed to claw back a measure of compensation for the dramatic cuts endured over the last four years, though there is still a long way to go. State arts budgets in the aggregate are up nearly 11% or $30 million, the largest nominal dollar increase in over 13 years. Notable success stories from this fiscal cycle include:

• Texas, whose Commission on the Arts got nearly double its appropriation from last year;
• Delaware, which received $1.6 million for a new Arts Trust Fund to provide general operating support for large institutions;
• Arizona, which eked out $1 million in general fund appropriations for its Commission on the Arts for the first time in three years;
• Florida, continuing its climb back to relevance with $5.7 million in new funding, mostly from line items;
• Michigan, also continuing a remarkable climb back from near-death with the second year in a row of multi-million-dollar increases;
• and South Carolina, whose arts commission defeated a gubernatorial veto for the fourth time in four years and on top of that got a hefty 52.4% increase.

California arts advocates did not succeed in dramatically changing the landscape for the California Arts Council, but at the last moment Assembly Speaker John Perez ensured a nearly $2 million increase to the agency’s coffers, bringing California out of the cellar as the cheapest state supporter of the arts on a per-capita basis. Other states with notable increases included Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Utah, and Vermont.

Not all the news was good for state arts advocates, though. The Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, only a year after coming back from being the first state art agency to be vetoed out of existence, has now been slashed almost entirely to the bone again with a paltry appropriation of $200,000, the lowest in the country. Arts councils in Tennessee, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Connecticut, West Virginia, and Wyoming also endured double-digit cuts.

In other state news, a tale of two tax policies: Rhode Island is eliminating taxes on the sale and purchase of artwork, while North Carolina is introducing a new 4.75% “privilege tax” for “admission charges to any live performance or event, any movie screening, any museum, cultural site, garden, exhibit, art show or guided tour.” The North Carolina tax applies to both nonprofit and commercial groups but carves out a number of confusing exemptions for certain festivals, state-supported museums, etc.; basically it sounds like terrible legislation. With that kind of environment, it will be interesting to see if the state extends its sunsetting film tax credit beyond 2014.

INTERNATIONAL

My goodness, the blows just keep coming for arts funding in England. The cuts to Arts Council England over the past few years were bad enough, but it turns out that local funding for the arts will fall another £124 million next year, even though local government budgets in general are up!  Better to be an artist in Britain than Portugal, however, which eliminated its ministry of culture two years ago and shows what happens when you pull the rug of government funding out from under a society that has no tradition of private philanthropy.

The giganta-budget West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong is running into trouble, with construction costs (surprise!) almost double the amount originally planned. The authority has decided to postpone seeking an additional $3.2 billion (I told you it was giganta-budget) payment from Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, presumably until things are in better shape.

Three profiles of new/new-ish culture heads: in Canada, Shelly Glover is settling into her new role as Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages; in France, embattled French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti presides over $3.2b in government spending on culture, which is down 2.8% from last year. France also has gone ahead and ended the “three strikes” provision of its copyright enforcement policy. Finally, Ines Abdul-Dayem is the new culture minister for Egypt. She has quite a story: earlier this year, she was dismissed from her post as head of the Cairo Opera House along with many other cultural officials by Alaa Abdel-Aziz, the man she is now replacing. In June, though, “artists stormed the Ministry of Culture and began an open-ended sit-in to demand the removal of the [now former] minister and the revocation of his decisions.” Shortly thereafter, following the ouster of president Mohamed Morsi, Abdel-Aziz resigned his position.