The Dance to the Free the Arts – photo from Melbourne Web Fest

Cuts to arts council budgets are commonplace, but the news that the Australia Council will see $104.8 million slashed from its budget over the next four years isn’t your usual tale of shifting budget priorities amid tough economic times. What makes this story alarming (instead of just sad) is that the money didn’t disappear from the arts; rather, Arts Minister George Brandis moved it–to a newly established policy, the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, managed by his own ministry. The Australia Council, founded in 1973, is governed by the principle of arm’s length funding, which allows the council to decide how to allocate the funds it receives from the government. Minister Brandis has long appeared hostile to this principle, having attempted in the past to assert personal control over the Council’s funding decisions. Accordingly, many in the arts community worry the new policy will allow the Minister to pursue his own arts agenda without the checks afforded by peer review, with implications for artistic independence in Australia. The National Programme will focus on funding tours, festivals, endowments and on attracting private sector cultural support, potentially at the expense of smaller, more experimental organizations. Artists across the country have rallied against the budget cuts, signing petitions and staging protests.

Christie’s, Picasso and the Billion Dollar Week: The art world oft goes the way of celebrity, though in May it reached new levels of wealth and grandeur. On Monday, May 11th, Christie’s 35-lot “Looking Forward to the Past” auction raised a jaw-dropping $705.9 million. Among the sales were two works estimated at more than $120 million, including Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” which sold for $179.4 million including fees–the highest price on record for a work of art sold at auction. Two days later, the auction house raised an additional $658.5 million worth of pieces at a postwar and contemporary auction, giving Christie’s the first-ever billion dollar week. (Not to be outdone, Sotheby’s raised close to $750 million in the first two weeks of May, at auctions of American-oriented contemporary pieces and Impressionist and Modern art.) Forget the 1%: the stratosphere of wealth on display at Christie’s in May was that of the 0.1%. Since 1997–the last time that Picasso was on the market–the pool of mega-wealthy art buyers has quintupled: a glaring  example of the increasing wealth inequality globally.

Broadband for All: Fresh off his success in classifying broadband internet as a public utility this February, Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler circulated a new proposal to revamp Lifeline, a $1.7 billion subsidy program whose goal is to ensure all Americans have affordable access to telecommunications. Lifeline was created in 1985 under the Reagan administration and at present subsidizes landline and mobile telephone service for some 12 million low-income households. Wheeler’s proposal would allow participants to apply their subsidy to broadband internet as well. Although at $9.25/month the subsidy isn’t enough to cover most plans, as educational, health, employment and other social resources move online, broadband access has become increasingly important and advocates for bridging the digital-divide argue that every little bit helps. Critics of Lifeline and the proposed changes argue the subsidy is wasteful, and plagued by fraud and abuses. A vote has been set for June 18.

Revolt at Actors Equity Association: In April, despite strong opposition from its Los Angeles membership, the Actors Equity Association ordered small theaters in LA County (that’s theaters with fewer than 100 seats) to pay its actors a $9 hourly minimum wage in the somewhat infamous 99 Seat Plan battle. This month, that same membership voted to oust incumbent president Nick Wyman–who presided over the 99 Seat controversy–electing Kate Shindle to the presidency. The win is an upset for an organization where union leaders seeking re-election are almost always reelected. The election outcome is almost definitely the result of the ongoing revolt by the LA contingent, and may just be the first of many steps towards a re-imagined AEA.

Retracted Study Shows How Easy It Is to Fake Data and Get Away With It: In December 2014, Michael LaCour, a political science grad student at UCLA, and Donald Green, a professor at Columbia, published a paper in the journal Science showing that one short but focused conversation with a canvasser could change a person’s opinion with lasting, and contagious effects (in this case, softening or changing one’s opinion of same-sex marriage). The paper’s rigor, scale, and results earned it devoted admirers and mainstream coverage in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, This American Life – even a tweet on Createquity – and launched LaCour’s career all the way to a plum tenure-track job at Princeton. The fairy-tale triumph unraveled quickly this month, however, after fellow graduate students David Broockman and Joshua Kalla reported a number of irregularities in the study, prompting co-author Green to request a retraction. These irregularities included fabricated data, fabricated funding, and a fabricated survey contract–fraud on a scale one would never expect to find in a journal such as Science. The story raises important questions about how many other celebrated studies have never-caught “irregularities” lurking within them, particularly since publicly challenging a peer’s academic work, especially as a jobless graduate student, carries far more career risks than it should.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Kristina Newman-Scott has been appointed Connecticut State’s director of culture.
• Jessica Mele will join the Hewlett Foundation as program officer in the Performing Arts Program in August.
• The Henry Luce Foundation appointed Teresa A. Carbone as program director for American Art, succeeding Ellen Holtzman who held the post for twenty-three years.
• After more than a decade as CEO of the LA Stage Alliance, Terence McFarland will move on to become the associate executive director at Valley Performing Arts Center at California State University in Northridge.
• The Whiting Foundation seeks a Program Assistant. Posted May 3; no closing date.
• The Cultural Data Project seeks a Research Associate. Posted May 7; no closing date.
• The Foundation Center seeks a part time, Special Projects Associate for Glasspockets. Posted May 13; no closing date.
• Exponent Partners seeks a Foundation Practice Manager. Posted May 21; no closing date.
• Ford Foundation is hiring a Director, Creativity and Free Expression. Posted May 26; no closing date.
• The Arts, Culture and Social Justice Network is hiring a part-time Facilitator. Deadline: June 11.
• The League of American Orchestras seeks a Research and Data Manager. No closing date.

 NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• National Endowment for the Arts released “Beyond the Building: Performing Arts and Transforming Place,” a report featuring the outcomes of a 2014 convening of the same name which looked at the performing arts and their role in creative placemaking.
• Several reports this month pointed a spotlight on museums. “New Practices in Digital and Technology” from the Association of Art Museum Directors looks at recent innovative projects at more than forty museums nationally; a second report from Contemporanea looks at the Latino experience in museums.
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund released its annual analysis of the State of the Sector, including a special supplement on arts and cultural nonprofits.
• Foundation Center and Grantmakers in the Arts released an update to their 2005 collaboration, Foundation Funding for Arts Education.
• A report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy reveals that the hype outpaces reality when it comes to private foundations’ investment in impact investing.
• A study by TRG Arts and the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance looking at audience engagement with different arts organizations across Philadelphia finds that loyalty sustains arts communities.
• A study from Richard Florida’s Martin Prosperity Institute finds major differences between “creative” neighborhoods and “science” neighborhoods, calling into question the conflation of these two communities.
• A report from the NAMM Foundation finds that a majority of teachers and parents believes music and arts education is important for children.
• A first-person report published in the journal The Arts in Psychotherapy offers insights into using art therapy to work with radical fighters in Saudi Arabia, including jihadists.
• A recent report from Committee to Protect Journalists focuses, for the first time, specifically on the myriad of threats that cartoonists face worldwide.
• A recent YouGov survey of US citizens has some mildly depressing results concerning the American public’s attitudes towards the visual arts, with “expensive” the most common word respondents associated with them. Also of note – the museum field’s official policy towards deaccessioning is vastly out of step with public attitudes.
• And finally, from outside the arts with implication for within, in August Rebecca Ratner will publish a study in Journal of Consumer Research which makes a case for doing (fun) things solo.

Marche Républicaine in Paris on January 11, 2015 – photo by flickr user Maya-Anaïs Yataghène

On the morning of January 7, two masked gunmen – now known to be brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi – attacked the offices of the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve, including the paper’s editor, Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier. In the wake of the attack, which was apparently a retaliation for the magazine’s repeated depictions of the prophet Muhammad, the surviving editorial staff decided to publish a subsequent issue, with a cover featuring a weeping Muhammad framed by “I am Charlie” and “all is forgiven.” The issue sold millions of copies, a far cry from the weekly’s usual 60,000-piece circulation, and further incensed the Muslim world — with protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, and Niger. Other cities rallied instead in support of free speech; a solidarity march held on the Sunday after the attack drew almost four million citizens and some forty world leaders. (The U.S. presence was notably lacking.)

This is by no means the first time that art in general and satire in particular have become targets for Islamic fundamentalists. (Createquity has covered several such incidents in the past, notably in September and November of 2012.) Still, the scope of the attack prompted an avalanche of news coverage and reactions exploring all sides of the issue, including the growing backlash across Europe against Muslim immigrants, Islamist terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, and importantly for this forum, freedom of expression. Artists around the world responded most immediately, many drawing up their own cartoons in support of the magazine specifically, and of the role cartoonists play in moments of conflict. Jordan Weissman cautioned against an either-or-approach, suggesting in Slate that Charlie Hebdo’s work is both “heroic and racist.” Oliver Tonneau, a radical French leftist, made a case for freedom of speech by noting that the considerable body of work put forth by the magazine was squarely within the French satirical tradition and, crucially, intended for an audience with the cultural context to see it as so. Others, like Marguerite Debaie, Maz Jobrani, and Karl Sharro, amplified the conversation by shining a light on the tradition of cartooning and satire in the Middle East and in Islam. Back in Paris, new editor-in-chief Gérard Biard has made it clear that Charlie Hebdo will continue on, albeit with a delay of the magazine’s 1,179th issue.

Net Neutrality’s Chances Suddenly Looking a Lot Better: The net neutrality battle, which landed at No. 3 on our Top Ten Arts Policy Stories of 2014, is kicking into high gear, and for the first time in quite a while things are looking pretty good for those in the “pro” camp. On January 7, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Tom Wheeler hinted in an interview that new net neutrality rules would in fact be crafted under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, a move President Obama himself called for in November (and which he reiterated in his State of the Union address.) Net neutrality supporters welcomed the announcement – a reversal of Wheeler’s previous stance – as such a classification would provide the greatest degree of protection for content producers within the strongest legal framework. Piggybacking on Wheeler’s announcement, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Representative Doris Matsui (D-CA) reintroduced the Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act, which would unambiguously authorize the FCC to issue net neutrality rules under whatever framework it deemed appropriate. (In response, Representative Fred Upton (R-Mich) along with Senator John Thune (R-S.D), the head of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, released their own draft legislation contesting the FCC’s legal authority to enforce online competition.) The biggest win for the pro camp in January, however, came from an unexpected ally:  mobile telecommunications provider Sprint circulated a letter to the FCC in which the company argued that “light-touch” regulation under a Title II framework would not harm investment or deployment, and that the open Internet has benefited consumers and businesses alike. On January 29, the FCC voted to change the definition of “broadband internet” in the hopes of expanding access in the rural United States. This vote is but a prelude to the final one, which is set for February 26 (though a draft of the proposed rules should be available as beginning February 5.)

Uncle Sam Busts the Overhead Myth: The nonprofit starvation cycle got some much-needed disruption in January in the form of new Office of Management and Budget rules on overhead spending in federal grants. The new rules include many benefits for nonprofits, such as broadening “direct cost” allocations and increasing the single audit threshold. The most welcome, however, is the rule regarding reimbursements for “indirect costs.” The guidance states that “when governments hire nonprofits to provide services, those nonprofits legitimately need to incur and be paid for their ‘indirect costs’,” i.e. their overhead and administrative expenses. In concrete terms, this means that nonprofits are now able to apply at least 10% of a grant or contract to pay indirect costs; the percentage increases for those organizations following new cost allocation rules. The federal adoption of these rules is only the beginning. The real work lies in communicating and consistently applying its tenets to the tens of thousands of organizations that stand to benefit. This will require a bit of advocacy work on behalf of the field which is sure to pay off.

Film and Theater Industries Continue to Struggle with Diversity: Hollywood’s diversity problem reared its (ugly) head again this month when the coveted Oscar nominations were announced: the twenty contenders for lead and supporting actor and actress were all white, the director category was dominated by white men, and not a single woman was nominated in either of the screenwriting categories. Worse yet, a recent study from the Directors Guild of America revealed that in the past five years, from the 2009-10 season through the 2013-14 season, 87% of first-time TV directors were white, and 82% of them were male. However bleak it may look on screen, in other corners of the arts world people are starting to take action. In December, Arts Council England announced an aggressive plan to engender diversity among its grantees – so aggressive that those who fail to meet the agency’s (as yet unspecified) standards risk losing their funding. This month, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs announced an initiative to measure the diversity of the city’s cultural organizations on the staff and leadership side. While there’s no penalty (yet) for those who come up short in this case, the initiative is seen as the first step in developing a plan to address diversity more broadly. Back in LA, a coalition of Southern Californian theater companies, led by Tim Dang of the East West Players, has proposed an initiative that calls for at least 51% of those employed by SoCal theater companies by 2019 to be people of color, women or those younger than 35. Though the initiative has encountered some concern that it runs afoul of anti-discrimination laws, supporters argue that finally doing something about diversity necessitates starting somewhere.

FAA to Enforce Instrument Carry-On Legislation: In a big win for touring musicians, a full three years after congress formally ordered airlines to allow passengers to carry on their instruments without charging them additional fees, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has finally taken action to implement these rules consistently across all airlines. There are caveats, of course: the instrument has to fit in the overhead bin (looks like tubas and upright basses are out of luck), and there has to be room in said bins for said instruments at the time one boards (no longer a given in the era of charging-for-checked-luggage.) Still, the rules are welcome news. They go into effect on March 6 – plenty of time to figure out your personal boarding-with-an-instrument game plan.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• ArtPride New Jersey has named Adam Perle as its new president & CEO. Ann Marie Miller, who has served ArtPride as executive director since 1995, will assume the new position of director of advocacy and public policy.
• Christa Blatchford is the new CEO of The Joan Mitchell Foundation.
• Sofia Klatzker will assume the role of executive director of Arts for LA in March.
• Detroit Institute of Arts director Graham Beal has announced he will formally retire when his contract ends in June, following an eventful sixteen-year tenure that culminated in securing the institution’s art collection from the bankrupt City of Detroit.
• After twelve years with the Ford Foundation, Roberta Uno is moving on to become the director of Arts in a Changing America, a new national project based at the California Institute of the Arts.
• Creative Scotland, the national body that supports the development of arts, screen and creative industries across Scotland, has appointed Richard Findlay as its new chair.
• China’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress, has appointed Luo Shugang its new minister of culture.
• Julie Fry, program officer with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program since 2007, will join Cal Humanities, California’s statewide humanities council, as president and CEO. Fry’s old position has been posted as of January 6 with no closing date.
• TurnaroundArts California seeks a Program Coordinator. Posted January 6, no closing date.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy is hiring a Research Analyst for its San Francisco office. Posted January 21; no closing date.
• National Endowment for the Arts is hiring for two positions: Theater and Music Director and Media Arts Director. Both are for two year terms with the possibility to extend. Posted January 29; deadline March 7.
• And across the pond, Creative Scotland seeks a Director of Creative Industries. Deadline February 8.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The National Endowment for the Arts released three new studies last month looking at arts engagement and its economic impact in the United States. One study looks specifically at motivations for and barriers to arts attendance  (and is the focus of Createquity’s recent Research Spotlight); a second study looks at public participation over twenty years (which reveals that three quarters of Americans use electronic media to view or listen to art); and the third looks at the cultural sector’s contribution to the nation’s GDP. The reports touched off a flurry of responses, some which called out the NEA for suggesting insufficient next steps.
• Two reports from Wallace Foundation, “Road to Results,” and “Thriving Arts Organizations, Thriving Arts,” released this month look at effective strategies for developing arts audiences and plans for the foundation’s next phase of research and funding in this area.
• A recent survey of arts attendance in Hong Kong shows only modest growth, though interestingly, Xiqu, Chinese opera, shows the most dramatic increase.
• The Community Development Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published a review of research and best practices in providing capital to low- and moderate-income communities through creative placemaking approaches.
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation released an evaluation of its own work in 63 communities nationwide, and suggests that the best strategy for improving low-income communities is long-term investment across multiple needs, such as affordable housing, safety, education, employment, and other basic services.
• An article in Urban Studies has found a wide (and concerning) gap in the definition and application of the term “gentrification” between the New York Times, census data and major academic studies over the past three decades.
• The OMG Center for Collaborative Learning released a report outlining eight strategies for facilitating diversity, equity, & inclusion among foundations, their grantees and the communities in which they work.
• A new report from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation looks at arts business training programs across the United States.
• A report from the Wyncote Foundation tracks how 40 legacy cultural organizations in the United States are successfully embracing digital media in their work.
• A recently released Independent Library Report for England, commissioned by the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, includes a series of recommendations for how libraries can attract a younger, digitally-savvy crowd.
• Two recent reports look at the effects of the arts on children. Northwestern University released a study that suggests that the cognitive benefits of music are most significant when children actively engage with music, and a study from the children’s book publisher Scholastic shows that being read aloud to as young child correlates strongly with being an avid reader later in life.
• Culture at Kings, the Cultural Institute at King’s College in London, released a review of arts education policy in the UK over the past seventy years, and urges policy makers to look more closely at lessons learned over time.
• A survey by the industry group Stage Directors UK found the average salary for UK directors is £10,000, less than half average national wage.
• And finally, a rather bizarre study out of DePaul University finds evidence to suggest that surrealist art is more emotionally reassuring than non-surrealist art to individuals contemplating their own mortality.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• This is pretty much the most creative cultural tourism gambit ever.
• The Michigan House approved a plan to contribute $195 million in state money to the “grand bargain” to save the Detroit Institute of Arts from the city’s creditors; this money would join the $366 million pledged by foundations, $100 million pledged by the museum itself, and possible funding from union groups. Some creditors still reject the deal, although the judge overseeing the proceedings has refused their request to remove and appraise every painting in the collection.
• “National and local governments don’t take decisions about arts funding based on evidence, however convincing it is.” The Guardian argues that our only hope for better public funding is to create “the kind of solid public support that makes cuts politically dangerous or, even better, unthinkable” through closer ties to local communities.
• Score one victory for the arts lobby: after a vigorous campaign by organizations such as the League of American Orchestras, the Obama administration has carved out an exception for musical instruments in its new ivory regulations.
• Meanwhile, the FCC is accepting public comments on its latest proposed net neutrality rules, which would seem to allow internet providers to strike deals with content sites for faster service – deals akin to those that already exist with tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Given the Commission’s recent flip-flopping, there’s no telling where this will lead, and we may not know until after the next election. One thing we do know: the idea of America itself is at stake.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Handler will be the new executive director of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, sponsor of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Handler is currently the program director at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
• Moy Eng, former director of both the Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program and Palo Alto’s Community School of Music and Arts, has been announced as the first executive director of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a real estate services provider for artists and arts organizations.
• John Horn, of the Los Angeles Times, will be the new host for an arts an entertainment program on KPCC, Southern California Public Radio.

IN THE FIELD

• Just a year after losing its highly respected director Deborah Cullinan to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts has just announced a major restructuring that will result in the closure of several programs and the layoffs of key staff. And NPR is cancelling “Tell Me More,” a little-heard daily talk show aimed at minority audiences, and eliminating 28 jobs. The National Association of Black Journalists blames lackluster promotion efforts.
• The San Diego Opera lives! But along with a full 2015 season, the company has announced layoffs including 13 full-time staff. And now the auditor is calling.
• New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning to gut-renovate its modern and contemporary wing to make room for a major gift of Cubist paintings and potentially create a new entrance from Central Park. Is this another case of museum hubris?
• The plan to dissolve the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been finalized, with the collection going to the National Gallery of Art and other museums it chooses and the building and design school going to George Washington University.
• When you think of St. Louis, do you think of jazz? A $10 million expansion to Jazz St. Louis—to be called the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz—hopes to make the two synonymous, establishing St. Louis as one of the top hubs for jazz in the world.
• Lower Manhattan is home to a new performing arts school. Thanks to three years of significant growth, Pace University’s performing arts program will become a school within Pace’s liberal arts college.
• Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Jonathan Safran Foer on behalf of all of those without enough to read, Chipotle cups will now be adorned with short texts by literary luminaries. Not everyone is enthusiastic.
• Those Colorado Symphony mile-high marijuana concerts are now invitation-only, due to an overlooked regulation banning toking up in public. The Denver Post’s music critic went and got blasted – I mean, had a blast.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• AT&T announced that it intends to buy DirecTV. The “media chessboard is moving more than it has in the past decade,” with Comcast’s February purchase of Time Warner cable and Sprint’s overtures to T-Mobile…
• … and reports that Apple is planning a major new foray into streaming music with an acquisition of Beats Audio and of co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, though something is holding up the deal.
• Nearly four years after announcing a name change, a new mission, and a new grantmaking strategy focused on impact, Cincinnati’s ArtsWave (formerly the Fine Arts Fund) seems to be seeing results. The united arts fund raised a record $12 million for its annual campaign this year, helped catalyze last year’s creation of a new multidisciplinary arts festival drawing national attention, and is starting to form strategic partnerships with non-arts funders. Retiring CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson deserves a lot of credit for seeing this transformation through.
• The Hewlett Foundation’s Fay Twersky defends the decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative as data-driven in the face of William Schambra’s accusation that a leadership change was the primary driver. Let’s hope this public debate doesn’t dissuade grantmakers from following Hewlett’s lead on transparency.
• The Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund has announced a new capitalization program, including its largest-ever grant of $200,000 to the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. The Fund created the program in response to research showing that even many of the city’s strongest arts groups were constrained by having only three months of financial cushion.

BIG IDEAS

• Is it time for foundations to embrace partisan politics instead of trying to remain above the fray? Writers for the Stanford Social Innovation Review think so. “Partisan conflict is not an external factor that advocates can work around,” they write. “It is the defining axis of American politics today, and funders must be unafraid to reckon with it.”
• The expansion of the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge – a promise to give away at least half of one’s fortune – to include billionaires from around the world raises questions about different cultural attitudes toward philanthropy (in China, public or transparent giving is eschewed) and about the relative merits of the Big Philanthropy model vs the more distributed community foundation model of giving.
• Arts entrepreneurship aficionados, look out: Barry’s Blog has a stellar lineup, uh, lined up for a weeklong blogathon on the topic starting…today!

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Academy of Sciences has hard numbers that show students learn better through hands-on activities than through lectures – at least when it comes to the sciences.
• Philanthropy Northwest reports on a year-long peer-learning project on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts involving 10 foundation CEOs in the region.
• Corporate giving is up again, according to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s annual tally.
• South Arts has released two research reports on arts education in the South. The first, a survey of nearly a third of all principals in the region, found among other things that Southern students have less access to visual arts and music than other American students but greater access to dance – with significant variation among Southern states. The second, case studies of nine strong arts education programs, found that the successful schools cultivated a shared vision of the arts, incorporated the arts into the core curriculum driven by state and national standards, and exposed students to working artists.
• Bringing the ability to make snazzy charts and tables to the masses, evaluators Stephanie Evergreen and Ann K. Emery have developed a data visualization checklist for the graphically challenged among us.
• In case you ever wondered about the correlation between per capita consumption of cheese and the number of people who die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets, Tyler Vigen has you covered.

• And, we try again: as expected, the FCC is proposing new net neutrality rules. They are similar to the previous rules, which were recently invalidated by a federal court, but depend on a different legal rationale. Those who are concerned the rules (old and new) do not go far enough to protect content creators they have their chance to persuade the Commission – the public comment period has just opened.
• Even as the Detroit Institute of Arts contemplates privatization, the private Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC is planning to cede most of its collection of 17,000 artworks to the National Gallery of Art and other museums across the country. The move, following years of financial crisis, would also see the Corcoran’s building and College of Art and Design taken over by George Washington University.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Marin Community Foundation has named Larry Best to the business-card-bending position of Program Director for Arts & Culture, and Social Justice & Interfaith Understanding. His predecessor, Shirin Vakharia, has become Program Director for Community Health and Aging.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Boston-based Barr Foundation has joined the ArtPlace America coalition, bringing 2014 commitments to $28 million – just in time for Artplace’s announcement of this round’s finalists.
• Continuing the trend toward transparency in artist earnings, cellist Zoë Keating has shared a breakdown of all her income from music sales and streams in 2013. Of the $75,341 she made, 92% was from sales; a single track bought on iTunes was worth 160 Spotify streams, which was in turn worth seven YouTube streams.

IN THE FIELD

• Heads up to the country folk: a new rural arts blog salon and webinar series put on by Americans for the Arts shines light on how rural communities can and have used the arts for economic growth.
• The art world was abuzz recently with the news of an artist/vandal who destroyed a work by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei in the middle of a museum – mimicking Ai’s own actions in photographs posted in the gallery. Are Maximo Carminero’s actions a harbinger of participatory disaster? Nina Simon weighs in on how to bring clarity to the messy transition towards museums as “living” institutions.
• For those prone to screw up targeted marketing, NewMusicBox breaks down how not to become the Abercrombie and Fitch of music.

BIG IDEAS

• The Dallas Museum of Art’s unusual membership program, instituted in January 2013, provides free membership to individuals willing to let the museum track their activities as they enter and explore the galleries, offering points and rewards along the way. In addition to reducing barriers to joining, it has given museum leadership valuable insight into visitor behavior. The information is then used to attract new donors. So far, it seems to have worked out well for everyone involved; is this the future of memberships?
• In an interview, Deeksha Gaur, Director of PR and Marketing at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in DC, talks about the digital audience engagement innovations that have been called “a glimpse at the theater of the future.”
• Grant panels meet American Idol? Back in 2013, the Arizona Commission on the Arts shook up its grantmaking by identifying and supporting arts-based entrepreneurial ventures via an “Art Tank” competition in which applicants had six-minutes to “pitch” their proposals to experts and a live audience. Executive Director Bob Booker offers interesting reflections on the process. Meanwhile, Barry Hessenius considers what might happen if arts funders acted more like venture capitalists: more active involvement with grantees beyond funding, and greater weight on leadership in evaluating proposals.
• Writing the next great American novel? Consider finishing it on a train. Amtrak, in a move that’s left authors everywhere drooling, quietly launched a residency program that allows writers to travel its long-distance rail routes for free while working. While undoubtedly cool, the initiative has caused some to wonder whether the resident writers have an obligation, explicit or implied, to make sure Amtrak benefits from the arrangement.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Registration for “Creativity and Innovation in Public Education,” this year’s Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) Cultural Symposium, is full – but the event will be livestreamed on March 4. E-participation is free.
• Anupama Sekhar offers a personal account of her experience at January’s 6th World Summit on Arts & Culture in Santiago, Chile.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In the latest study about the streaming music service Spotify, Music Machine looks at musical preferences by state.

ETC.

• Seeking an opportunity to relax, kick back, “hear and think about what is heard”? Join the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (yes, it exists) at a three-day symposium in Portugal. If you’re already of the acoustically ecological persuasion, consider submitting a presentation or artwork on anything from noise control policies to “the study of soundscapes as social and political intervention.” Proposals are due March 15.

On Thursday, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jane Chu for the position of Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Chu, the president and CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, MO, brings big-institution arts industry experience and a middle-America background to the job. If confirmed, she will become the first Asian American permanent chair of the NEA, although Joan Shigekawa has served that role in an interim capacity for the past year and a half. Reaction from the field has been one of pleasant surprise, but she’s getting rave reviews from back home.

Meanwhile, two of Chu’s predecessors warn that her task will be all about money, money, money. Earlier, in yet another down-to-the-wire process, the United States Congress authorized a spending bill in January covering the rest of the current fiscal year, which ends September 30, 2014. The NEA and other federal cultural agencies were essentially level-funded compared to last year’s appropriations, which is effectively a (small) raise from the amounts each agency had to work with after the so-called sequester kicked in last year. However, the NEA’s budget is still down from its recent peak of $167.5 million from fiscal year 2010, and far below its inflation-adjusted peak from the Carter years.

The budget friction is affecting the arts in other ways, too: for example, the Department of Transportation has failed to meet a deadline to require airlines to accommodate musicians’ instruments on flights because it says Congress didn’t provide it with enough funding to hire the people necessary to write the guidelines. A group of Congressional representatives led by Jim Cooper (D-TN), for its part, is calling BS and asking the DOT to get its act together. Meanwhile, the European Union is moving toward a uniform policy for instruments brought on airplanes.

It’s been a rough 2014 so far for net neutrality. Last month’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals means that cable and telephone companies could privilege certain kinds of content, which could endanger the wealth of artistic innovation on the web. AT&T, for its part, says nothing is about to change – possibly because the decision leaves open other means of regulation that could be worse for internet service providers. In fact, Wired seems to think that the court order has given the FCC carte blanche to regulate the entire internet. Yet if you thought the invisible hand of the market would help secure net neutrality on its own, you might be concerned that America’s largest cable company is buying its second-largest. Time Warner Cable’s proposed merger with Comcast seems to bode ill for open Internet advocates, given that Comcast already has a monthly cap on bandwidth in place; if things continue down this road, a former FCC Commissioner warns of scenarios like cable companies bundling internet content the way that cable channels currently are, and censoring stories about their own terrible customer service. All eyes are on the FCC as it considers its next steps.

STATE AND LOCAL

While Los Angeles awaits the appointment of a head of its department of cultural affairs, new mayor Eric Garcetti met with arts leaders to drop hints on “a more cohesive arts policy” — which apparently does not include any increase in city funding. Meanwhile, alleging mismanagement, Fairfax County in Northern Virginia will pay $30 million to take control of the Lorton Arts Center and avoid foreclosure.

INTERNATIONAL

The UK’s Building a Creative Nation has been launched to create 50,000 creative sector jobs for young people ages 16 to 24 by 2016. Part of the initiative aims to combat unpaid internships in the arts industry by subsidizing 6,500 training positions. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg claims the program is “paving the way for a new wave of young British talent,” who will contribute “billions to the economy” in the fastest-growing employment sector of the British economy in 2011-2012. Nearly 1.7 billion Britons (5.6% of the workforce) are employed in the creative industries, more than half of them in squarely cultural areas like the performing and visual arts, film, photography, and publishing.

Not all is rosy in the UK, though: Parliament is investigating the fairness of grants made by Arts Council England, which a report found gives five times as much per capita to London organizations vs. others. Philanthropic dollars are similarly concentrated. (By way of comparison, 82% of private UK arts giving went to London; in the US, according to the Foundation Center’s database, 20% of major grants go to New York State.) That might be part of the reason that space for art in London is now at such a premium. Meanwhile, the Council will require new grantees to capture, report, and share information about audience size and composition and has called on the BBC to collaborate with arts organizations.

Elsewhere in the British Isles, Creative Scotland has announced a new 10-year strategic plan; Wales’s capital city is trying to transfer responsibility for two arts venues to the private sector; Newcastle hasn’t been able to raise any money for a matching fund campaign aimed at private donors; and Irish arts funding is down 7% after having been cut for the sixth consecutive year.

In Spain, four years of funding cuts to the cultural infrastructure by that country’s right-wing and debt-ridden government have increasingly spurred protest, and now the Spanish film community is starting to fight back, claiming political conspiracy. Even Pedro Admodóvar is speaking out against what he calls Spain’s “awful cultural policy.” Elsewhere in Europe, Iceland’s state broadcaster has cut almost half its music staff. But in a bit of good news, regulators in France have decided to reverse a decision that would have raised the import tax on artworks from 7% to 10%, instead reducing it to 5.5%.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has decided a potentially landmark copyright case in favor of an artist who had been sued for appropriating images from a book in his art. While this would seem to be a victory for fair use, the court’s opinion doesn’t provide much in the way of hard and fast guidance for future cases. Donn Zaretsky has been providing extensive coverage over at The Art Law Blog. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition Policy, and the Internet has been holding hearings on potential adjustments to current copyright law.

With Rocco Landesman and Julius Genachowski out of government, the Future of Music Coalition shares what they would like to see in an NEA Chair and an FCC Chair.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has proposed legislation that would bring tax incentives for Broadway productions in line with what film and television producers currently enjoy. The current tax code provides for essentially a tax shelter on the first $15 million of expenses provided that 75% of that goes to pay for services performed in the USA. Schumer’s bill, the STAGE Act of 2013, would extend that protection to live commercial theater productions. Of course, this is Congress we’re talking about here, so don’t hold your breath.

STATE AND LOCAL

Actually, all local news this month. The City of Chicago is investing $1 million to bolster arts education in its public schools, part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s commitment to implement the Chicago Cultural Plan completed in 2012. The money will go toward dedicated weekly instruction time, increasing professional development and training for teachers, increased community partnerships, and more funding assistance and supplies. Sadly, the Philadelphia public school system has a $304 million budget shortfall and is looking at potential cuts to music and art programs if the city and state don’t pony up some more cash.

The intrepid Guy Yedwab has been getting more involved with the League of Independent Theater in New York, which has been doing some admirable community organizing to put the arts on the platforms of local candidates. Guy has posted video from an event he helped organize with that specific purpose in mind, and notes from a mayoral forum that wasn’t arts-specific but had ramifications for the arts nevertheless.

INTERNATIONAL

A new law in the United Kingdom attempts to make it easier to license orphan works, but may open the door to online photo image plagiarism in the process. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, the UK’s inaugural City of Culture festival, held in Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, is in financial trouble a third of the way through the yearlong program because “income from sponsorship and ticket sales is much less than…expected.”

Small steps toward a better world: Israel and Palestine have agreed to let UNESCO implement a 2010 plan to safeguard Jerusalem’s Old City and its holy sites, part of a larger process that is hoped will have the effect of depoliticizing the international cultural agency. Cultural diplomacy fans, this is where it’s at right here.

Remember when we had those stories last year of ancient culture being destroyed by Islamic militants in Timbuktu? Well, if this story from a Tibetan exile publication is to be believed, a similar, if less violent, destruction may be taking place in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese government in order to create a “tourist city” replete with shopping malls. Elsewhere in the Pacific, the Australia Council for the Arts has a new director in Tony Grybowski, an insider who had been heading up the council’s Major Performing Arts Board. Grybowski will be charged with implementing Australia’s new national cultural policy, which despite being championed by ousted arts minister Simon Crean seems to be moving through the legislative process without difficulty so far.

After a long lull, we’re starting to see some action on the arts and related topics at the federal level. First, the House and Senate have passed a continuing resolution enshrining the “sequester” cuts in the rest of Fiscal Year 2013, meaning that the National Endowment for the Arts and other federal agencies are sustaining a 5% decline from their originally enacted budgets. For the NEA, this means that the new budget is approximately $139 million instead of $146 million, which puts it at the lowest level since George W. Bush was president. (At the first link above, Americans for the Arts has a short video touting the importance of getting involved in Arts Advocacy Day. It’s nicely put together, but as with other videos of this type I can’t help but feel the message might be more compelling if it were accompanied by some music that the NEA actually funded.)

Second, President Obama has released his FY14 budget request. While this still needs to get through Congress, it’s significant in that it sets a likely upper bound for the budgetary appropriations of various arts-related agencies. The LA Times’s Mike Boehm reports that Obama’s budget is relatively generous to those agencies compared to previous years, providing a 4.5% increase in the aggregate above the pre-sequestration levels. The budget allocates $154.5 million to the NEA, which is right about what Americans for the Arts was pushing for but is still well below peak levels. The Smithsonian and National Gallery of Art do relatively well under the President’s proposal, while the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Kennedy Center get lower priority. Despite the reasonably good news, Obama’s budget request also brings back a much-derided proposal to cap deductions at 28% of adjusted gross income – including the charitable deduction. (More on the charitable deduction later this week.) Watch AFTA President Bob Lynch discuss the budget proposal on PBS here.

In non-appropriations-related items, the Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 in favor of Supap Kurtsaeng, the Cornell math student who made bank by reselling Wiley textbooks purchased overseas at a cheaper price, thus preserving what’s known as the first-sale doctrine in copyright law (i.e., that you’re free to sell used items without first getting permission from the copyright owner). An ongoing legal battle between network television broadcasters and a startup called Aereo, which uses micro-sized antennas to rebroadcast over-the-air content to tablets and smartphones for a monthly fee, could have implications for internet TV more generally. Amidst all this, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski has announced his retirement from his influential position affecting issues like low-power radio and net neutrality; Future of Music Coalition issues a statement on his departure, and as a bonus offers a review of Maria Pallante’s appearance before the US House to testify about potential updates to the Copyright Act. Finally, many of the critical measures in the America Invents Act patent reform legislation went into effect earlier this month; Keith Sawyer offers some analysis.

STATE AND LOCAL

This isn’t quite “news” since it’s still highly speculative, but for the first time in several years, there is a serious bid afoot to restore the California Arts Council to its former glory. The CAC had its budget cut by 94% a decade ago in the face of financial pressures on the state budget, and has languished among the worst-funded state arts councils per capita ever since. AB 580, sponsored by lawmaker Adrin Nazarian, is a bid to raise the CAC’s state appropriation from $1 million to an eye-popping $75 million, which would easily take the prize for biggest state arts funding story of the year if successful. California’s budgetary situation is arguably no better than it was when the CAC was cut in the first place, but arts advocates are hoping that Governor Jerry Brown, under whose leadership the Arts Council was brought into being back in 1975, will be the difference between this effort and three previous ones that failed (the most recent in 2009). I enjoyed this excerpt from the article:

At the hearing Tuesday, John Gallogly, executive director of L.A.’s Theatre West and a board member of the statewide advocacy group Californians for the Arts, presented each committee member with a crayon that cost 3 cents — the amount per resident that he said state government now funnels to the Arts Council if the federal and license plate money are excluded.

“We’re trying to say ‘give us a small box of crayons,'” instead of just one, Gallogly said. “You can’t create a rainbow with just one color.”

In other state news, the newly reorganized Connecticut Office of the Arts is receiving some bad press from the Connecticut Mirror. A number of arts organizations are apparently unhappy with the new creative-placemaking-oriented system for awarding grants, which relies on a cumbersome application process and out-of-state panelists who evaluate the proposals asynchronously. And Washington State has hit venues where patrons “are given the opportunity to dance” with thousands of dollars in back taxes on the basis of an obscure law dating from the 1960s that hadn’t been enforced in decades.

With the economy now four years removed from the official end of the Great Recession, we’re starting to see some recovery in local government budgets and with it, some welcome increases in arts funding revenue streams – particularly in the West. In Nevada, Clark County (which contains Las Vegas) voted to create a Percent for Art program for the first time, which will “divert 5 percent of annual room tax collections and 5 percent of the county’s share of property taxes into the Arts Fund, not to exceed $1.25 million.” In Utah’s Salt Lake City, increased tax revenues have boosted city arts funding by 14% over last year. California’s San Bernadino County, part of the fast-growing Inland Empire region, lost its arts council in 2006, but as of this year it’s back, with a budget of almost $300,000. And in Atlanta, mayor Kasim Reed seems to be proposing a 25% increase in the budget for the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs, though no one seems sure exactly what he means by that.

Meanwhile, the LA Unified School District has declared the arts a core subject for its 660,000 students but is finding that the devil is in the details, and things have gotten so bad in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra labor dispute that the Mayor’s office has gotten directly involved in the negotiations – though to no avail as yet.

INTERNATIONAL

What a bizarre story from Australia: just 11 days after arts minister Simon Crean unveiled the country’s new cultural policy to great acclaim, he is out of a job following a failed coup attempt aimed at Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Crean’s departure leaves the new plans in significant doubt, despite the fanfare with which they were announced. Ben Eltham has more.

Elsewhere, the news is still mostly bad but at least it’s letting up a bit. Arts Council England is taking it on the chin with yet more cuts, this time of just over 1%. In Spain, where the arts community has been deeply affected by austerity measures, arts groups are coming up with some innovative ways of coping – for example, by handing patrons carrots instead of tickets to protest/get around a punishing 21% sales tax on the latter. And in Romania, a national museum has had to partially shut its doors due to a lack of funds.