China – photo by flickr user Diego Aviles

China has a long history of censoring free speech and media content in an effort to control the information its citizens consume. In 2016, Reporters Without Borders ranked it 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, and that position is likely to keep sliding as China continues to fortify its virtual borders. (By comparison, Russia ranks at 148 on that same index.) This month, China went after Apple, which had long received somewhat preferential treatment in the country, shutting down its iBooks Store and iTunes Movies just six months after those services launched. That same day, it abruptly suspended a partnership between e-commerce giant Alibaba and Disney, struck in December 2015, which allowed Alibaba to license streaming Disney content. China also significantly tightened restrictions on foreign nonprofits under the guise of national defense, echoing Vladimir Putin’s policies in Russia. The month ended with a move against one of its own: China suspended Ren Zhiqiang, an outspoken property magnate, from the Communist party in retaliation for Ren’s publicly criticizing President Xi Jinping’s call for loyalty from the Chinese media. All signs seemingly point to the government of the world’s most populous country getting more and more repressive by the week.

Google Books scores a big win for fair use. A decade-long copyright battle has finally come to an end as the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming that Google’s scanning of books to make excerpts available on its search engine, without the authors’ permission, is a form of copyright infringement. Guild members believe Google is providing an illegal free substitute for their work, depriving authors and publishers of potential revenue. (An original 2005 settlement, later rejected by courts, would have required Google to pay authors.) The Supreme Court did not comment on its decision, but the crux of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals’s earlier ruling in Google’s favor was that despite scanning entire books, Google is only supplying “snippets” to the public. Since in most cases these snippets are vetted so as not to actually satisfy a reader’s need for the entire book, Google’s use of them can be considered “transformative” as permitted by the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law. The court also considers these excerpts primarily a source of information about the full texts, and individual authors have never been guaranteed “an exclusive right to supply information… about [their] works” under copyright law. ArsTechnica posits that “in the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.”

From robot-building to social innovation, Silicon Valley invests in artists: In mid-April, a group of artists, impact investors, philanthropic funders and social innovators launched Upstart Co-Lab. Led by Laura Callanan, who was briefly the NEA’s Senior Deputy Chairman under Jane Chu, the new collaborative aims to connect more artists with social entrepreneurship and impact investing opportunities, recognizing the importance of artists as catalysts for economic and social change in the private as well as public sector. With partners including the Ford Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Oberlin College on board, some of Co-lab’s more ambitious initial proposals include a new Creative Economy Index Fund (comprising U.S. public companies across the creative industries) that seeks to enable targeted impact investment in the arts for the first time. An “ArtPath” national initiative also promises to help artists develop career skills and plans to better make a living from their creative work. Meanwhile, according to a recent Washington Post report, one particular sub-sector of Silicon Valley is especially in need of creative professionals like writers who can “engineer the personalities” of virtual assistants, i.e. Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. An ambitious new crop of virtual assistant startups (garnering at least $35 million in investment over the past year) is developing bots that can engage in not just mundane office tasks but more “human” interactions, requiring the same types of colorful personalities and detailed backstories as Hollywood characters. Up for debate is just how lifelike to make these virtual assistants without causing psychological confusion. Yet giving these rookie robots enough “people skills” to handle all possible workplace situations (including avoiding being provoked by their “bosses” into publicly offensive behavior) seemingly requires the skills of true artists.

Music, art and the Panama Papers. The Panama Papers–a leak of 11.5 million files from the database of the world’s fourth-biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca–rocked the world when they were released this month by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The Papers–the largest leak in whistleblower history–reveal the myriad ways the rich have exploited tax havens to conceal their wealth, and have fascinated and horrified the public in equal measure with their scope and complexity. They implicate some 143 politicians, including twelve national leaders among its pages, with a $2 billion trail that leads all the way to Russian president Vladimir Putin. So what does this have to do wit the arts? For one thing, Putin’s apparent use of the St. Petersburg-based cellist Sergei Roldugin as his “bag man” has sparked the public’s imagination. More substantively, the art market, which this year has reached astronomical proportions, has had its underbelly exposed by the scandal. The papers reveal several instances of potentially shady dealings, raising troubling questions about the value of provenance and the legality of ownership.

Cinema returns to Gaza. The embattled Gaza Strip once enjoyed a vibrant cinema culture, with more than a dozen cinemas across the small territory showing films almost daily. In 1987, these cinemas burned during the first Palestinian uprising. They were repaired, only to be destroyed, definitively, in 1996. In January, Gaza Cinema, led by members of the production company Ain Media, quietly began a movie-going revival. They rented a small events space, and screened “Oversized Coat,” a 2013 film from the Jordan-based Palestinian director Nawras Abu Salehl. As word has spread, so has demand; this month the organizers added a second weekly show. Tickets are priced at an accessible $2.50, allowing many to participate their first-ever movie-going experience. For the moment, the organizers are focused on Palestinian films, though they plan to expand their content (with permission, of course).

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After twenty-five years with the McKnight Foundation, Neal Cuthbert has announced he will retire from his position of vice president of program at the end of this year.
• Robert L. Hughes has been named the new director of K-12 strategy at the Gates Foundation.
• Regina R. Smith has been appointed managing director of The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program.
• The Ford Foundation seeks a Program Associate. Posted on April 8; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Several recent reports provide insights into United States philanthropy and the arts. According to the the 2016 edition of the BNP Paribas Individual Philanthropy Index, the U.S. ranks first among four regions worldwide in terms of the commitment of its philanthropists, followed by Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet the Foundation Center’s snapshot of 2013 arts and culture giving demonstrates that arts funding did not keep pace with a general rise in U.S. foundation giving that year; the arts also received a lower share of overall giving than in the previous three decades.
• Two reports this month parsed film data. One shows strong evidence that movies featuring black actors not only keep up with films at the box office and among the critics, but blow away films with no black actors at all. A second analysis, published in Polygraph, breaks down the dialogue of some 2,000 films by cast member age and gender, revealing some stark realities about equity.
• How Cities Can Grow the Maker Movement, published this month by the National League of Cities, explores the emergence of the maker movement within a selection of major U.S. cities.
• How much TV do millennials watch a day? A new report out from Nielsen suggests not all millennials (that’s people 18-34) are the same.
• Americans for the Arts’s latest National Arts Index measuring the vitality of arts and culture in the United States shows American exported arts goods rising in value and new technologies as increasingly important in engaging arts audiences, among other findings. Meanwhile, SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR)’s second Annual Arts Vibrancy Index ranked Portland, Austin and Kansas City as some of most vibrant art cities in the U.S.; they join a “top 20” list that also includes New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
• This month, the Education Commission of the States and Arts Education Partnership published its 2016 “State of the States” comprehensive survey of state policies for arts education nationwide.
• ArtPlace America released two field scans this month focusing on housing and public safety, kicking off an ongoing effort to assess “how arts and cultural practitioners have and might be partners” in achieving a range of ArtPlace’s community development goals.
• A first-of-its-kind study commissioned by several major US museums shows that the effects of arts programs can last well into adulthood. In other news, US museums spent nearly $5 billion on expansions during the time of economic recession between 2007-2014, more than the other 37 countries examined put together, according to research by The Art Newspaper.
• The percentage of Americans who visited a library in the past year is down sharply, according to a Pew report on the Future of Libraries–and technology may not be the only reason.
• For the first time, UK higher education data experts QS have ranked universities by their performing arts capabilities, with two music and drama conservatories making it into the top ten this year.
• A recent Creative Capital survey of its artist grant recipients from 2000-2013 found that the awards have had significant impact on both artists’ visibility and income.
• The LA County Arts Commission released a literature review on how organizations have addressed issues of diversity and cultural equity, as a first step towards achieving the November 2015 resolution from the County Board of Supervisors to diversify local arts organizations. D5 also published an annual report on the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in philanthropy. Related, in a paper recently published in The Sociological Quarterly, sociologist Keith Leicht argues that the conversation about inequality in America revolves too much around disparities between groups and not enough on the disparities within them.
• Barry’s Blog’s recent survey on how nonprofit arts organizations use communications internally and externally revealed that while many report “information overload,” few have formal communications plans (or staff) to address this issue.
• Research from the Chicago School of Business found that setting a donation option as the default in a charitable appeal can sometimes increase revenue, but not always.
• New research commissioned by The Guardian into the 70 million comments left on its site since 2006 provides the first quantitative evidence that articles written by women and minorities are more often the victims of internet abuse and trolling. Also across the pond, The Stage published two reports on arts professionals in the UK, one finding that local arts graduates earn less than graduates of any other subject, and the other showing that women leaders at the country’s top subsidized theaters are paid £29,000 less on average than men. But here’s something to inspire “confidence” about making a living as a visual artist: inflating your ego might also inflate your prices! A new study from the European Journal of Finance suggests that the work of narcissistic artists earns more at auctions.
• An exploratory paper out of the UK found mental health benefits to participating in drum circles. Are we all in fact born with a beat? Recent insights from neuroscience (aided by small zoo’s worth of dancing animals) shed light on the biological origins of rhythm.

• In a reversal, the FCC has drafted new net neutrality rules that critics claim are unworthy of the name: they would allow broadband companies to provide a “fast lane” for content providers willing to pay a “commercially reasonable” fee. The FCC’s public comment period opens on May 15. Related: if the Comcast-Time Warner merger is approved, “the combined company’s footprint will pass over 60% of US broadband households.”
• A belated tax tip for artists: emigrate to Mexico. Or, for those committed to staying in the US of A, consider launching a worker cooperative as a means of upping income while maintaining time for artistic pursuits. For those on the collector side, there’s always lending your new purchases to a museum in Oregon, Delaware or New Hampshire first.
• Several record companies have filed suit in New York against Pandora to secure royalties under state law for the use of recordings made before 1972, which are not protected by federal copyright. Sirius was targeted by a similar lawsuit last fall.
• Classical musicians may now have a harder time leaving and re-entering the United States thanks to a ban on ivory meant to protect African elephants.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Grant Oliphant, former Pittsburgh Foundation leader, will begin a new role as president at Heinz Endowments this June.
• Also in June, the Canada Council for the Arts will welcome its new CEO and president Simon Brault. Brault was previously vice-chair of Canada Council’s board before moving to the National Theatre School Montreal, and will serve in his new position for a five-year term.
• Michael Kaiser, a man who wears many hats, will add another one in co-chairman of IMG Artists, which will also involve managing a new cooperation between IMG Artists and DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.
• Jonathan Fanton, former president of the MacArthur Foundation and of the New School, has been named President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Former president Leslie Cohen Berlowitz resigned last July in the wake of a scandal over her compensation and qualifications.
• Lorin Dunlop will join the M. J. Murdoch Charitable trust this June as Program Director. Most recently, Dunlop was responsible for public safety grant programs of the Oregon Criminal Justice System.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• PonoMusic, a new high-def digital audio business, raised $6.2 million on Kickstarter to become the third-best-funded project in the site’s history. Neil Young, who started Pono to provide a higher-quality alternative to current digital formats, set the initial goal at $800,000.
• Yet another contender is trying to elbow its way into the crowdfunding game: Crowdrise, a new(ish) platform dedicated exclusively to nonprofits, just received an additional $23 million in financing.
• The Walter & Elise Haas Fund, working together with the Foundation Center and Mission Minded, has developed an open-source, free solution that any grantmaking entity can use to make its grantmaking data searchable, publishable, sharable, and fully accessible. You can see “Open hGrant for WordPress” in action on the Haas site.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera has outlined a new fundraising strategy to avert closure and announced a meeting on Monday of its 850-person membership. It’s been a bumpy ride: half of the 58-member board has resigned; a new chair, Carol Lazier, has taken over and personally pledged $1m to save the organization; general and artistic director Ian Campbell has been placed on indefinite leave; and protests by unions and members have added financial and legal complications. The opera’s plan includes a new $1m crowdfunding campaign with a deadline of May 19; it is actually only one of several San Diego cultural institutions that have been shuttered or are imperiled.
• A closer look at the end of the Trey McIntyre Project.
• A bid by a group of philanthropic organizations to buy out Pittsburgh’s failed August Wilson Center for African American Culture was dropped, with the foundations claiming a preference on the part of the Center’s court-appointed receiver for a commercial developer.
• New York City is facing a sudden rash of failing institutions. The Incubator Arts Project is closing, citing — you guessed it — difficulties raising revenue. The Brecht Forum, a Marxist educational and cultural space, is buckling under the weight of a lawsuit for back rent. And Manhattan’s legendary Canal Street art supply store Pearl Paint has shut its doors and is mourned.
• Is an arts-centric Coursera in our future? Barry Hessenius decries the state of professional development in arts administration and calls for a virtual “one stop shop” of on-demand courses, articles, and networking/mentoring opportunities.
• A handful of arts organizations have been experimenting with a lesser-known organizational structure called the “disregarded entity,” which may offer non-profits a more flexible alternative to independence on the one hand and fiscal sponsorship on the other.
• In The Foundation Review, authors Gary Cunningham, Marcia Avner, and Romilda Justilian of the Northwest Area Foundation note declining philanthropic investment in communities of color and make a pointed call for foundation leaders to commit to reducing racial inequality. And across the pond, British comedian Lenny Henry is leading an effort to secure better representation for minorities on the BBC.

BIG IDEAS

• National Arts Strategies’s Sunny Widmann suggests arts organizations create their own Skunk Works® divisions — originally conceived by Lockheed Martin and not as stinky as the name suggests — to nurture innovate programs and practices.
• We hear a lot about the intersection between creative placemaking and gentrification, but is dealing with it just a matter of saying hi to your neighbor and identifying your privileges? At The Atlantic Cities, Daniel Hertz suggests that if we really care about gentrification, we should be paying a lot more attention to housing policy.
• Global inequality of wealth is at a 100-year high, with the infamous 1% owning half of the planet’s wealth, according to a hot new book by French economist Thomas Piketty. One consequence: “professionals have now been priced out of the [art] market and it’s shifted more toward investment bankers.”
• Barry Hessenius is looking for the next set of big ideas – and the people behind them – with another edition of the Arts Dinner-vention. Nominations are due May 15.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A music psychologist found that introducing random repetition into a piece of music makes it more appealing – and makes people think it was more likely to have been composed by a human being.
• Research suggests literary fiction can help short-circuit ethnic stereotypes.
• A new paper examines the intersections of the arts and health via case studies from Cleveland on interventions including art therapy and the artistic design of healthcare facilities.
• The NEA is out with a new report on the Education Leaders Institute Alumni Summit, a five-year effort on the part of the NEA to strengthen arts education policies at the state level. The Endowment’s Arts Education director Ayanna Hudson discusses the report in the context of the agency’s new strategy.
• A new center at Stanford will focus on meta-research in the medical sciences and examine how much publication bias — which raises questions about all research fields, including the arts — really is a problem.
• The Pew Research Center has published a new report on demographic and generational trends in America. The findings themselves are what you might expect – our population is aging, becoming more diverse, and moving away from religion; immigration and interracial marriage are on the rise; and Democrats and Republicans are at odds – but the presentation brings these and other trends to life.
• Seen any good movies at the theater lately? Probably not, according to new data on film reception by month of release as aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The numbers show that the summer and holiday seasons have the best pickings. Don’t believe it? You can play around with the data yourself.

Photo by vancouverfilmschool. Some rights reserved.

About a year ago the New York Times ran a series of articles on corporate tax breaks, complete with a web-accessible database of state tax incentives for businesses. All in all, the Times discovered 1,874 state and local incentive programs that give out a combined $80.4 billion to corporations each year. To put those figures in perspective, the tax breaks doled out by Oklahoma and West Virginia are worth about one third of those states’ entire budgets. Manufacturing is the most highly subsidized industry, receiving about $25.5 billion in tax breaks annually, followed by agriculture and oil, gas, and mining. Fourth on the list? Surprisingly, it’s the motion picture industry, which nets about $1.5 billion in state and local tax credits per year.

What’s behind this $1.5 billion tax rebate for filmmakers? While industries such as agriculture have been subsidized for decades, state and local tax credits for film productions are relatively new. Louisiana was the first state to introduce such an incentive in 1991, and other states were slow to follow suit. Only four states offered incentives to movie producers in 2002, but once the idea caught on it spread like wildfire, and by 2010 forty-four states offered some form of incentive to filmmakers. The specifics vary from state to state, but typically the financial incentives (for which TV productions, industrial videos, commercials and sometimes even video games are eligible) consist of some combination of tax credits, cash rebates, employment rebates, sales tax and lodging exemptions, and fee-free use of shooting locations. In order to qualify, productions must generally satisfy certain conditions, such as spending some percentage of their total budget locally, shooting a certain percentage of the footage in-state, employing a certain quota of local residents, or exceeding a minimum amount of in-state spending. In addition, some states require that the action of the films take place in a local setting or even demand that the film depict their state in a positive light in order to qualify for tax credits.

To be clear, the film industry isn’t supported out of any particular concern for cinematic art, nor are politicians incentivizing the production of films because they think we’d be better off as a society if we had more movies and TV shows to watch. As is the case with many other corporate tax breaks, the main reason for offering tax credits for filmmakers is simply jobs, jobs, jobs. State officials don’t particularly care if a company is making movies, auto parts, or toothpaste—if it has the potential to create a lot of jobs for local residents, officials want those jobs in their legislative district rather than someone else’s. They are willing to dangle tax breaks as bait on the assumption that the jobs created by the firm will bring more money into the local economy than the government will lose by providing the tax break.

So how effective are the tax incentives for film and TV productions in generating jobs and/or revenue? That depends on whom you ask. Or who funds the research you’re looking at.

The ROI of film tax credits

Reports funded by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the main lobbying arm for the movie industry, consistently show a positive return on investment for state treasuries. For example, a recent study of the New York State Film Production Tax Credit commissioned by MPAA found that “for every $1.00 of credit distributed, the State and City received a combined $2.23 in taxes.” In Florida, a research firm that was hired by MPAA found that $118.7 million in tax credits yielded $140.44 million in 2011/12, for a more modest return of $1.18 to the dollar.

By contrast, a recent report on Louisiana’s Motion Picture Tax Credit by the State Auditor found that the state supported the film industry with $196.8 million in tax credits and only received $27 million in additional taxes in return (about $0.14 for every dollar spent), and the Massachusetts Department of Revenue found its return to be only marginally higher at $0.16 per dollar spent. A 2011 article by the Tax Foundation lists several other studies by state agencies and a few that were funded by MPAA exhibiting the same discrepancies.

How do these studies arrive at such vastly different numbers? To get some insight into this question, we can take a look at two conflicting reports on Massachusetts’ Film Industry Tax Incentives that were published this year: one by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue (mentioned above) and the other by HR&A Advisors for MPAA.

* This is not explicitly reported as the number of jobs created, but is implied by the statement, “Massachusetts motion picture production employment increased 46.1 percent from 1,630 jobs in 2006 [the year the tax incentives were introduced] to 2,380 jobs in 2011.”

As far as I can tell, the disparity, most notably in the estimated economic impact, results primarily from the following differences in the models and their underlying assumptions:

• Opportunity costs: Since the state is required to maintain a balanced budget, the Department of Revenue assumes that any incentives that are provided to the film industry have to be paid for by saving money somewhere else in the budget. So instead of just calculating the positive effect that the tax credits have on creating jobs, their analysis factors in the number of jobs that will be lost in other areas of the state’s budget due to cuts. Of course, these cuts have negative ripple effects throughout the economy just as the newly created jobs have a positive impact. By contrast, the MPAA report only looks at the positive effects of the new jobs that are created.
• Wages paid to non-residents: Both reports acknowledge that some of the jobs that are created by film and television productions in Massachusetts will be held by people whose primary residence is in another state; however, the manner in which the studies correct for that varies considerably. The MPAA report merely exempts “individual employee salaries over $1 million, as it is assumed the majority of these employees are non-residents, so multiplier effects associated with this spending are not realized within the Commonwealth.” The Department of Revenue similarly excludes all payments to recipients earning more than $1 million per production, but in addition it excludes 95% of all other wages paid to non-residents. The rationale is that most of the lodging, food, and incidental expenses for non-resident employees are paid for by the production company, so that only a small portion (estimated at 5%) of the non-resident workers’ paychecks gets spent in-state.
• “New” spending vs. total spending: The Massachusetts Department of Revenue is careful to exclude the production of TV shows and commercials that would have been produced in-state even in the absence of the incentives. This wasn’t of great consequence in 2011 (the latest year included in the study), since $174.6 million of the $176 million spent on TV and movie productions was deemed to be “new” (i.e., induced by the tax credit). However, in 2010 41% of the total film production spending ($29.5 million out of $71.6 million) would have been expected to take place in Massachusetts even if no tax credit had existed. (The large difference between 2010 and 2011 was attributed to the discontinuation of some long-running TV programs that were produced locally). The MPAA study doesn’t factor pre-existing film production into the equation, preferring to attribute all of the current film production activity to the incentive.

Despite the considerable differences between the studies’ findings and their disagreement about whether the incentives produce a net benefit for the state treasury, everyone agrees that the tax credits have a positive impact on the economy. For example, the 2013 audit in Louisiana found that every dollar of film tax credits resulted in $5.40 in economic output. However, that’s not really saying much, since almost any form of government spending is likely to have a positive impact on the economy. The question is how the impact of the tax credits compares to other things the state could have done with the money.

What about those jobs?

As mentioned above, in most cases the objective of these tax incentives isn’t necessarily revenue generation but job creation. Are film tax credits efficient means of creating jobs? One way to consider that question is how many tax dollars are being spent for each job that is created. According to the Department of Revenue, Massachusetts’s taxpayers had to fork out $128,575 in tax credits for each job that was created in the film industry in 2011. Seeing as the median wage for jobs created by the film industry in Massachusetts was $70,657, that doesn’t seem like a very good deal. The state could have employed almost twice as many people at the same income level if it had simply hired those people directly, instead of subsidizing motion picture companies. The picture looks somewhat better if one uses MPAA’s numbers, but it’s still not great. Assuming (generously) that all of the jobs that were created by TV and film productions between 2006 and 2011 can be attributed to the tax incentives, 750 jobs were created in 2011 at a cost of $37.9 million. That comes out to $50,533 in state spending for each new job. So even using MPAA’s more favorable numbers, it seems that the state paid more than two thirds of the wages for the film industry’s new employees.

Film-induced tourism

One factor we haven’t considered yet is the effect that film and television may have on tourism and the public perception of the locations where they are produced. There are certainly a number of cases in which blockbuster films have led to significant increases in tourism, as The Lord of the Rings trilogy did for New Zealand. And once local residents get past the street closures, traffic delays, and general nuisance that come with a major movie shoot, I’m sure many would agree that there’s some excitement in spotting Hollywood celebrities at local restaurants. There’s also some satisfaction to be gained from recognizing familiar landmarks on the big screen when you see movies that were shot in your hometown. In that sense, local film productions may promote a sense of pride in and attachment to a location, so that tax credits could be justified on the basis that they improve the quality of life for local residents. If nothing else, they give them something to talk about.

Both the tourism and public opinion arguments are valid reasons to support tax incentives for movies. It therefore seems appropriate that MPAA includes film-induced tourism in its recent reports on state tax incentives (in Florida and Massachusetts); however, the measurement of this effect remains problematic. Having consulted twelve representatives of Florida’s tourist industry, MPAA figures (conservatively, it claims) that 5% of all tourism in the state can be considered film-induced tourism and can therefore be added to the economic impact of the film tax incentives. The MPAA-commissioned study of Massachusetts’s film tax incentives uses a different methodology that was employed to assess the value of New Zealand’s exposure in the Lord of the Rings and Stockholm’s exposure in the Millennium trilogy. This approach equates each recognizable shot of the location where the film is set with the publicity that is achieved by a 30-second paid advertisement for the destination on primetime television. The cost of purchasing enough airtime on television to reach an equivalent number of viewers is then assumed to be the value of the advertising that the film provides for the location.

However, if tourism is the objective, the tax credits shouldn’t be granted to all movies indiscriminately. Only those that showcase the location prominently and identifiably should be eligible. I wouldn’t doubt that ABC’s Nashville is having a positive effect on the psyche of that city’s residents as well as on tourism and the local economy. As the assistant commissioner of communications and creative services for the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development noted, “You’re not only getting the 20-plus episodes per season”: every advertisement and preview for the TV show is essentially advertising Nashville. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine how shooting Homeland in Charlotte, NC, would do much to increase public awareness of North Carolina’s attractions, given that the show is supposed to be taking place in Washington, DC.  Incentive programs that require films to be set in-state and/or depict the location in a positive light make a lot of sense from this perspective (though the latter condition may seem dangerously close to censorship).

So where does that leave us?

In December, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which among other things is responsible for determining our nation’s Gross Domestic Product, for the first time released a calculation of the economic value of the arts and cultural production in the United States. According to the BEA, arts and culture contributed $504 billion to our GDP in 2011. To put that in perspective, that’s almost twice the $289.9 billion generated by mining (which includes all oil and gas extraction). The motion picture industry alone added $83.2 billion to the US economy, which, believe it or not, is more than the total value added by automobile manufacturing. The motion picture industry has long been touting its economic significance to argue for more favorable tax treatment, and these latest numbers will only bolster its case.

Yet critics of film tax credits claim that these policies do nothing to stimulate the economy and merely pit states against each other in a race to the bottom. Even some people within the movie industry acknowledge that if the tax credits are the only thing that a certain location has going for it, business will likely move somewhere else as soon as the financial incentives are rolled back or some other state offers even bigger tax breaks. Once the states have foregone all tax revenue from movie producers in the rush to compete with other locations, the playing field will once again be even and the industry will settle where it was to begin with—the only difference being that the production companies no longer pay taxes and state budgets are even tighter than before.

I haven’t found any data to indicate whether or not the incentives are increasing due to competition between states, but from a theoretical perspective the race-to-the-bottom argument is compelling. Even if one believes the MPAA studies that show a positive return on the states’ investment, if the states keep raising their tax incentives to compete with their neighbors, the public benefits of attracting motion picture productions will eventually approach zero.

In the material I’ve reviewed for this article, there is little to suggest that the current incentives offered by state and local governments are optimal in any sense. I have yet to come across calculations that show that a certain level of tax incentives creates the greatest number of jobs per tax dollar forgone. So why do some states offer 15% tax rebates while others offer 20%? Are the expected returns really higher in some states than others, justifying the additional investment? Or are the higher tax incentives necessary in states where the conditions for filmmaking are otherwise so poor that no producers would go there if the rates were any lower? Since I haven’t been able to find a convincing rationale for the levels of the tax credits, I assume the levels are indeed set according to inter-state competition, which is consistent with the race to the bottom scenario. If that’s the case, I’d say it’s a poor justification for public spending. (This situation isn’t unique to the motion picture industry, by the way. The same doubts about inter-state competition and the race to the bottom hold true for all sorts of corporate tax breaks that try to bribe corporations into setting up shop – or keeping current plants open – in particular locations.)

So how might we improve the current system of incentivizing film and TV productions? Even if the economic argument offered up by MPAA doesn’t hold—and, personally, I’m inclined to believe the governments’ internal audits that show a net loss for the states—I don’t think one must abandon the idea of incentivizing motion pictures entirely. The system might just need to be improved to target those productions that are likely to generate the greatest public benefits.

The fact is, the current tax credits already target specific types of motion picture productions. Minimum requirements for the production budget and/or the amount of money that is spent in-state are presumably designed to ensure that the tax breaks go to big-budget productions that will employ a lot of people. The large corporations behind those productions are the ones most likely to respond to incentives, moving their operations to whichever state offers the lowest costs, whereas a small film production company in Massachusetts is likely to work in Massachusetts whether or not the state offers any incentive. However, for that same reason one might argue that the large corporations are precisely the wrong place to invest public money: they operate nationally (or internationally) and will fly in people from around the world to work on the production, so relatively few of the jobs created will go to local residents. Furthermore, as soon as another state offers bigger tax rebates, they’ll pack up shop and move there. Any spike in economic activity from a big-budget production coming to town is therefore likely to be short-lived. Wouldn’t it be better to give the tax breaks to smaller firms whose production budgets are too modest to fly in talent from out of state? Those productions might not hire a whole lot of people, but at least the paychecks will be going to local residents, and if the production does well and the company grows, that growth will happen in-state.

The one argument that does work in favor of giving tax breaks to big budget productions is their ability to reach a wide audience and potentially increase tourism or improve public opinion of a certain location. In order to fully endorse this approach, I’d need to see more credible research on the economic value of the exposure that shooting locations receive, preferably coupled with a greater capacity to predict which films are going to have a significant impact in that regard. As tempting as it is to reduce the conversation about film tax credits to a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, it would be smarter to consider how to determine which productions to incentivize with tax credits and where such tax expenditures would be wasted. That’s speaking from the perspective of job creation, of course. If the objective were to improve the quality of cinematic art, an entirely different set of selection criteria would be necessary.

Wouldn’t you know it? Of the nearly ten pages of notes I wrote over those three days, almost half are about public education.

So much for that break.

I did go to a few sessions specific to education: an update on GIA’s Arts Education Funders Coalition’s advocacy efforts, for example, and a session about the Hive Learning Network‘s support for digital learning. Most, however, didn’t explicitly have much to do with K-12 classrooms. One described a multi-city performance festival. Another shared lessons learned from one foundation’s attempt to coax a bit of “ridiculousness” from its grantees. They were fascinating in their own right, but as I listened I kept writing vague questions to myself about “evolution,” “innovation,” and “the system.” Something was nagging at me, and I didn’t know what it was.

Then Ethan Zuckerman made my head explode.

Mr. Zuckerman’s keynote on day two of the conference was the perfect cerebral counterbalance to the soul-stirring meditations provided by Quiara Alegria Hudes and Nikky Finney on days one and three. (Kudos to GIA for lining up not one, not two, but three exemplary plenary speakers for this gathering.) He talked about how digital media is changing our interactions with one another, changing what it means to be an engaged and globally-minded citizen, and changing how we access and filter the information and opinions that shape our understanding of the world. The upcoming generations of “digital natives,” he said, are raised with a “pointillist” worldview. They seek and expect constant participation and engagement in the causes they think affect their social circles. They want immediate impact. They risk falling into an echo chamber of ideas that support their existing conception of the world. They are suspicious of institutions. They engage via social connections, not broad issues. To them, “the idea that [their] job as a 20-something is to read the newspaper every day and every two years elect someone to represent [them] is bullshit.”

I don’t have a Facebook account but I don’t live in a cave. The idea that the Internet and social media are changing how we consume information isn’t new to me. However, Zuckerman hammered home both the speed and uncertainty with which the world is shifting beneath our feet. We can’t yet judge whether these changes are for good or ill, but must be flexible in our understanding of what things like “citizenry” and “creativity” mean. Creativity, according to Zuckerman, isn’t just about creation. It’s about settling into a space between concepts, actively seeking divergent points of view, drawing connections between people and disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with one another, indulging in an “import-export business” of ideas, and resisting the temptation to lapse into homophily.

For the rest of the conference, everything I heard and discussed was about “the space between.” I went to an off-site session at Drexel University, where fashion majors work alongside engineering majors to create wearable pieces of circuitry, and students in a music and technology engineering lab stay up to the wee hours figuring out how to program robots to play drums for a tongue-in-cheek video rendition of  “Come Together.” As one of the presenters quipped, showing us a visual map of men and women with “hybrid competencies” working between disciplines, “the tree of knowledge has been cut down and replaced by a network.”

It was pretty darn cool.

It was also clarified my vague musings about “evolution” and “the system.” In arts education we seek “systemic change,” trying to determine the structures we must put in place so all students have equal access to studying visual art, dance, etc. Those structures are based on our own understanding of the artistic disciplines and our experiences with “the system.” In light of what Zuckerman described, however, they seem, well, rigid. To give one example, our advocacy efforts often make clear that “the arts” refer to four specific disciplines – visual art, dance, drama, and music. (With the advent of new national core arts standards, a fifth discipline, media arts, is getting its due, though the fact the word “digital” is missing may be testament to just how far our efforts lag behind student experience.) We do this because our field is a “big tent” and we want to be sure no one is left out (unless, like both our plenary speakers on days one and three, you happen to work in the literary arts). So we are careful to call those four-or-five disciplines out as separate-but-equal, and maintain that students should have high-quality learning experiences in each.

Those decisions make sense to us. But do they make sense to our students? Do they align with their “pointillist” worldview?  Will they be relevant in 2020? Will they be relevant in 2016? How on earth do we craft policies that have the “teeth” to get to issues of equity, but not the rigidity that will render them obsolete? How do we take a “systemic” view to support students with a “pointillist” lens? What if a “pointillist” generation doesn’t want or care about four-or-five separate artistic disciplines? What if our desire for policies and definitions that reflect how we think about our work are getting in our way of supporting what they need?

Uncomfortable thoughts, but not unwelcome. I came to Philadelphia thinking I would lend a newcomer’s perspective on foreign topics. I left with those foreign topics challenging my longstanding perspective. The “space between” is interesting indeed.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Australia is relatively fresh off the adoption of a national cultural policy, and with that policy come calls for new ways to measure culture’s intrinsic value.
• Fractured Atlas has created a simple but useful infographic explaining what ObamaCare means to individuals, including artists.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Kris Tucker, Executive Director of the Washington State Arts Commission, has announced that she will step down in January. She has held the position since 1999; her successor will be chosen by the Governor following a search process led by the Commission.
• At Cincinnati-based ArtsWave, longtime president and CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson will step down next August. As part of a standing succession plan, current Chief Operating Officer Alecia Kintner is expected to become President and COO.
• The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City has chosen a new executive director to succeed founder David Hughes: Julie Gordon Dalgleish took up the post this month.

BIG IDEAS

• Why we need a GiveWell for the arts: bioethics professor Peter Singer applauds “effective altruism” or evidence-based grantmaking, and, in the process, slams the idea of donating to an art museum. The article has provoked several responses from Adam Huttler, Janet Brown, Laura Zucker, and Linda Essig. Before we get tangled in semantics (isn’t “effectiveness” beside the point of true altruism?) GiveWell thoughtfully unpacks what the term means to them.
• Nonprofit executives both in and outside of the arts, meanwhile, aren’t putting much faith in data-driven strategies. According to a poll by Infogroup Nonprofit Solutions, executives consider “using data and analytics to drive strategy”  by far and away their least important nonprofit fundraising practice.
• The second batch of guests at the much-anticipated Arts Dinner-Vention Project  — Kristin Thomson, Salvador Acevado, Devon Smith, Lex Leifheit, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Meiyin Wang — weigh in on what a “new movement around the arts” would look like.
• Kerry Lengel explores the challenges and opportunities present in the battle for relevance and ticket sales for arts presenters in Arizona, and everywhere really.
• Think tanks in DC have increasingly focused on advancing a pre-existing agenda, raising funds, and political advocacy. Is there still a place for objective research in policy decisions? We’d like to think so.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Three trustees of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation claim the foundation owes them at least $60m; foundation staff asks, “What are they thinking?” Florida courts will decide.
• Amid the controversies over how little musicians are paid from streaming services, Doug Wolk takes a big-picture look at the revenue flows of sites like Spotify and Pandora to explain who is and isn’t getting paid by whom, and whether it really matters.
• Maryland’s Forum Theater, in an attempt to make its work more accessible, is allowing audience members to determine the price of their tickets next season. The strategy may prove to be wishful thinking, but raises the question of whether it’s more effective to ask audiences to “pay what they can” or to “pay what they each think a performance was worth.”

IN THE FIELD

• Amid national discussion surrounding recent lawsuits by unpaid interns, Fractured Atlas’s Jason Tseng offers concise takes on the history, legality, and possible future models for internships in the arts.
• Another Fractured Atlas staffer, Tim Cynova, interviewed 26 top professional leaders over the past several months about what it takes to attract and retain stellar staff members. He shares their responses in a video compilation here and will be releasing videos of each interview on his #StellarStaff website over the next month.
• Book lovers sound off on the Justice Department’s recent suit against Apple and publishing companies for conspiring to raise e-book prices. Meanwhile, independent bricks-and-mortar booksellers appear to be back on the upswing.
• Good news for cinephiles outside New York and LA: you may no longer need to invest in home theaters. A new website called Gathr allows users to band together to bring independent films to theaters across the country with a Kickstarter-like crowdsourcing engine.
• Bad news for cinephiles outside: drive-in theaters across the country are imperiled by the need to invest in expensive new digital projectors. Honda will save a few based on online votes; some theater operators are turning to the internet on their own to stay in business.
• Non-news for cinephiles: the general public is more complimentary of films than professional critics. How much more? The New York Times has a nifty analysis of Rotten Tomatoes scores from critics versus average moviegoers over the last ten years.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Look out, Rick Perry: the Cultural Data Project is coming to Texas.
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have released two reports on their Leading for the Future experiment, which granted $1m in “change capital” to 10 leading arts organization to improve their capitalization. The summary report highlights factors that contributed to or limited success (stable finances and a well-informed board help; a major recession does not); the more interesting case studies of each organization offers detailed information on how they defined and evaluated success.
• NewMusicBox’s Rob Deemer follows up on our recent item about the NEA’s artist workforce research to argue that there should be a separate occupational category for composers. Meanwhile, the NEA has a new research report out on industrial design. The sector is large, growing, and apparently very versatile: nearly 40 percent of people named in design patents are also named in utility patents, implying they have a penchant for invention.
• A new report on the music industry in Nashville finds that the city has by far the highest number of music industry jobs per capita and the second-highest average salary after LA. This handy infographic breaks it down.
• If you’re looking to get up to speed on everything important that’s been written on the arts and Big Data so far, here’s where to start. Chris also has a review of “Counting What Counts: What Big Data Can Do for the Cultural Sector.”

An image from the 2009 FESPACO Opening Ceremony. Photo by Suzy Robins.

This year my mother made her triumphant return to FESPACO, Africa’s premier film festival held bi-annually and always in Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou. She was back, this time with my father and I in tow, both of us galvanized by six long years of my mother recounting anecdotes from her last trip.  There was the Ouaga restaurant run by nuns who sang Ave Maria in an infamously off-kilter warble while carving your chicken. The late nights eating sticky fried plantain rolled in dried pepper at roadside jazz bars where one inevitably ran into several of the young bohemian American artists who had sunk all of their savings into a plane ticket to Ouaga and a pass to FESPACO and had no place to stay, knew not even enough to never order a drink with ice in West Africa, let alone the bribes, flattery and subtle threats inherent to any major third-world event. Beyond anything, there were the films, that, while, in the not-quite-familiar-enough-to-any-in-our-family language of French, were staggering.

I, for one, was excited. I was still secondhand high off the daily missives we’d received from my sister earlier that winter when she was a volunteer at the Sundance Film Festival. She had gotten close enough to Alexander Skarsgard to tell him she loved him and he’d giggled in response. She had ushered Will Smith and his son to their seats at a screening, wearing the special occasion calf-length faux-fur coat we’d bought her at a Burlington Coat Factory in Houston a month before.

Though I immersed myself in thoughts of a similar experience during the 15-hour car ride from my home in Accra to Ouagadougou, I don’t know who I thought I’d run into. After four years of schooling in the U.S. and one year of aimless wandering on a leave of absence from my small, private, liberal arts college, I am more ugly American than Ghanaian. And though I used to be an expert on the African movie channel offered on our satellite service and its tawdry Nigerian titles all inexplicably named after American celebrities, (Sharon Stone, Beyonce 2: The President’s Daughter), I could no longer remember any of the stars’ names, and doubted this was the caliber of movie to be screened at the festival anyway.

Ouagadougou was a feast for the eyes, endless aesthetic pleasure with its wide roads and modern geometric buildings somehow conveying Arab, somehow conveying, we hold history very close to ourselves here. More beautiful was FESPACO’s opening ceremony, which included a cultural display so wonderfully bonkers that it almost defies description. My most lasting memory is of 15-foot tall puppets of women in traditional Burkinabe clothing salsa dancing with their partners. These puppets were the women of the festival writ large.

There was a huge emphasis on women at FESPACO, something we were reminded of by the organizers repeatedly. That, this year, the guest of honor was the First Lady of Gabon and the film that was to officially open the festival was written, directed by and starring the same Algerian woman. The constant mention seemed—by turns—defensive, like an apology for an offense that would go otherwise unrecognized and aggressive, when it was regularly mentioned that, at this edition of FESPACO, every jury was chaired by a woman, unlike at Sundance, where not a single jury was.

The feminist slant went down a treat for most of the audience, especially with the white European families who called Ouaga home and the middle-aged black American women who collectively made up about 20% of the FESPACO attendees. The rest of the audience was mostly local Burkinabes as well as African filmmakers and filmgoers from all over the continent. There was also a contingent of the new phenomenon of predominantly white American exchange students sweating through their batik skirts and tank-tops who I recognized from their do-gooder ilk in Accra. They all looked vaguely pleased or indifferent; perhaps their French did not quite stretch to a discussion of gender politics.

My reaction had the two sides of myself, African and American, warring; I didn’t know whether to be proud that so many women were given a position of power at such a uniquely African event or shocked that so few women were at its American equivalent. It appeared miraculous to me that there would be such a vigorous debate on the empowerment of women in this city that seemed to exist nowhere, that rose out of the sand. But from the very beginning I had been impressed by the progressiveness of FESPACO and of Ouaga in general.

Ouagadougou had instantly seemed to me to be a land of women. There were thousands of them, mostly on motorbikes, their purses dangling from their wrists as they revved the puttering machines, their headscarves trailing in the wind, the kitten heels of their shoes stained red by the persistent desert dust. There was something feminine about this city. To my dreamy and romantic mind, it seemed, like an enigmatic woman, to hold some secret loosely in its grasp. I thought of the women on motorbikes, a sight I had never seen in Accra and then I thought of my sister, sharing a 3 bedroom condo with seven strangers in order to afford her volunteer position at Sundance; who’s empowered now?

I knew enough about Sundance to know that its leaders were not ignorant of the shocking gender gap between men and women in the film world; at the 2013 festival they released a study written in conjunction with Women in Film LA that examined the role of women in Sundance’s own history. This effort is admirable, but, in the face of what FESPACO accomplished, seven juries with seven female chairpersons, it seemed overly academic, especially considering that there were fewer female jurors at Sundance 2013 than in years past. It also seemed more thoughtful than FESPACO’s approach to throw as many women as possible into the mix after a 44-year history of no female chairpersons. I couldn’t help but wonder: how much of this celebration of the feminine was posturing?

This question was answered at the festival’s first screening, a film named Yema. Written, directed and starring Djamila Sahraoui, the movie opens with a woman, Ouardia, preparing the body of her son for burial and then digging his grave, placing him to rest despite her advanced age. This son is hinted to have been killed by his brother Ali who is the leader of an armed Islamic group. Ouardia is torn between her inherent love for Ali and her intuition that he is responsible for the death of his own brother. She lives completely isolated at the top of a rocky outcropping in rural Algeria, with only a one-armed shepherd who tends his flocks on her land for company. Ouardia spends most of her time tending to her garden, which becomes a metaphor for her strength, losing herself in heavy manual labor.

Yema is nothing if not a celebration of women, firstly because Djamila Sahraoui performed every major role possible in the creation of the film. But beyond that there is Ouardia, a woman put in position of choosing between the love of her two children, one already gone, the other being taken away by his own extremism, lost for all essential purposes. It is an excellent film, mostly silent, and mainly portrays Ouardia engaged in intensely physical acts-digging through the hard ground to create a grave for her son, pulling heavy buckets of water up from the simple well on her grounds to water her garden. The landscape becomes a character of its own. Harsh and unforgiving, it is still strikingly beautiful, much like Ouardia.

After seeing Yema, I understood that FESPACO’s obsession was not necessarily just with the feminine but with women like Djamila Sahroui, who is endemic of the kind of artist that makes it in Africa. At FESPACO there was a whole slate of ambitious female filmmakers, Africans, many of whom have lived abroad at some point, but realize the value of coming in on the ground floor of a cultural evolution that is sweeping developing African nations. For the first time, Africa has reached a level of sustainability that breeds homegrown artists, and not in a Beyonce & Rihanna 2 type of way.

Where it once was that every African filmmaker had to take the beauty of their lush heritage abroad to get their story told, now the continent is attracting its artistic talent back-African artisans are producing work in Africa for a global audience. That the selection of these artists at FESPACO was overwhelmingly female is fitting. Women have long been the gatekeepers of African history. For all the flexing and posturing, the tangible swag of the African male, African society is matriarchal. This new crop of female African artists are inheriting their traditional role as historian but giving it a modern twist, giving voice to the role of women in a continent that is rapidly developing, caught somewhere between third world depression and bourgeois ambition.

I saw then what FESPACO had that Sundance could not-an intersection between tradition and opportune timing. Africa and, to some extent, FESPACO are still deciding who they want to be. There’s a whole legion of female African artists who are not willing to step back and see themselves written out of those plans.

As the lights came up on Yema, I thought back to the drive to Ouaga and a teenaged boy I’d seen standing by the side of the road wearing a 3x ‘Say Neigh to Ketamine’ t-shirt and red snapback hat stitched with the initials T.I.N.A., This Is New Africa. Though he may not have known it, the boy in the red cap on the side of the road between Accra and Ouaga now seemed to be a seer of some kind. He was right: FESPACO was new Africa.

The internet just got a little less friendly for pirates. A new “Copyright Alert” system, the product of a voluntary agreement between internet service providers such as Comcast and AT&T, Hollywood movie studios, and major record labels, will inconvenience persistent illicit downloaders first with warnings and then stronger measures such as slowed service. The Future of Music Coalition (consistently the smartest folks in the room when it comes to the arts and copyright issues) is wary but hopeful.

STATE AND LOCAL

Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan is pushing to cut in half the state’s generous subsidy to film producers, which currently gives up to $50 million a year in credits for qualifying expenses to firms that set up shop in the state. Michigan had one of the most aggressive film incentive programs in the country just a few years ago, which attracted such productions as “Gran Torino” and “Up in the Air,” but Snyder has since put on the brakes (even as he supported a rebound last year in the state’s arts council budget).

INTERNATIONAL

My goodness, the stream of news flowing out of the United Kingdom just gets fatter and faster. First, the embattled Arts Council England has a new head in Peter Bazalgette, a former TV executive and chairman of the English National Opera. Local governments continue to cut arts budgets in the face of financial pressures: Newcastle went through with eliminating its £2.5 million culture budget despite intervention from national Labour party leaders, and is attempting to move towards a privatized model instead; Westminster (part of London) has confirmed that it’s cutting its annual £350,000 subsidy out of the picture; and Scotland’s Moray is ditching its more modest £94,000 culture budget. At least Belfast is increasing its local arts support by 27%, to £1.4 million. A survey of UK theater companies suggests that many are cutting back on productions, commissions, and cast sizes due to the cuts, though small sample size should be taken into consideration. In this environment of austerity it’s a great time for university tuition fees to be tripling for artists, but the British government is hoping that the Creative Employment Programme, a rapidly expanding paid apprenticeship system in the creative industries for youths aged 16 to 24, will offer a smooth pipeline for new grads. (Joe Patti has more.)

The combination of the eurozone crisis and austerity policies has decimated Spain’s system of public support for the arts, with funding dropping as much as half since 2009 according to a recent report. The litany of second-order impacts cited in that article includes 100 employees laid off at a single opera house in Barcelona, a cancelled Lucian Freud show at the Museo Nacionale del Prado in Madrid, and a cancelled three-year collaboration between Madrid’s Teatro Real and the Berlin Philharmonic. The Orquestra Girona is down to one concert a year. But depending on who you talk to, there are opportunities lying in wait amidst the upheaval.

Australia’s government is out with a new cultural policy, and Ben Eltham (author of A Cultural Policy Blog) declares it a hit for artists. (Annoying registration required, but it’s free.) The policy commits $236 million in Aussie dollars in mostly new money over five years to various federal arts and culture agencies and programs. The government has also chosen to adopt many of the recommendations made in an independent review of the Australia Council last year, including a controversial proposal to do away with the Council’s discipline-based system of funding. (NEA, take note!) The package even includes $4 million for a “data collection program to inform research for the sector and to  track public value of investment.” More here. And they’re considering a media reform package while they’re at it Down Under.

In other news, Russia may adopt a restrictive rule shutting out small concert promoters, China is considering royalty rights (droit de suite) for visual artists, and UNESCO has pledged to raise an $11 million fund to restore the destruction in Timbuktu, Mali, but at least one observer is skeptical that the money will be used wisely.