• EMCArts’s Director: Activating Innovation position, which we first posted about in March, is open again. Details here.

Cool Projects

• You simply MUST watch the entirety of this video produced by the fine citizens of Grand Rapids. Organized after an article published on Newsweek’s website named Grand Rapids one of “America’s Top 10 Dying Cities,” the world-record-setting “LipDub” – lip sync video – proves GR’s vitality in inspiring fashion. Theresa Cameron has more of the story over at ARTSBlog.
• Hartford’s iQuilt creative placemaking initiative has received a whopping $400,000 grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
• Andrew Taylor reports on the progress of Panera Bread’s experiment in pay-what-you-can pricing. Most customers are paying the retail price for the food, and only about 20% are taking advantage of the opportunity to pay less than what they would pay for the exact same food elsewhere. It’s an interesting lesson for economists on how social norms or pressures may influence behavior towards arbitrage opportunities. I also can’t help but wonder how much the apparent success of the experiment is made possible by the locations of the stores, which are in Clayton, MO; Dearborn, MI; and the Hollywood district of Portland, OR. None of those cities are poor, they have similar overall demographics (with the exception of the large Arab-American population in Dearborn), and Clayton is a wealthy suburb of St. Louis.
• TCG’s “What If?” series of posts has been well worth reading. Here’s one recent example, an excellent think piece on an organizational model for a group of small artist collectives. Of course, as Michael Kaiser points out, mergers are never easy.

In the Tank

• The same weekend that the Kansas Arts Commission went under, Florida’s governor vetoed state funding for public broadcasting. Meanwhile, Mid-America Arts Alliance director Mary Kennedy McCabe weighs in on Kansas.
• The IRS has announced that 275,000 nonprofits have officially lost their tax-exempt status today, due to a failure to file required forms for three years in a row. This officially reduces the number of nonprofits in this country by 17%. View the full list here, and check to see if any arts organizations in your community have been affected.
• Under continued financial pressure, including a $5 million current-year deficit, NYC Opera is leaving Lincoln Center for a new home – what home that is, no one knows. It’s also laying off 11 employees, and rumor has it that the budget will be reduced next year to $11 million.
• NYCO is leaving Lincoln Center just two years after a $107 million renovation to the theater in which it performs – a renovation that resulted in its being renamed the David H. Koch Theater. Yes, this is the same David H. Koch whose conservative advocacy group supported Governor Sam Brownback’s vendetta against the Kansas Arts Commission.
• This quote from one of the many stories about the NYCO’s recent challenges well illustrates the depressing conflict between commercial and aesthetic incentives at major institutions (emphasis mine):
  

  The [performers’ and stage managers’ union] delegates said they were proud to be part of the company. “Yet we are confused and troubled by the way management is programming the seasons,” they added, calling for productions of more familiar operas, like “Carmen,” “Madama Butterfly,” “La Bohème” and “La Traviata.” “George Steel’s artistic vision may be brilliant,” the union officials said, referring to the current general manager and artistic director, “but it doesn’t fill the seats.”

• NYCO is not the only company in New York suddenly looking for a home. After losing its bid to take over the Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Arts at St. Ann’s is desperately seeking shelter.
• The Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas is going on hiatus.
• Bye bye Florida Stage.
• Tony Kushner, of all people, reports that he doesn’t make his living as a playwright.

Orchestra R/Evolution Revisited

• Sarah Lutman reports from the League of American Orchestras conference.
• A new business model: investing in musical instruments.
• The Detroit Symphony visits the suburbs. And its President fails to take a pay cut.
• Very good thoughts on new music programming from Sam Bergman.

Overseas/North Country Report

• As much as we like to complain about our arts advocacy in the US, other countries haven’t figured it out either. You’ll notice some strikingly familiar language in this rant from England.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber has established a new arts funding program through his foundation. Good thing, since it looks like the city of London is cutting back on its culture funding.
• The Dutch government might make the renowned Netherlands Dans Theater perform in the Dutch suburbs rather than overseas.
• Rio de Janeiro doubles its culture budget.
• Ben Eltham reports on support for the arts in the 2011 federal budget in Australia.
• Shannon Litzenberger reports on capitalization discussions from a Canadian perspective.

Data Tells a Story

• Richard Florida investigates the relationship between corporate business taxes and economic competitiveness at the state level, and finds that there isn’t one. Remember, one of Florida’s main arguments in The Rise of the Creative Class was that economic development strategies aimed at drawing companies through lower taxes don’t work anymore. This analysis provides pretty compelling evidence that he’s right. [A note: I’ve criticized these kinds of cross-sectional comparisons in the past because they are not very good at proving causal relationships. But the topic at hand is a better fit for this method, since what’s being found is actually a lack of a relationship.]
• The UK is embarking on a national effort to measure happiness.
• Analyzing Google’s vast storehouse of published data.
• Amanda Alef looks at how arts majors fare financially relative to others.
• Looking at a barter economy experiment in the arts.

Give it Away, Give it Away Now

• On the heels of the Giving Pledge, Gates, Buffet & company are now spearheading a Hollywood Pledge. And the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has signed up 60 foundations for the “Foundation Pledge” (giving focused on underserved communities).
• These five simple questions represent a really great rubric for self-evaluation on the cheap.
• Adam Huttler offers a two–part analysis of what the L3C means for the arts.

Etc.

• The Future of Music Coalition joins a petition to stop the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
• Cool story featuring interviews of NYC buskers trying out for the great Music Under New York program.

In the meantime, here’s some other arts policy buzz around the web, and a look back at the week that was:

• Via Fractured Atlas, another group called ArtsPolicyNow has a competing arts policy platform on Obama’s Citizen Briefing Book, which you can vote up or down as you please. The full document is available here (pdf). (As an aside, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is looking a little sad right now; I’m embarrassed to say that as of this writing the top recommendation is for marijuana legalization, and that #5 is “Revoke the Tax Exempt Status of the Church of Scientology.” Really, people? This is the best you can do?)
• Yet another action item: this petition to create a Secretary of Arts cabinet position, inspired by Quincy Jones, already has an impressive 146,000 signatures.
• Barry Hessenius notes all of the recent activity and takes the opportunity to issue a righteous rant on artists coming together in 2009.
• Not directly arts policy related, but a new mini-study (pdf) by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation finds that business start-ups are important to job creation, much more so (in the aggregate) than established firms. From the report:
  

  The fraction of employment accounted for by U.S. private-sector business startups over the 1980-2005 period is about 3 percent per year. This measure is interpretable as the employment-weighted business startup rate for the United States. While this is a small fraction of overall employment, all of this employment from startups reflects new jobs. As such, 3 percent is large compared to the average annual net employment growth of the U.S. private sector for the same period (about 1.8 percent). This pattern implies that, excluding the jobs from new firms, the U.S. net employment growth rate is negative on average. This simple comparison highlights the importance of business startups to job creation in the United States.

  The report doesn’t consider nonprofit startups, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same principle holds true. (h/t PND)

• The current edition of Newsweek has a long article from Jeremy McCarter on Obama and the arts, looking back to FDR and the New Deal and tackling some of the issues discussed above.
  

  When President Roosevelt signed the Works Progress Administration into law in 1935, it included provisions for four arts programs: theater, writing, music and art. The $418 million (in 2008 dollars) allocated in the first year was a tiny slice of the agency’s total, but, as Nick Taylor relates in “American-Made,” a new history of the WPA, it was extremely effective. Arts organizations such as theaters and symphonies tend to be highly labor-intensive, making them a quick and efficient way to help put many people back to work. (Take note, you writers and artists threatened by new media and the Death of Print: part of the rationale for the program was to find jobs for talented people left unemployed by industrial shifts that predated the Depression, such as vaudevillians being put out of work by the movies.)

  From the vantage point of our current crisis, new employment may be the least interesting result of the arts programs. Without trying to be a latter-day Medici, FDR sponsored some impressive creations, including Orson Welles’s trailblazing, voodoo-inflected, all-black staging of “Macbeth,” as well as countless dazzling murals and posters. These achievements weren’t merely esthetic. The WPA’s investment in the arts also helped bring about a change in values—one that’s especially evident in the work of the Federal Writers’ Project. The agency published state guidebooks that were far more ambitious than itineraries for tourists on car trips. Contributors—including the young Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright—collected stories about the history, people and day-to-day life of cities and towns, making the books part essay collection, part encyclopedia and part vehicle for exploring a certain ideal of Americanness.

• Tom Borrup has an extensive report from the 2008 Creative Clusters conference (a.k.a. The International Creative Economy Network and Conference) in Glasgow over at the Community Arts Network.
• Closer to home, former Miller Theater executive director and darling of the new music world George Steel is returning triumphantly to New York as the new director of City Opera. After watching him leave unexpectedly last year for the Dallas Opera in what seemed at the time a rather strange marriage, the Big Apple media are excited to welcome him back. And Dallas seems content to let him go — the opera’s board chair has a remarkably gracious quote in the Times piece, and Scott Cantrell of the Dallas Morning News writes a bizarre hit piece on Steel, calling him “remote and aloof” and tittering that he didn’t show up at enough dress rehearsals and patron gatherings. Take it for what it’s worth; Cantrell doesn’t seem to much care for newfangled creations by people not named Mozart or Puccini. For example, the same piece (Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place) that is “much maligned” according to Steve Smith is “generally dismissed” in Cantrell’s estimation.
• Umm, so yeah, it turns out that like a quarter to a half of all nonprofit organizations could lose their tax-exempt status next year. Oops! (In fairness, many of those are probably dead organizations that are still on the books for one reason or another. But if you know someone with a small nonprofit, make sure they read this article!)
• Hilarious.
  

  I understand that you’re used to working long hours at Lehman Brothers. Not-for-profit people work crazy hours too — without the promise of overtime pay or the possibility of a car service to take us home at 10 p.m. when we finally turn the lights off. (FYI: We turn those lights off by ourselves.)

• Finally, the Lodestar Foundation has an intriguing $250,000 prize for the best merger or collaboration between nonprofit organizations. Two of the eight finalists are arts and culture applicants, and another is a fascinating merger of a YMCA with a JCC in Toledo.