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.

Lots of movement these past couple of weeks!

• Shannon Daut, formerly Deputy Director of Western State Arts Federation in Denver, CO, will be the new leader of the Alaska State Council on the Arts.
• Vincent Stehle has been announced as the new director of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media.
• Fidelma McGinn, Executive Director of Artist Trust, is leaving to become Vice President of Philanthropic Services for the Seattle Foundation.
• Lawrence Tamburri is out as CEO of the financially troubled Pittsburgh Symphony, and has been replaced by a board member.

ART AND GOVERNMENT

• The DC Office of Human Rights has challenged the practice of offering discounts on performances to professionals under the age of 35.
• Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer is speaking out against a wide-ranging state secrecy law in South Africa that she and others say will be a blank check for censorship.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dance/NYC has released a report on the state of dance in New York City.
• The Otis College of Art and Design is out with its second study of Los Angeles’s creative economy.
• NPR’s Patrick Jarenwattananon takes a look at the Future of Music Coalition’s Artist Revenue Streams survey from the perspective of jazz musicians. (includes video)
• The Foundation Center’s Director of Research, Larry McGill, has a great post on Philanthropy News Digest talking about the limitations of measurement in the social sector. The comments are also well worth reading.
• Assets for Artists is conducting an evaluation of its program, and good for them, they’re offering $100 a pop to low-to-moderate-income Massachusetts artists who are willing to participate in their de facto control group. This is the way to do it, folks.

IN THE FIELD

• Jeanne Ruddy Dance, a part of the Philadelphia modern dance scene for 12 years, is shutting down.
• The Future of Music Coalition takes a hard look at the joint venture between Groupon and Live Nation offering heavily discounted last-minute concert tickets.
• This month’s article on classical music entrepreneurship got quite a lot of attention, and is now one of the most-viewed Createquity blog posts all time. One of the groups profiled in that piece, Classical Revolution, got its own writeup in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. And the LA Times‘s music critic Mark Swed shared the experience of another group that sounds like it could have been included, wild Up.
• I’m hearing more and more about the Trey McIntyre Project, a dance company that purposefully transplanted itself in Boise, Idaho, after a nationwide search for a community to adopt. (Baltimore’s Single Carrot Theatre is an example of an ensemble with a similar immigration story.) TMP received a $450,000 ArtPlace grant to “limit its touring to remain in Boise, where it will engage the community to make dance and dancers ever present,” aiming to “generate local identity and pride equivalent to that fostered by the university football team.” More about that project here.
• As someone with little experience in the visual arts trenches, I found this article on the economics and ethics of artists being asked to donate work to benefit auctions illuminating. (Thanks, Katherine!)

BIG IDEAS

• Will someone please offer Michael Wilkerson a blog? The American University arts administration professor participated this past week in yet another blog salon from Americans for the Arts (this one focusing on the private sector), and offered two blowout posts: one proposing a national dedicated revenue stream that would more than double the federal money available to directly support the arts; and a second questioning the good that proposal would do because of the fundamental assumptions embedded in how arts support is distributed.
• Great job-hunting advice from the Mission Paradox blog.
• The Foundation Center’s CEO Brad Smith compares Occupy Wall Street and the Giving Pledge as social movements in this lighthearted post.
• Cool story from a while back about a foundation that lets all of its staff members (even the receptionists) participate in grantmaking. (You need a subscription to Chronicle of Philanthropy to view.)
• Did you know that Zappos (the online shoe retailer that was recently bought by Amazon) offers its new employees a chance to quit after an initial weeklong training period and pocket $4,000? Ian Ayres and Akhil Amar suggest that law schools offer their students a similar “anti-incentive” to quit after their first year, in order to help save everyone a lot of time and money.
• Very smart analysis from Isaac Butler and Matt Yglesias about geographic redistribution in the arts vs. the rest of the economy.
• Are you ready for the neuroeconomics revolution?

Posting has been light around here lately because I am in the midst of another move. I am coming to the end of my official residence in Rhode Island, where I have been plying my trade and generally causing trouble for the last year or so. I’m moving back to New York to join the rest of my Fractured Atlas colleagues in the West 35th St office, and have been subletting a place this month in Harlem/Morningside to provide a home base for apartment searching (which thankfully looks to be over) and unpacking. I really enjoyed my time in Providence – it’s a very cool small city that has a lot going on for its size and very much “gets” the value of the arts and creative industries in a way that many places don’t.

• Much has been made of the NEA’s new investment in urban revitalization, but since the agency’s budget looks like it will be the same or a little less compared to last year, this is all something of a zero-sum game. In this case, looks like Dana Gioia’s “The Big Read” program is the big loser in Rocco’s reorganization of agency priorities. (As an aside, I came across this old-ish articlecatching up with former NEA Communications Director Yosi Sergant this weekend and noticed the following observation: “in Sergant’s department of 14 people, four were dedicated to making books-on-tape.” Another legacy of Gioia’s literary-centric worldview, perhaps?)
• By the way, did you know the NEA has a YouTube channel? Here’s Design Director Jason Schupbach talking about “creative placemaking.” There’s much more here.
• Meanwhile, right wingers are hot on the trail of arts funding again, though so far it seems less organized than it was for the Sergant incident. The same “arts jobs are not real jobs” lie that we heard during the stimulus fight is once again front and center. (Michael Rushton patiently explains why it’s not true.) Senators Coburn and McCain have continued to identify arts projects supported by the federal government as “wasteful” for no other reason than that they are arts-related, offending Gary Steuer in the process. Perhaps more troubling is the newfound focus by conservatives on state and local funding for the arts, led predictably by Glenn Beck.
• Looks like Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffet’s efforts have had some impact: 10% of the world’s billionaires have now adopted the Giving Pledge to donate at least half of their wealth to charity before or at death. Notable arts supporters among the list include Gerry and Margaret Lenfest, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Paul Allen, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, Bernard and Barbro Osher, and Sanford and Joan Weill. Hopefully they’ll listen to Kathleen Enright’s advice for them.
• Grantmakers in the Arts is ramping up an interesting-looking series of guest blogs, and the latest is a grantmaker-grantee conversation between Ute Zimmerman and Theaster Gates.
• Retrospective: Michael Kaiser looks back on the Arts in Crisis tour, and Conni of Conni’s Avant-Garde Restaurant takes stock of inventory after a year of support from the Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists program.
• Delinquent nonprofit form filers are getting one last chance from the IRS to prove they still exist: file the 990-N “postcard” form online by October 15. Otherwise, it’s lights-out.
• Newsweek may be considering going nonprofit.
• Massachusetts has signed a law empowering local communities across the state to define their own cultural districts and identify incentives for their development. The Massachusetts Cultural Council will manage the program. Earlier this summer, the MCC had been in danger of getting moved under the aegis of a new quasi-public agency called the Massachusetts Marketing Partnership, but it looks like that proposal is off the table.
• So in addition to seven-figure salaries, we need to be giving top culture executives seven-figure tax-free housing as well? I want to see Dan Pallotta‘s defense of this. It’s not all fun and games, though – sometimes you get a full-fledged performance review from your colleagues in the New York Times. If you too want to be a culture executive, Laura Zabel explains how did she get that job.
• I was totally going to give Devon Smith a rest after linking to her blog a bunch of times over the last few months, but dammit, she keeps coming up with fantastic new stuff that can’t be ignored. Her “Social Media Measurement Plan” is perhaps her most ambitious post yet, chock-full of tips and tricks to track your online footprint. It’s seriously a must-read. I’m starting to think maybe we should try to keep Devon from getting a job after all because then she’ll keep giving this stuff away for free. (Just kidding, D.) Devon has a panel proposal in the mix for South by Southwest Interactive; and Fractured Atlas has two, one for Interactive and one in Film.
• By the way, you can vote for those SxSW panels, thus helping to choose the content of the event you’re going to. Ever since I wrote that article on crowdsourced philanthropy platforms, I’m always coming across new systems that I wish I could have discussed as part of it. Case in point: IDEO’s new collective design hub for the good of the world, OpenIDEO. Meanwhile, Lucy Bernholz declares “Curator” to be the philanthropy buzzword du jour.
• Iranian leader declares music incompatible with Islamic values.
• Are affluent Westerners psychologically different from the rest of the world?
• So, this is…unexpected: Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, “is setting up a foundation dealing with contemporary art in the South Pacific [specifically Vanuatu], he’s got 400 acres of land on the island, and will be inviting artists, writers, film makers, composers etc from all over the world to do small residencies of several weeks each. They’re going to have artist residencies starting mid next year, and the whole venue will be based on bamboo.”