• A lot of people are talking about the news that Detroit’s emergency fiscal manager is exploring whether the city-owned art on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts (which I visited for the first time just a few weeks ago) can be considered an asset in the event of a municipal bankruptcy. I will be shocked if anything like this actually happens, but in the meantime it’s provoking some rare discussion of deaccessioning in mainstream media space. See Tegan Kehoe’s recent piece on Createquity for more on the ethics and debate around deaccessioning.
• Wondering what to make of the IRS nonprofit oversight controversy? The Nonprofit Law Prof Blog has a good overview of commentary and analysis from lawyerly circles.
• A new paper by Roger Colinvaux examines the US tax deduction for charitable giving and comes to many of the same recommendations for reform as John Carnwath in his article on the subject for Createquity. Speaking of charitable giving deductions, countries in Europe that have similar legislation are finding that they have to extend the benefits to other member nations of the European Union, whether they want to or not.
• Next City takes a look at the record when it comes to the subsidies cities pay to Bass Pro retail stores (over $500 million to date!) in hopes that they will generate jobs. (It’s not good.) I’m kind of mystified as to why there isn’t more of this kind of before-and-after analysis of these kinds of policy interventions – it seems like rather fertile ground.
• The NEA Art Works blog has a nice interview with Maryland governor Martin O’Malley.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Denise Montgomery, the new executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
• Joanna Woronkowicz is moving on from the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts to become an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Public Affairs working under Michael Rushton, and offers a farewell post in which she touts the idea of an interdisciplinary research cabal focusing on cultural policy.

BIG IDEAS

• Dallas is making a big play to put itself on the world cultural map. Led by Maxwell Anderson, who is the head of both the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Arts District, Dallas officials have launched a new network of “global” cultural districts to be managed by Adrian Ellis of AEA Consulting, assembling an advisory board including representation from New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hong Kong…and lots and lots of people from Dallas.
• Congratulations to Mediuum, a digital marketplace for visual art, which has won the first Creative Arts Competition prize as part of MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for student entrepreneurs. The Creative Arts Competition is awarded for the “innovative use of the arts as a core component of business plans.” (h/t Joe Patti)
• Asking funders to be less insular may be a familiar refrain, but no one can articulate the case quite like Arlene Goldbard, and she does so again in a recent doozy of an essay. Meanwhile, Linda Essig has a review of Arlene’s new book, The Culture of Possibility.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• “So, yes, it’s party time in the world of social impact investing.  But it’s a potluck my friends, and you’d better know what dish [you’re] bringing.” Michael Hickey talks turkey about money you have to pay back.
• Corporate giving is back on the rise, according to a new report from the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy.
• The President/CEO of the New York State Health Foundation offers some perspectives on risk taking at the foundation level.
• Real estate in Detroit is so cheap, it only takes $142,000 to save a historic rock venue from being auctioned and get one of its theaters named after you.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Good rule of thumb for aspiring grad students (especially in the humanities): the more specialized your degree, the more useless it is. Sadly, specialization seems to be the prevailing trend. The University of Nottingham is blazing the trail of single-genre music studies with a two-year course in heavy metal studies. By the way, a study from 2004 indicates a negative correlation between a graduate degree and earnings for jazz players.
• Back when it was super popular, I though Myspace would be an incredible data source for researchers on the music industry. Myspace has largely fallen by the wayside in that regard, but two sociologists from the University of Chicago managed to grab a complete dataset back in 2007 and it’s now showing up in Richard Florida’s blogs.
• According to a new study, people of color tend not to move as much as whites and to stay close to home when they do, which perpetuates spatial inequality.
• A new meta-analysis of studies of art therapy on cancer patients indicates that “the benefits tied to creative arts therapies were small, but similar to those of other complementary techniques such as yoga and acupuncture.” And another study says don’t trust those correlations between music education and SAT scores – smarter students are more likely to take music classes, but that doesn’t mean music classes make you smarter.
• The study of diversity in Bay Area theater that Clayton Lord has been blogging about for a while is finally out; an abbreviated version of the executive summary is here. Five-word version: all the stereotypes are true.
• Sentences to ponder: “Voting is just another survey without individual consequence.”
• First there was Dance Your Ph.D., and now we have JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments – “the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing scientific research in a video format.” ArtScience ascendant!

This is a condensed version of my full Arts Policy Library write-up on the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP). Please check out the latter for a more comprehensive discussion of their report. 

Is an arts degree worth it or worthless? Many an art or art history major has had to defend the value of her studies. Indeed, in a Kiplinger article that used data from payscale.com and Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce to determine the “Worst College Majors for Your Career,” fine arts, studio arts, film/photography, graphic design, drama and theater arts all made the list. The article claims that recent arts graduates have higher unemployment rates and are more likely to wind up working in retail than those who chose other majors. But the recent Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) report, “A Diverse Palette: What Arts Graduates Say About Their Education and Careers” indicates that post-graduation life is not so bad for arts alumni. SNAAP’s report found that:

• The unemployment rate for arts alumni is less than half the unemployment rate for all Americans, and about equivalent to the unemployment rate for college graduates.
• The overwhelming majority (92%) of SNAAP respondents reported either a “good” or “excellent” experience at their alumni institution and most would “do it all over again” if given the chance.
• More than three-quarters of currently employed arts alumni are “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with their primary job.
• More than two-thirds of arts alumni remain active in the arts community by creating, exhibiting and performing.
• Arts alumni are significantly more likely than the average American to have volunteered their time or donated money to an arts organization or artist in the past year.

However, when we look further into SNAAP’s research, the following stand out as issues:

• The possibility that SNAAP’s respondents aren’t representative of arts alumni as a whole, for the following reasons:
  • the survey only reaches graduates who have maintained valid contact information with their school or who can be located using a service called Harris Connect
  • the survey is exclusively online and takes 20-30 minutes to complete, possibly rendering it less attractive for alumni who lack consistent internet access in their homes or don’t feel strongly about their relationship with their alma mater
  • institutions pay to participate in SNAAP, which may indicate that participating institutions are already paying above average attention to their students and alumni
  • a disproportionate number of the participating institutions appear to have top-ranked arts programs, based on an analysis of visual arts fields; graduates from these programs may be better-off and happier with their education than the average arts alumni
• The potential conflict inherent in using data from paying institutions to create a field research report
• SNAAP used different measures than the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce study or the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to collect employment figures; SNAAP’s method includes intermittent work as employment, making accurate comparisons impossible
• The survey does not ask its respondents to consider their opportunity costs when making subjective judgments about the value of their education

Ultimately, the SNAAP report is largely inconclusive, in large part due to the questions about its representativeness and because one of the few metrics that could potentially serve as a common yardstick with other fields of study is complicated by SNAAP’s alternative approach to measuring employment status. Still, SNAAP is the most comprehensive data resource available for pre-professional arts education, and reminds us that an education should be valued for more than the average earning potential of its graduates.

(For a quick summary of this post, see “Strategic National Arts Almuni Project: The Condensed Version.” SNAAP has responded in the comments.)

Is an arts degree worth it or worthless? Many an art or art history major has had to defend the value of her studies. Indeed, in a Kiplinger article that used data from payscale.com and Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce to determine the “Worst College Majors for Your Career,” fine arts, studio arts, film/photography, graphic design, drama and theater arts all made the list. The article warns college students who are tempted to major in fine arts that the unemployment rate for recent grads is 12.6% (almost twice the national average of 6.8%) and they are 1.8% more likely to work in retail than the average college graduate.

The employment situation for recent art-school grads is anything but aesthetic. Slow job growth and an abundance of fine-arts majors means unemployment is high – the second highest on our list. When fine-arts majors do find jobs, they generally don’t pay well. Even experienced artists can expect to make 20% less than their college classmates. While few people have ever gone into art for the money, the East Village isn’t as cheap as it used to be.

So the recent Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) report that finds that the unemployment rate for arts alumni is less than half the unemployment rate for all Americans is heartening, but surprising. Moreover, the report claims that most arts alumni “are satisfied with the opportunities their ‘primary job’ affords to demonstrate their creativity.” The sunny outlook that SNAAP presents in “A Diverse Palette: What Arts Graduates Say About Their Education and Careers” seems to be in conflict with both the aforementioned Kiplinger article and conventional wisdom. But is it? Let’s analyze what the SNAAP report actually has to say about the prospects for arts alumni.

SUMMARY

SNAAP, based at the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, was founded for the stated purposes of providing a comprehensive look at artist development in the United States, and identifying how best to connect arts education and training to artistic careers. SNAAP defines “the arts” and “art” as inclusive of

 a broad range of creative activity including performance, design, architecture, creative writing, music composition, choreography, film, illustration, and fine art.

Since 2009, SNAAP has distributed a yearly report based on the results of an annual online survey that it gives to alumni of participating institutions. These institutions include arts high schools, comprehensive colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges and special-focus arts institutions. Institutions pay to participate in the project, with fees for post-secondary schools ranging from $3300 to $7800, depending upon the size of the arts alumni population. The survey comprises eighty-three questions and takes 20-30 minutes to complete.

The most recent 2012 report, based upon results from the 2011 SNAAP survey, presented many positive findings, or at least findings that appear to be positive. Most SNAAP respondents are currently employed. In fact, for the past two years, the SNAAP respondent unemployment rate is less than half the national unemployment rate for all Americans. What’s more, 87% of currently employed SNAAP respondents are “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with their primary job. Even most of those who are working in non-arts fields report general work-satisfaction, and most also say that despite working in an area outside of the arts, their arts training is still relevant to their work.

When asked if they would “do it all over again,” 77% of SNAAP respondents said that yes, if given the chance to go back in time, they would make the same choices as they originally had in terms of institution and major. Indeed, 92% reported that their overall experience at their institution was either good or excellent, and 88% would recommend their school to other prospective students.

Furthermore, arts alumni are also likely to participate in the arts outside of work. The report explains why this is meaningful:

One of the arguments for public support for the arts is that the presence and contributions of artists add depth and meaning to the human experience, thereby enhancing the quality of life for all. Thus, it’s important to know how arts graduates contribute to the arts and their communities independent of their income-producing work.

More than a quarter of SNAAP respondents have volunteered for an arts organization in the past year, and 45% have donated money to an arts organization or artist in the past 12 months. These are significantly higher rates than those in the general population, where just 2% of Americans volunteer for arts, cultural or humanities organizations, and only 6% of US households with incomes under $100,000 have given money to the arts. Moreover, in their leisure time, 72% of SNAAP respondents remain active in the arts community by creating, exhibiting and performing.

But it isn’t all coming up roses for arts graduates. Despite the encouraging employment data, 50% of survey respondents were “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied with the career advising they received at their school. Nearly half were unhappy with the opportunities for degree-related internships and other work that their institutions provided, and 41% found occasions to network with alumni lacking.

Additionally, 40% of currently employed respondents have two or more jobs, which may be a sign that  they are unable to find full-time work or that their primary job does not provide enough income to live on. In fact, the majority of respondents from all arts majors except architecture earn less than $50,000 per year in their primary job.

Still, the 2012 SNAAP report concludes:

For many of these graduates, going to an arts training institution was “worth it”; they gained invaluable skills that they continue to draw upon whether or not they work as professional artists—both at work and in their non-work time.

ANALYSIS

Certainly the value of an arts education must be measured as more than the average earning potential of its graduates. Even so, the SNAAP report findings are inconsistent with data reported in the Kiplinger article, which states that there are higher unemployment rates for arts graduates. Why might this be? Let’s analyze the methodology of SNAAP’s research.

Respondent Representativeness

The 2011 SNAAP Questionnaire is only available online, and SNAAP relies on the individual institutions to disseminate information about the survey. This means that SNAAP survey respondents maintained valid email and/or mailing addresses on file with their alumni institutions, or had been active enough on social media to be located either directly by their schools or by Harris Connect, the “people finder” service contracted by SNAAP. Respondents who take the time to remain in email contact with their alumni institutions may be more likely to think favorably about those institutions than those who haven’t. And of the alumni contacted, those motivated to respond to the 20-30 minute survey may have been more likely to hold positive viewpoints about their institutions and present career situations.

The exclusive online availability of the survey, as well as the fact that information about the survey is primarily disseminated online, means that respondents most likely have regular internet access, and that they’re comfortable navigating the web. The survey delivery method may skew toward a more well-off demographic who are able to pay for internet in their homes. The questionnaire takes 20-30 minutes to complete. If you’re using your local coffee shop’s internet to look for work and e-mail resumes, you may not be as inclined to use a half hour of that time to complete an alumni survey as someone who is sitting at home after work watching hulu and cruising Facebook.

Anecdotally, I often hear of individuals from well-off backgrounds enjoying success in the arts, in part because they are able to afford to take unpaid internships, or participate in residencies where they generate no income for months at a time. These opportunities may lead to greater things. Additionally, these are pleasurable experiences, and although one may not be earning a large income, a SNAAP respondent may still reflect on them positively, especially if paying rent and buying food isn’t a concern. Thus, it’s possible that the SNAAP respondents are more financially comfortable in the aggregate than arts alumni as a whole, and if so we might expect to see this bias reflected in the responses. (Unfortunately, while the SNAAP survey asks the age, gender and ethnicity of each respondent, it does not ask any questions about the socio-economic background of the respondent, or whether he or she has additional financial support or means beyond his or her income.)

Danielle J. Lindemann and Steven J. Tepper’s recently published follow-up report on SNAAP’s 2010 survey, which was structured and delivered in the same way as the 2011 survey, acknowledges the survey’s potential response bias: “It is plausible that more financially successful arts graduates are more likely to fill out a survey about their experiences.” However, they counter that results from an earlier study indicate that the SNAAP results are not skewed in this respect. In 2009, SNAAP conducted a shadow study using a variety of incentives, such as a $15 gift card and inclusion into a lottery for a $100 award, as well as different modes of delivery, including paper, web and phone. Their report explains:

We found that there were no meaningful differences in the characteristics of the graduates in the high response rate group compared to the low response rate group. Related to the question of employment, for example, respondents from the higher-response rate sample indicated that they were currently doing paid work an average of 31 hours per week. Comparable individuals from the full SNAAP sample in 2009 indicated that they were doing paid work an average of 34 hours per week.

Still, even if alumni who are financially better off weren’t more likely to respond to the SNAAP survey, the issue of what alumni the SNAAP survey reached remains. More than 36,000 alumni responded to the survey, for an average institutional response rate of just over 20%. But, alumni who have updated their institution with current contact information may already be more inclined to respond positively about that institution than those who haven’t.

Even if there is no bias among respondents to the survey, however, the selection of institutions participating in SNAAP is not random. The 2011 SNAAP survey was sent to alumni from 183 programs in 66 institutions, including 8 arts high schools, 20 private nonprofit postsecondary schools, and 38 public postsecondary schools. These postsecondary institutions include colleges and universities with top-ranked arts programs, such as Maryland Institute College of Art, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, University of California – Los Angeles and Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as a number that are less known for their arts programs. At first glance, this seems like a reasonable cross-section of higher arts education across the nation. Still, these institutions have all chosen to participate in SNAAP, and paid a fee for the privilege of doing so. This suggests that they are already paying above average attention to students and alumni of their arts programs. What’s more, of the 58 postsecondary institutions, more than 30% have art programs in disciplines that include fine arts, ceramics, graphic design, multimedia/visual communications, painting/drawing, photography, printmaking, and sculpture, ranked in the top 20 by US News. To put this in perspective, the College Arts Association’s directory of Graduate programs in Studio Art and Design includes almost 250 individual institutions. These arts graduates, with degrees from esteemed institutions, may be more financially successful and happier with their arts training than arts alumni from second- and third-tier schools.

SNAAP’s efforts to increase and test response rates, through its use of Harris Connect and the shadow survey, are commendable. Still, the report repeatedly uses “arts alumni,” “arts graduates” and “SNAAP respondents” interchangeably. Are respondents to the survey representative of arts alumni as a whole? Unfortunately, there is no way for us to know.

Conflicting Interests

As mentioned earlier, participating institutions pay to have the survey sent to their alumni. This potentially creates a bias, if not in the survey’s responses, then in how this data is ultimately interpreted in the final SNAAP report and “packaged” to a broader audience. SNAAP explains why it requires fees from participating institutions:

…as a self-sustaining research project, institutional participation fees underwrite the cost of survey administration, data analysis, and school reports.

In other words, SNAAP needs these fees in order to remain viable. Although the individual institutions’ reports aren’t made public, schools might understandably be hesitant to participate in a study that openly casts doubt on the value of an arts education. In turn, that lack of participation could mean the end of SNAAP. Indeed, the SNAAP report does include negative statistics, but they are always countered with a positive statement, so that the overall tone and takeaway is optimistic. For example, the following passage from the SNAAP report came after a list of mixed results about alumni satisfaction with various aspects of their education:

While the results suggest a variety of strengths and weaknesses for institutions to consider, they also indicate that despite any less than stellar experiences alumni may have had, most who obtained an arts degree have few regrets. When asked if they would still attend their institution if they could start over again, over three quarters (77%) say definitely or probably yes. Furthermore, when asked if they would recommend their institution to another student like them, 88% say yes.

Although the 2011 report findings are not drastically negative overall, it’s unclear whether SNAAP would be in a position to draw attention to a significant and sustained deterioration in these numbers in the future.

Data Comparability

SNAAP reports that the SNAAP respondent unemployment rate is less than half the national unemployment rate for all Americans, which in 2011 was 8.9%.This figure becomes less impressive when compared with the unemployment rate of college-educated Americans, which most SNAAP respondents are. The 2011 national unemployment rate for college graduates is 4%; for SNAAP respondents with a bachelor’s degree, it’s also 4%, and for those with a master’s, it’s 5%. Still, it would appear that arts alumni are not significantly better or worse off than college graduates with non-arts majors, which conflicts with the Georgetown research cited in the Kiplinger article. How could this be?

SNAAP explains that unlike Carnevale, Cheah and Strohl’s Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce study, its employment figures are based upon different measures than those used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The difference in employment numbers between data from SNAAP and from other sources may be due in part to SNAAP’s employment measures, which include intermittent work—not uncommon among professional artists—as among the ways of being employed. The U.S. Census, for example, would label such people as unemployed.

In particular, SNAAP may be counting severely underemployed respondents as employed because they identify as self-employed/ freelancers. Freelancers are often more affected than traditional employees during a recession, from which the US continues to recover. When pockets are tight and businesses aren’t growing, customers are more likely to view purchases of goods like art as luxuries, see participating in a continuing ed or community art class as optional, and need services like design less. In fact, BLS projects that employment opportunities for craft and fine artists will grow by 5% over the next decade, which is slower than the average 14.3% projected for all occupations.

Because of the nature of SNAAP, the project only collects data about arts alumni. However, in order to truly draw conclusions about the value of an arts degree, we would need to see data collected in the same way for a cross-section of majors. Unfortunately, one of the few metrics that could potentially serve as a common yardstick is complicated by SNAAP’s alternative approach to measuring employment status. SNAAP could easily have designed its survey to enable analysis of unemployment figures comparable to BLS statistics alongside numbers derived from the alternative method. It’s unclear why this path wasn’t taken.

Considering the Alternatives

Many of the questions in the SNAAP survey ask alumni about subjective impressions, like these:

In your opinion, how much did [INSTITUTION] help you acquire or develop each of the following skills and abilities?

Please describe how your arts training is or is not relevant to your current work.

Describe how your arts training at [INSTITUTION] is or is not relevant to your participation in civic and community life.

Certainly most arts alumni value the arts—that’s why they chose an arts major—and the SNAAP survey provides them with the opportunity to opine about the importance of the arts. But for most arts alumni, the choice was not between pursuing an arts degree or doing nothing. Instead, the choice was between studying the arts and studying something else. Or perhaps it was between pursing an arts-related graduate degree and gaining additional experience in the workplace, or investing in a home. Respondents weren’t asked to reflect upon the sacrifices that they might have made in choosing their field of study.

I have no doubt that the education that arts alumni received contributed to skill sets that are relevant to their primary employment and civic engagement. But it’s also possible that alumni may have developed equivalent or better skill sets related to their current employment with an alternative course of study. Still, it is encouraging to learn that most SNAAP respondents have found work “congruent with their values and dispositions” that affords them the opportunity to “demonstrate their creativity.”    

IMPLICATIONS

So what does this mean? Certainly not that the SNAAP study has no value, nor that arts education is worthless. But the SNAAP report is largely inconclusive. SNAAP respondents are not necessarily reflective of the larger pool of arts alumni. A significant proportion of the participating institutions have top-ranked arts programs. It’s possible that a sample with alumni from a greater range of arts programs would produce the same results, but it’s also possible that SNAAP’s sample is biased. The report also presents an alternative way of measuring employment data, which could be valuable in creating a more accurate view of the employment situations of those who freelance or are self-employed, regardless of whether that work is arts related. Unfortunately, absent a comprehensive employment survey across fields using SNAAP’s method, it tells us very little about arts alumni as compared to holders of college and graduate degrees as a whole.

As an artist, arts educator, and arts administrator, I want to believe that an arts education is always worth it. Certainly the median salary of arts alumni should not be the sole factor in determining its value. However, with the average student loan debt for recent college graduates at over $26,000, and many borrowing beyond that to pursue graduate degrees, financial considerations shouldn’t be eliminated from the equation entirely. As I read the SNAAP report, I found myself thinking about Vanderbilt University Law Professor Herwig Schlunk’s groundbreaking 2009 academic essay, “Mamas Don’t Let You Babies Grow Up To Be… Lawyers,” in which he calculates opportunity and out-of-pocket costs for law students, and the likely return for different types of students, depending upon their class rank and the prestige of their program. He concludes that for many, particularly average students graduating from second and third tier schools, law school is a losing proposition.

It’s not possible to determine for whom an arts education is a worthy investment because no similar study has been done for art students. The difficulty for SNAAP is that its first responsibility is to analyze data for paying customers, not to  use that data as field research to draw larger conclusions. Still, at this time SNAAP is the most comprehensive data resource available for pre-professional arts education.

Few people go into the arts for the money. It’s likely that most of us instinctively knew that the median salary of an arts major would be significantly less than that of an engineering or business major, even before Georgetown released their report. SNAAP’s report does tell us that although a career in the arts may not be incredibly lucrative, not all artists are starving. But it also reminds us that an education should be valued for more than the average earning potential of its graduates.

… the worth of an arts degree must be measured by both pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits. Much has been made of recent reports using national income data showing that arts graduates have lower than average earnings… Tangible economic benefits are unquestionably important, but calibrating the success of arts graduates only by how much they make does a disservice not only to those who practice their art and apparently derive great satisfaction from doing so, but also to the communities they enrich with artistic contributions through sharing their artistic creations, teaching, and supporting other artists.

FURTHER READING

For those who would like to dig in to SNAAP’s data in more detail, the 2011 Aggregate Frequency Report is what you’re looking for.

The 2011 SNAAP Annual Report covers the 2010 survey, along with the 2010 Aggregate Frequency Report.

Danielle J, Lindemann and Steven J. Tepper’s SNAAP special report, “Painting With Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of an Arts Degree” addresses potential bias issues and further analyzes the 2010 survey findings.

SNAAP publishes nifty interactive visualizations of its survey data, called SnaapShots. Here is the SnaapShot of the 2011 survey data, and the previous version, SnaapShot 2010.

Daniel Luzer critiques the SNAAP survey bias in Washington Monthly.

The Kennedy Center discusses the survey.

SNAAP manager Sally Gaskill blogs about SNAAP’s findings for Americans for the Arts.

• The National Endowment for the Arts has spearheaded the formation of a new coalition of private funders to support its creative placemaking agenda. Called ArtPlace, the collaboration features Carol Coletta as its fearless leader, and has the backing of such significant national funders as the Ford, Knight, Kresge, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations. Grants and a $12 million loan fund are administered through the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a nonprofit lender and financial consulting organization. ArtPlace has already made a set of 34 grants in “record time” totaling $11.5 million to a range of projects in the Our Town vein (including one to Coletta’s former employer, CEOs for Cities, in an cool-looking collaboration with GOOD Design.). Thankfully, after a closed-door process for this first round, ArtPlace is opening up next year’s grants through a letter of inquiry which is due November 15. Coletta has more at the Art Works blog.

PHILANTHROPY

• A couple of weeks ago, Sean Stannard-Stockton asked a seemingly innocent question: who should be the Hewlett Foundation’s next president? I was surprised to see Sean wrote a follow-up in which he shares that “emails I’ve gotten from very senior members of the philanthropic community – people whose opinions I respect very much – suggest that my hosting this discussion is far more controversial than I might have guessed.” Apparently, according to these Very Senior People (none of whom, Sean notes, are Hewlett employees), speculating about who might ultimately be the driving force behind the distribution of hundreds of millions of tax-exempt philanthropic dollars a year should be off-limits to plebes who are not on the Hewlett Foundation Board. Thankfully, Sean elected not to listen to this silliness and has gone ahead and published the suggestions that have come in, which include some very interesting names.
• Speaking of Hewlett, Emiko Ono will be the new Program Officer for the Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, replacing Marc Vogl. Ono was Director of Grants and Professional Development for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
• Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has announced a first-of-its-kind “Initiative on Impact Investing.” Officials at the school’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) will be developing a new course, case materials, and working with practitioners to explore impact investing in more depth in an academic setting.
• Ouch: the Center for Effective Philanthropy reports that community foundation leaders are far less strategic in their work than their rhetoric would suggest. In particular, “CEOs who are strategic in their donor work focus explicitly on how donor contributions will benefit the community. In comparison, nonstrategic CEOs focus on how donor contributions will continue to flow to the foundation.”

IN THE FIELD

• After a decade of planning and building, Kansas City’s $326 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts has opened – one of the last products of the performing arts building boom of the 1990s-2000s.
• Doug Borwick, the Association of Arts Administration Educators president who has a new blog on ArtsJournal called Engaging Matters, writes a love letter to the much-missed Community Arts Network.
• And here’s an inside look at Yerba Buena’s personalized membership program, YBCA: YOU, with more from Borwick.
• Words I’d never thought I’d write department: congratulations to Philly’s Mural Arts Program, which landed a cover story…in AAA New York Car & Travel magazine!
• Composer Nico Muhly offers an insider’s perspective on the byzantine restrictions faced by orchestral composers seeking access to recordings of their own work.
• Sally Gaskill, who runs the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project at Indiana University, interviews Angela Myles Beeching, director of the Center for Music Entrepreneurship at Manhattan School of Music, about preparing musicians for careers outside the academy.
• And speaking of professional training degrees for artists, excuse Poets & Writers magazine for trying to give people some sense of how to choose a creative writing MFA program. According to an angry group of writing faculty, the fact that the rankings take financial aid too heavily into account is enough to break out the pitchforks.

THOUGHT BUBBLES

• A very interesting interview with John Kreidler about his cultural policy simulation game, Medici’s Lever.
• Cool true-life story of the birth of an internet meme, conceived by the arts blogosphere’s own Chris Ashworth.
• Clay Lord offers a rare look at the neuroscience of audience response to theater.
• Arlene Goldbard offers her vision of how the arts could play a role in a new stimulus.
• Plagiarism appears to be on the rise in the internet age, even among doctoral students: a study of 120 dissertations in psychology turned up instances of plagiarism (defined as using 10 or more words from another source verbatim without attribution) in a shocking 80% of them. If even the future teachers are plagiarizing, what does that mean for the long term trend?
• Surprise, surprise: when you raise prices 60%, you might lose some customers.
• Two months ago, shoemaker Converse opened up a free recording studio in the ultra-hip neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The New York Times spends a day there talking to the artists taking advantage of the service. A competitive process is used to identify musicians, and as with Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love” (see below), artists are chosen “less for their talent than for their viral energies — their presence on MySpace or Facebook, their hustle in pursuing their careers.”
• I found this live improvised playwriting experiment between Neil Labute and Theresa Rebeck kind of cool, despite the hokey setup.
• I’ve never understood why anyone would want a tattoo, but it seems buyer’s remorse is at an all-time high. Unfortunately, tattoo-removal-seekers are finding that it’s not so easy to turn back time.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In connection with the Artist Revenue Streams project, Future of Music Coalition and the Field are co-hosting (along with a boatload of other organizations including Fractured Atlas) a workshop for musicians on “accounting for creatives” in NYC on Monday, September 19. Check the link for info.
• Nice to see an organization that just released a research report (the Center for Effective Philanthropy, in this case) openly discussing how response bias might have affected the results. We need to see more of this kind of transparency in reporting research results.
• I was intrigued to hear of the formation of a new music research and composition e-journal series on the Social Science Research Network database, led (mostly) by Boston University faculty.
• Andrew Taylor points us to a new book by the Curb Center’s Steven Tepper on protest and the arts.
• Two economists estimate the “psychic value” of a work of art (as distinct from its investment value) at 28% of its overall price.

LOOKING BACK

(the following are some “retro” links from the past 12 months that for one reason or another didn’t make it into the around the horn wrap-ups the first time around.)

• Joshua Phillips lays out a very serious and detailed proposal (and justification) for a public policy game show.
• It’s not too often that I see a coherent conservative case against arts funding, but here’s an example for those who might be curious. Main arguments: the evidence of the arts’ economic impact is flimsy, and government funding makes for worse art.
• It was hard to suppress a wry smile upon learning that Leona Helmsley’s precious dog Trouble, to which she left $12 million in her will (disowning two of her grandchildren in the process), has passed away. The funds held in Trouble’s trust have reverted to Helmsley’s charitable foundation, which is one of the largest in the world.
• Wondering where our nation’s sudden income inequality came from? Since 1992, super-wealthy Americans’ effective tax burden has plummeted by more than a third. Over the same time period, the effective tax rate for all taxpayers has dropped only 6%.
• Is subway pop-up theater the new flashmob-chorus/dance/opera-in-a-mall?
• I found this quote worth mulling over, from the NYTimes Magazine’s writeup of Kickstarter last month:
  

  I sat in on a meeting where the [“Projects We Love”] newsletter picks were made. During the half-hour or so Strickler and the team discussed the choices, I was struck by how often they talked not about the projects but about the pitches. “His video is so boring.” “What are the rewards?” “Why is this cool?” They were focused on the project ideas through the filter of “the Kickstarter project” as a form. “We have values,” Chen told me, and they boil down to prizing creators who respect its proc­ess. They favor creators who think through the rewards for backers, get the word out and engage an audience. In other words, the process doesn’t shape the aesthetic. It is the aesthetic.

Here’s an excerpt:

What changed me the most [at business school] was the exposure to an endless panoply of other areas of human life beyond contemporary classical music. Sure, I learned about assets and liabilities and how to read a cash flow statement, but I also learned about the auction for 3G wireless ranges, competition between Target and Wal-Mart, why Turkey is an emerging power player in the Middle East, and how colleges and foundations manage their endowments. […]

In the course of this sudden immersion into what the rest of the world thinks about and does on a daily basis, I came to realize that my former existence had been focused like a laser on about 0.00001% of everything that matters. It was like the veil had been lifted on my life: the choices I faced when I voted in an election or needed to buy produce or searched for an apartment to rent or, yes, chose a graduate school had all been determined by somebody, or more often a collection of somebodies acting in somewhat predictable ways. It became clear to me that I was never going to have control over my own destiny unless I had the capacity to see and understand the external forces that were influencing my circumstances. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, too. So here are a couple of vignettes from my own journey into the belly of the capitalist beast, which I offer in the hopes of connecting my experiences (and perhaps some of yours) to the bigger picture. After all, we are just variations on a theme.

Read the rest over at NewMusicBox.

The Flanagan report confirms that labor costs at the nation’s top symphony orchestras have, indeed, risen faster than earned income, and this has some people upset. They seem to think that the report is a Chicken Little doomsday speech pushed by a cadre of orchestra managers in a conspiracy to build a public case for breaking the musicians’ union. While I can’t speak for the motivations behind the report’s origin, the report itself doesn’t say anything of the sort. On the contrary, it states on page 87 that,

The trend in total performance plus nonperformance revenue (regression 8) is modestly higher than the trend in total expenses (regression 9), so the overall financial balance improves slightly over time, after controlling for the effect of general economic conditions.

So orchestras (or at least the 63 relatively wealthy ones that were a part of the study) have successfully compensated for their increased labor costs by a combination of raising prices and seeking more donations—exactly what Baumol and Bowen’s model predicts. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with raised prices and more donations, assuming the market can bear it. And when combined with increased price discrimination, such as in the case of college financial aid programs, the social effects can be quite positive as access is increased rather than limited. However, an increasing reliance on contributed rather than earned income still feels scary, because contributed income just seems less stable. How can we count on people to just keep giving money away, against all rational instinct? Although orchestras have managed to stay afloat these past few decades, with some experiencing genuine financial success, I don’t see these issues going away anytime soon. The entire model is extremely dependent on the orchestra’s ability to find new donors and convince existing donors to give more and more for essentially the same experience. If the bottom were to suddenly drop out of that revenue stream, orchestras would find themselves incredibly exposed.

Now, what does this have to do with newspapers? Well, in addition to my Nonprofits class I’ve also been taking a course called Media Economics and Financing Journalism, taught by a member of the family that used to own the Boston Globe. As the semester has progressed, I’ve slowly become convinced that newspapers are in almost the exact same boat as symphony orchestras. They also face a Baumol effect in that technology advances have had limited benefits for the efficiency of quality original reporting. Furthermore, the most profitable sections of the newspaper (the sports, travel, and health pages) and the section that provides the most public good (the news division) are not the same. Our guest speaker in class yesterday even remarked that the demographics of his newspaper subscribers and subscribers to the local orchestra are virtually identical: aging, upper-income, and mostly white. However, unlike orchestras, most newspapers have had to rely solely on earned income to compensate for their rising labor costs—and so far, it’s not working. As a result, staff positions are being cut at print publications all around the country, with critics (music, dance, theater, and now even film) some of the first to go. After all, why should a paper pay someone to go see a movie and write about it when so many are willing to do just that for free? Even the educational environment in the two fields invite parallels, with both conservatories and journalism schools churning out new graduates at record rates, giving them the highest quality training for jobs that simply don’t exist.

If we can agree that journalism does provide an indispensable public good, in the form of in-depth, factual information not available anywhere else, I can’t help but see it gravitating toward a contributed income model in the coming years. No matter what steps the current industry giants take to shore up revenue streams, whether it be the Washington Post buying Kaplan or the New York Times Co. grabbing a piece of New England Sports Ventures, their core journalism operations will remain loss leaders, and thus vulnerable to cost-cutting pressures. Absent a significant change in industry dynamics, I would not be surprised if nonprofit journalism models become more common in coming years.