• A Federal court has overturned the FCC’s “net neutrality” regulations, which have required internet service providers to treat all content equally. Legal details here; implications for artists and ways to get involved here. Meanwhile, AT&T has announced a plan to exempt selected content from wireless data caps; artists are expressing concern.
• How many foundations does it take to keep Detroit’s art in Detroit? Nine and counting: the ad-hoc alliance of funders has pledged to give $330m to reduce the city’s unfunded pension liability if the city’s creditors will agree to allow the Detroit Institute of Art to become a separate non-profit with its collection intact. In a nod to its origins, the Ford Foundation is the largest single contributor. It’s unclear whether this will fly with the creditors, so additional donors are being sought. (This could be part of an alarming trend: the Annenberg Foundation recently had to spend more than $500k to return sacred Hopi artifacts home.)
• Thinking of applying for nonprofit status? You may need to brace yourself for a longer wait time than usual. The recent federal budget agreement gives the IRS $526 million less than last year and mandates the agency spend more time reporting to Congress.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• With Bill de Blasio having taken office, speculation builds around the next NYC Commissioner for Cultural Affairs, with names such as actress Cynthia Nixon, former Alliance for the Arts head Randy Bourscheidt, and Tom Finklepearl being floated as potential candidates to run what may be the nation’s largest arts funder. Meanwhile, Michael Kaiser praises outgoing Commissioner Kate Levin – and says we need her at the NEA.
• Karen Hanan, Executive Director of Arts Northwest, is transitioning to lead the Washington State Arts Commission effective March 1.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• How are arts organizations handling ongoing, recession-related budget pressure? Some are experimenting with curtain times, guerilla art, and other innovations; others are embracing an organizational cultural of abundance. Still others ask, “what budget pressure?”
• On the heels of the NEA’s decision to support collective impact projects for arts education, Ken Thompson of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation observes that despite the flurry of interest from funders, they display an overall “lack of certainty about what collective impact is” and for the most part remain focused on the programmatic rather than systems level. One source of the problem? For all of funders’ efforts to get grantees to collaborate, they aren’t doing much of it themselves.

IN THE FIELD

• After winning hearts and minds across the nation with its making-it-big-in-Idaho story, come this July, the Trey McIntyre Project will disband as a dance company, focusing instead on “other enterprises involving dance, film production, and photography.” Despite TMP’s throwing in the towel, Sydney Skybetter sees a triumph and not a failure.
• In other dance news, choreographer Gina Gibney’s company will take over the former home of Dance New Amsterdam in downtown Manhattan, preserving the space as a hub for dancers from commercial and non-profit companies at a time when space is scarce.
• After a three year lockout (and, as we reported a few weeks ago, an attempt to form their own nonprofit), musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra will return to their orchestra hall next month thanks to a contract settlement that cuts their pay and benefits by roughly 15 percent.
• A painting by Glenn Brown replicating the cover of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel “The Stars Like Dust” has sold for almost $6 million, causing many techies to suddenly find themselves in the unfamiliar position of advocating for copyright enforcement.
• Nonprofit theater makes way for film and television: Atlanta’s Woodruff Art Center has sold its three-stage 14th Street Playhouse to the Savannah College of Art and Design, which will use the space to house TV and film degree programs. Woodruff, in turn, donated $1.9 million of sale proceeds to the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta to establish a new grant fund to support local performing arts organizations.

BIG IDEAS

• We nearly missed this end-of-year roundup of “10 trends and 10 predictions” for the nonprofit sector from NonProfit Quarterly. You’ll recognize several of the items, like the emerging national security state and general government incompetence, from our list of the top 10 arts policy stories, but NPQ adds several others to the table (including an emerging progressive agenda at the local government level) and gives arts organizations a special shout-out – for their “struggl[ing]…business models.” Woohoo.
• Over at Barry’s Blog, social media guru and recent Arts Dinner-Vention participant Devon Smith delves into the potential roles of user experience designers, Google glass, and 3D printers in arts organizations, and offers some insights on the need for think tanks (including ours) in the arts.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts has posted a batch of working papers and reports resulting from the inaugural year of its Research: Art Works program. There’s a range of goodies to dig into, including a study of the racial and ethnic composition of arts boards, and another look at the arts as a driver of economic growth.
• The Brooklyn Commune Project is out with a new report “on the state of the performing arts from the perspective of artists.” Researched and written by volunteers, it includes an impressive and cogent summary of the economic challenges performing artists face, and thoughtful recommendations for the sector. At 50+ pages it’s not a short read, but a worthwhile one. (More from Andy Horwitz here.)
  
• Another report from the UK examines how artists can support the development of socially responsible, sustainable economies, and identifies three “vital practices” that allow them to do so: 1) critical reflection around how artists maintain their livelihoods, 2) opportunities for artists to “pool their risk” when embarking on new endeavors, and 3) opportunities for artists to access unused spaces in urban environments.
• Amid increased calls for states to track student access to arts education comes this welcome reminder that determining access is more complicated than counting which schools offer which courses.
• In the latest distant-reading study, analysts have crunched “various linguistic characteristics” of a slew of old books against their commercial and critical success, then applied the resulting algorithms to contemporary writers to find that Dan Brown, William Faulkner, and Philip Roth aren’t very successful. Points for counter-intuitive results, at least.

• Glenn Beck is at it again: the right-wing broadcaster recently attacked the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture along with the Imagining America initiative on his Internet show, The Blaze. Far from a government agency, the USDAC is a “citizen-powered” art project that hasn’t received any public funding to date. Not one to be deterred by facts, Beck claims the two groups are “America’s newest propaganda machine” attempting to “rewrite our history.”
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has signed a new lease with the city of New York that clarifies the museum is allowed to charge a suggested admissions fee, and added fees for special exhibitions. A lawsuit filed earlier this year alleged that the Met’s previous lease with the city required the museum to be free to the public five days a week.
• Cultural policy researchers in England are crying foul over Arts Council England’s “long-standing bias” toward organizations based in London, which receive a whopping 82% of funding, and asking it be redistributed proportionally to the population across the country.
• A number of theaters in upstate New York are concerned about the possible opening of several casinos in the area and the potential impact on booking major performers and retaining audiences. The advocacy group Upstate Theaters for a Fair Game is seeking protections from the state to “‘establish a fair and reasonable partnership” between the casinos and the local market.

IN THE FIELD

• The Museum of Modern Art sure is committed to staying on top of digital trends in education: it jumped on the MOOC train early, and now has a new partnership with Khan Academy.
• Two Latino theater companies in New York, Pregones Theater and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, are getting set to merge with the help of Time Warner and the Ford Foundation. The two performing ensembles will retain their original names under the new organization, but will share resources.
• The Theater for a New Audience has moved into its first permanent home after spending the last 34 years producing shows in a variety of rented spaces around Manhattan. City planners view the completion of the newly constructed theater as “the capstone” to a downtown Brooklyn cultural district long in the making.
• What’s going on with the Brooklyn Philharmonic? The NYC-area orchestra made a splash back in 2011 with a daring programming strategy focused on marrying classical music with other more widely popular genres as well as local composers and artists. But all the positive press and attention the new direction received apparently wasn’t enough to stanch the organization’s financial bleeding.
• While the debate rages on over whether Spotify is good or bad for musicians, YouTube muscles in on its territory by planning a subscription service that would give users on-demand, ad-free access to music videos on their mobile phones.
• Musicians of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra recently voted to break from their local union chapter of the American Federation of Musicians in an unprecedented industry move. The decision was reportedly motivated in part by the “understanding that to be successful as an orchestra in the future, [they] need more flexibility, they need to be nimble, and…unions sometimes get in the way of that.”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• With 71 percent of projects getting funded (compared to the 43 percent average), the dance community boasts the highest proportion of successful Kickstarter campaigns. Theater clocks in at second place with a 64 percent success rate.  Is this evidence that arts orgs are reaching new supporters – or just swapping money back and forth between their friends?
• Pop quiz: which nonprofit group has successfully  “reduc[ed] its reliance on foundation funding, buil[t] new revenue sources” and is “constantly experimenting and challenging assumptions around who their audience is and what they care about”? Nope, not the arts — nonprofit news outlets.

BIG IDEAS

• Barry Hessenius’s Arts Dinner-vention has wrapped, and the edited video has been posted in seven installments; GIA collects them all on one convenient page. The conversation among some of the leading lights of arts administration explores ideas for the future across three areas: the role of the community, new format and delivery mechanisms, and the artist’s role and artist ecosystems.
• Say you didn’t require a project budget as part of that RFP. What’s the worst that could happen? Michelle Williams calls for grantmakers to trust the artists we work with, and she catalogues some innovative ideas from the GIA 2013 conference.
• Scott Walters has a new blog series examining the history of the regional theater movement by riffing on Todd London’s An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions of a New American Art. London, incidentally, delivered what reads like a doozy of a talk on innovation at the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture.
• Michael Kaiser’s latest book, The Cycle: A Practical Approach to Managing Arts Organizations takes an optimistic look at the difficult and delicate task of building an arts organization that is effective and strong enough to last.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is offering a $30,000 prize for an interactive application that will “make the rich content of the 2012 [Survey of Public Participation in the Arts] more accessible to the public through a series of interactive, visually appealing, and easy-to-use data visualization tools.” Submissions are due February 3.
• A new study by On the Move examines how European cities support “cultural mobility” – the ease with which artists and cultural professionals engage outside their home region.
• In an effort to increase both convenience and access to data on the nonprofit sector, major players Guidestar and the Foundation Center have entered into a strategic partnership meant to “support the field in new and innovative ways.”
• The Whole Schools Initiative in Mississippi reports that 5,000+ students participating in an arts integration program performed significantly better on fourth and fifth grade state assessments than their peers.
• For its Arts, Culture and Audiences week, the American Evaluation Association highlighted assessment practices in arts education with a series of blog posts stressing that assessments can be “hands-on, active learning experiences for students.”
• York University and the National Ballet School in Toronto are partnering to conduct a pilot study with the hopes of providing scientific evidence of the positive mental and physical effects of dance on people with Parkinson’s disease.
• Grantmakers in the Arts’s ongoing research into support for individual artists has generated a crop of admirably detailed case studies of how a nonprofit grantmaker, state agency, private foundation, and family foundation select recipients for their awards to individuals.

• The Future of Music Coalition has a great roundup of takeaways from a recent congressional hearing on copyright law and the technology sector. Big ones include the very different challenges posed by copyrights versus patents, and that for the most part, technology companies don’t see copyright restrictions as stifling their ability to innovate.
• A new arts center in New York City (and the whopping $50 million in city capital funding that’s making it possible) has Mayor Bloomberg’s fingerprints all over it.
• Reason #22 to think twice before moving into a glass house: the New York State Supreme Court has ruled that a artist was well within his First Amendment rights when he took and then exhibited photographs of his neighbors — including two small children — inside their glass-walled home from across the street. Upon recognizing their images in an advertisement for the upcoming exhibit, the neighbors had attempted to sue the artist for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Katy Locker will join the Knight Foundation as its Detroit-based program director; she is currently VP of Programs at the Detroit-based Hudson-Webber Foundation. In an interview with former ArtPlace CEO Carol Colletta, she lists the arts as one among several “levers to continuing Detroit’s turn around.”
• Lisa Hall will become VP for Programs at Houston Endowment. She comes from YES Prep Public Schools, where she was VP for Talent Support and General Counsel.
• KPAC, a classical radio station in San Antonio, has cut its five local hosts to reduce costs and will use a syndicated service from Minnesota. The station has offered the hosts part-time work; so far, only one, Dierdre Saravia, has accepted.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Newly-appointed Ford Foundation President Darren Walker offers three lessons on philanthropy: collaborate broadly, as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation did in the Harlem Chlidren’s Zone; invest in due diligence into grantees to ensure leaders are both passionate and adequately supported by their organizations; and recognize that the kinds of metrics used to measure success in business won’t apply in many philanthropic contexts.
• Grantmakers in the Arts continues to take a more activist stance regarding cultural equity. Earlier this summer, the entire GIA board of directors underwent two days of anti-racism training led by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. A similar two-day workshop (though led by a different group) will be offered to grantmakers attending this year’s GIA conference in October.

BIG IDEAS

• Organized labor is declining, the nonprofit sector is expanding, and two may well meet in the middle. Employees at a homeless service nonprofit in San Francisco successfully unionized in June, signaling what might be the beginning of a broader trend.  And while unions have been getting a bad rap recently this article points out that “the mission-driven nature of nonprofits can prove to be an asset in providing an alternative model to the us-versus-them framework adopted in most private sector organizing.”
• Angie Kim shares two great examples (both arts-related) of nonprofit membership associations, typically ill-equipped to drive sector-wide change, assuming a leadership role at the risk of alienating members or compromising revenue streams.
• Half of Barry Hessenius’s “Dinner-vention Party” guests offer their thoughts on how the arts can address declining audience numbers and shifting participation in truly new ways. This first batch includes “briefing papers” by Laura Zabel, Kimberly Howard, Clayton Lord, Margy Waller, Tamara Alvarado, and Nina Simon.
• What happens when video-game designers become auteurs? In the case of Thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen, the artists reworks his art many times before releasing it to get the “emotional impact right,” his company goes bankrupt as the project runs over schedule and over budget – and the final product becomes a critical darling, breaks sales record, and wins its creator a $5.5m venture-capital investment.

IN THE FIELD

• A new movement in the architecture and design field builds on LEED certification’s environmental standards, and calls for a triple-bottom-line approach that takes social factors into account as well.
• Amazon has launched Amazon Art, a partnership with more than 150 galleries that allows you to browse, purchase and review (or faux-review) fine art much as you would a kitchen appliance. At least one blogger isn’t impressed, noting, “Much as I admire [Amazon’s] shipping practices… why compete in a market where an awesomely speedy physical delivery network means next to nothing?” Speed might not matter here, but access to artwork—especially for people who don’t live in major urban centers – might.
• The community-supported agriculture model is being transferred to the arts in cities including Pittsburgh, St. Paul and Flint. Most of them are visual art-specific, with at least one performing arts version as well. And they never have to worry about getting too much Swiss chard…

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) has updated its annual survey of arts alumni. SnaapShot 2012 presents the results in attractive infographics, and SNAAP’s 2013 annual report interprets the data. The theme of the report is inequalities among graduates of diverse backgrounds. Findings include a lack of access to networks among black and Hispanic arts alumni, which disproportionately discourages these alumni from becoming artists; and persistent pay gaps between male and female graduates.
• The Australia Council for the Arts has released a new study of the Australian arts sector in 2012. The report is bullish: attendance at arts events is up by about 3.5%; box office across genres was up 16% (only theater box office declined); and private sector contributions held steady.
• GlobalGiving, GuideStar, the Foundation Center, and TechSoup are collaborating to create an international registry of philanthropic entities. The project, funded by the Hewlett and Gates Foundations, will develop a system of unique identifiers and establish a database for information like the nature and location of philanthropic work.
• A new paper from Yuan Ji, an attorney for Wilson Sonsini and recent Yale Law School graduate, examines the conversion of Burning Man from for-profit to nonprofit status.
• Do copyright laws “make books disappear”? A researcher examines the numbers of books available in print over the last two hundred years, and finds they tend to vanish quickly, only to reappear later when they fall into public domain.
• A new study found that undergraduates tended to like the paintings of the critically-respected 19th-century artist John Everett Millais more with repeated exposure – but they liked the work of the popular but less canonical Thomas Kinkade less the more they saw of it. This is in tension with previous research into the “mere exposure effect” that found that  familiarity just about always breeds affection, even for lesser Impressionists.

• Two new Presidential cabinet nominees, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, have pro-arts backgrounds according to Americans for the Arts’s Bob Lynch.
• The Atlanta Regional Commission is one of the only metropolitan planning organizations and one of the largest communities to date to attempt to bring the arts and creative industries under one roof. Greg Burbidge wonders how best to find common ground among the interests of entities as diverse as video game designers, history museums, and dance collectives.
• Kudos to Hyperallergic’s Mostafa Haddaya for picking up this very odd job announcement from the unlikeliest of places:
  

  The Department of Homeland Security, a federal agency with a projected 2014 budget of just under $60 billion, would like to retain an experienced arts administrator for its “Loaned Executive Program.” The proposed position offers a salary range of “$0.00 to $0.00 / Without Compensation” and is

  [A] special opportunity (unpaid) that provides top executive-level talent from the private sector an opportunity to share their expertise with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to fill special, discrete needs.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The founding CEO of the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, Harriet Ivey, is retiring after 15 years at the helm. The Trust makes grants to arts organizations in Indianapolis and Phoenix.
• Tom Kaiden is moving on after 12 years at the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance (including three as President) to take a position at the Arlington Alexandria (VA) Convention and Visitors Association.
• The National Endowment for the Arts’s Director of Literature, Ira Silverberg, is leaving the agency to return to New York. Silverberg had been a literary agent before joining the Endowment.
• Keith Sawyer, my favorite creativity and innovation blogger, is moving to Chapel Hill, NC to take a professorship in the University of North Carolina’s School of Education.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Guidestar, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance have joined together to combat the Overhead Myth – the idea (promulgated over the years by some of these same organizations, particularly Charity Navigator) that a nonprofit’s impact is somehow tied to the percentage of money it spends on its programs. The wide adoption of this construct has had all sorts of perverse unintended consequences in the sector, from non-transparent accounting to unsustainable management practices. Related commentary from Paul Brest, Kjerstin Erickson and (unintentionally) Janet Brown.

BIG IDEAS

• Wise words from Michael Rushton, in a post ostensibly about VIP tickets at amusement parks:
  

  I don’t feel an intuitive sense of being wronged when someone has the spending power and the desire to buy $50 bottles of olive oil, $5,000 suits, $100,000 cars. None of those purchases affect me. But if someone uses their spending power to gain position at my expense, then I object. This is at the root of complaints about the role of money in campaign financing: funds are spent by individuals and corporations wishing to advance their political agenda at the expense of other political claims. It is why we think there is something wrong with an industry that serves to collect millions of dollars preparing students to do well on their SATs: such efforts are purely designed for parents who want their children to have a better position, necessarily at the expense of others, for a chance at the limited spaces available at elite colleges. Fighting for position in these cases is worse than a zero-sum game, it’s actually a negative-sum game as resources are expended not for any increase in valuable goods, but simply to re-arrange who is at the front of the queue, either in politics or higher education.

• Sad I missed this new talk from the reliably brilliant Nina Simon, delivered at this year’s Theatre Communications Group conference in Dallas. Lots to chew on here, but what strikes me most is the combination of aggressive risk-taking and hyper-focused strategic thinking – an approach with such clear upsides and yet a frightening one for many in our field, I think.

IN THE FIELD

• Matthew Fluharty reports from the Rural Arts and Culture Summit in Minneapolis.
• A short primer on cultural districts from Erinn Roos-Brown.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA has released new data on artist employment, updating its Artists in the Workforce study from 2005. In addition to summary findings, numerous tables are available for exploration.
• So people don’t always read to the end of articles – what else is new? But this is:
  

  Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing.

  That is the truth. I have to laugh sometimes at what kinds of things are said about Createquity articles on Twitter, like when Tegan Kehoe’s skeptical review of “The Artistic Dividend” two weeks ago was hailed as (a) an analysis of a brand-new study [it was published a decade ago] and (b) good news for arts advocates.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Congratulations to the South Carolina Arts Commission, whose funding was preserved when elected representatives overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the commission’s entire budget. An additional veto that would have invalidated a one-time $500,000 increase for the commission was also overturned, so all in all the Arts Commission will see a significant bump in its budget this year. It’s the third time in three years that the Arts Commission has staved off an elimination threat from a South Carolina governor.

ART AND PLACE

• Hot on the heels of ArtPlace’s similar announcement, the 2012 Our Town grants have been announced. The geographic distribution is striking, and quite literally all over the map. In contrast to last year, there were no grants to New York City, Los Angeles, or any of the nation’s other largest cities with the exception of Dallas, and more than half the grants are going to communities with fewer than 50,000 people. The NEA also held a series of webinars about the awards, which have been archived and are available here.
• Richard Florida, Darren Walker, Rocco Landesman, and Dennis Scholl participated in a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival called “Making Cities Sing.” Partial video from the event is here.
• In the wake of debates about whether Portland, Oregon is truly a creative class success story or not, Barry Johnson offers an interesting perspective on the role of the creative economy in that region.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Jacob Harold, program officer for philanthropy for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who has been appointed the next president of GuideStar (succeeding Bob Ottenhoff). Harold had previously been on GuideStar’s board of directors, as well as a funder.

IN THE FIELD

• The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance, a first-of-its-kind amalgamation of the region’s SOBs (symphony, opera, ballet) into a single organization, is officially live. Good luck to them – it’ll be interesting to see whether the arts scene finds it easier to coexist with one performing arts behemoth instead of three.
• Congratulations to Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch for being named one of the NonProfit Times’s Power & Influence Top 50 for the first time. Lynch is the only 100% arts person to make the cut, though Lisa Paulsen, president & CEO of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (which supports social and medical causes), as well as the leaders of the arts-supporting foundations American Express, Pew, and Knight, are on there as well.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

•  The Philadelphia-based William Penn Foundation will retain its local focus, despite a recent infusion of money that has made it one of the largest foundations in the country.
• Barry Hessenius has an interview with the Knight Foundation’s VP of the Arts and man about town, Dennis Scholl.
• An interview with outgoing Hewlett Foundation Vice President (and #2 under Paul Brest), Susan Bell.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, or SNAAP, has released its annual snapshot of arts graduates and their careers. SNAAP’s Sally Gaskill has more at ArtsBlog.
• Americans for the Arts held a blog salon for its Arts & Economic Prosperity IV report earlier this month. I tweaked the premise of AEP IV in the last Around the Horn, but I don’t want to take away from the fact that a lot of work on the part of many, many people went into creating it. Ben Davidson tells some of the behind the scenes tales, Maria Munoz-Blanco draws a picture of impact, and Createquity superfan Paul Tyler describes the power of mapping in Kansas City.
• Data alert: Nina Simon dissects her museum’s attendance growth over the past year.
• “Simply put, price seldom impacts demand in the arts.”

ETC.

• Stanford Social Innovation Review has an article about the value of “backbone organizations” in a collective impact context, based on the experience of FSG consultants working with the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. The article is in four parts: I, II, III, IV. It’s not the sexiest topic, but if you believe in the relevance of infrastructure to the arts, as I do, it is worth a read.
• More on the Collide@CERN project that Shane Crerar wrote about for Createquity earlier this year.

• Mike Boehm has more on the important role California’s soon-to-be-defunct community redevelopment agencies have had in shaping Los Angeles’s cultural development.
• Gene Takagi provides this extremely helpful dispatch from a session on new “hybrid” legal forms such as the Benefit Corporation and L3C.
• Culture360 has published a helpful two–part history and analysis of cultural policy in South Korea.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Hewlett Foundation has a new President – and just like the last one, he’s a former dean of the Stanford Law School.
• Guidestar’s CEO, Bob Ottenhoff, is moving on.
• The Tennessee Arts Commission has announced Anne Pope as its new executive director.
• Welcome Sarah Lovan, new arts program officer for the McKnight Foundation.

BIG THOUGHT

• I’ve been thinking about transparency a lot lately. It’s harder than it looks, but here are two recent examples I find admirable from two organizations that have been committed to transparency from the beginning. First, the open embrace on the part of the Center for Effective Philanthropy of ways it can improve its flagship product, the Grantee Perception Reports. And second, a fairly devastating report from GiveWell on the progress of its #1 charity recommendation from 2010, VillageReach (to which I was one of many donors). The latter seems especially dicey at first, but GiveWell goes out of its way to praise VillageReach’s continued commitment to collecting and reporting data on its activities and adds, “we always prefer discouraging observations to no observations.”
• Lisa Bernholz lauds David Sasaki of the Omidyar Network for committing to blogging about every grant he makes. But Omidyar still lags behind on other transparency standards, as Glasspockets points out.
• You’re going to be reading a lot more about the term “Collective Impact” this year, I predict. Nonprofit consultants FSG, who coined the term last year in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, write about their choice not to trademark the name.
• Michael Eisen, co-founder of the open access publisher PLoS (Public Library of Science), opines on why the academic publishing model hinders scientific progress. (And yes, research on the impact of the arts, lest we forget, counts as science.)
• Check out these fun videos of “culture warriors in their native habitat” discussing Harvard Business School case studies, courtesy of Fractured Atlas Deputy Director Tim Cynova.

BIG MONEY

• The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation looks to become a major new player in visual arts philanthropy.
• NYC arts institutions will receive $100 million from Brooke Astor’s estate.
• It turns out that a portion of ArtPlace’s funding, which comes from a handful of major arts foundations, is restricted geographically to the areas that those foundations serve, leading to a disproportionate focus in some regions vs. others. While this revelation won’t be a shock for those who know the foundations in question – Knight, for example, has a particularly idiosyncratic geographic reach arising from the Knight family’s historical connections to newspapers in specific markets – it’s not going to be much comfort to the applicants who faced higher odds because of it, and reveals the challenges of relying on a patchwork of arts funders to create a truly national agenda.

IN THE FIELD

• Cute advertising conceit for a symphony concert plays on desperate fundraising campaigns.
• Is the Colorado Symphony following through on its supposedly transformative business plan? Inquiring minds want to know.
• The SAG-AFTRA merger is finally complete.
• I always appreciate interviews with artists in which they are candid about their economic circumstances and how they make money (or don’t). Jen Dziura has a nice one with musician Kim Boekbinder in the Grindstone.
• Barry Hessenius has a good interview with Doug Borwick, president of the Association of Arts Administration Educators.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA is out with a new study from arts education researcher James Catterall finding that at-risk youth with “arts-rich” educational experiences outperform their peers on various metrics of success. Almost simultaneously, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released updated numbers from its Fast Response Survey System covering K-12 arts education, a congressionally mandated study. Sunil Iyengar offers a first read of the result; Janet Brown expresses some skepticism at the numbers.
• The Pennsylvania-based Education Policy and Research Center has a report out providing arts education policy recommendations for state leaders.
• Survey fatigue is a real and growing problem for researchers who want to get information directly from customers, audience members or stakeholders.

• If you haven’t been following this story about the Wisconsin Republican Party’s efforts to intimidate University of Wisconsin professor Bill Cronon (and now other university professors in other states), you should be. If this keeps up, state universities are going to face a huge disadvantage attracting both students and faculty, since no one can be assured that their private emails (even about grades, personal issues, and such) won’t be exposed by Big Brother in the course of some political vendetta. But then, maybe that’s the point – one less thing to pay for, after all. (To Wisconsin’s credit, the school administration has mounted a strong and fair response.)
• Shannon Litzenberger, who is something like my Canadian counterpart (she is writing a blog about arts policy for the Toronto Arts Fondation), has written a great three-part series on United States arts policy (covering public investment, advocacy, and the role of the private sector). Even though it’s aimed at a Canadian audience, it should still be educational for American readers – and it’s always interesting to see how we’re viewed by others. (For an update on Canadian arts policy, try this recent post.)
• One of the issues under discussion these days is the budget for public broadcasting. The House recently passed a bill (not expected to reach the President’s desk) that would eliminate funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which in turn funds NPR and PBS. In response, CNN commissioned a poll that asked Americans what percentage of federal funding is taken up by broadcasting. Turns out the median response overestimated the actual number by a factor of over 400, and — get this — the majority of Americans are just fine with that amount!
• Lots of people are talking about the Google Books decision and its implications for creators’ rights. Meanwhile, a new working paper argues that copyright may only be minimally effective at its original purpose of incentivizing creative production, using evidence from the post-MP3 era. Michael Rushton has more commentary here.

Collective Economic Action

• The long-lost Collective Arts Think Tank is back, more than a year and a half later, with a massive follow-up to their original manifesto that you can read here. In it, they continue to advocate for rank-and-file artists and small presenters taking the initiative to reduce supply themselves. Linda Essig comments.
• Tina Rosenberg provides a good overview of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding models here and here. Much of this will be familiar to Createquity regulars, but odds are you’ll learn something new.
• Even music union members think it’s time for the union to change.
• Project Streamline is making a comeback: the Grants Managers Network and the Center for Effective Philanthropy have announced an assessment tool aimed at helping funders determine if their paperwork requirements are too onerous. CEP’s Amber Bradley provides some analysis of the survey results so far. Given all this, Christopher Madden’s estimate of the deadweight loss (essentially from transaction costs) associated with grantseeking among arts groups in Australia, pegged at $3.6 million, is especially timely.
• Umm….
  

  A quick search through fiverr.com’s database tells me that you can buy as many 100 comments, a single tweet to 25,000 Twitter followers, a negative or positive review in English and Spanish, and unlimited number of blog comments for a full week all for $5 apiece. For a few hundred dollars, you can guarantee a crazy amount of comment traffic and new media attention that would rival culture blogging’s biggest superstars.

The Arts and Urban Life

• “It would be sad indeed if Dallas, having imported some of the world’s best architects, wound up creating the dullest arts district money can buy.” Great reflection on the pitfalls of institution-centric arts-led development.
• Gary Steuer connects the dots between the arts and Philadelphia’s reversal of a longstanding trend toward population decline.
• More on Detroit’s bid for an arts-led renaissance.

Reactions and Pre-reactions

• Clay Lord writes for ArtsBlog on stories vs. data. (I had actually written most of my post on the same subject prior to Clay’s, but it was published afterwards.)
• Christopher Madden offers an Australian perspective on crowdsourcing funding decisions in the arts.
• Michael Rushton responds to my article on supply and demand in the arts.

Research Corner

• Looks like one of the casualties of the budget fight could be the closure of data.gov, which had been a promising attempt to make government data more accessible to researchers and others. The Sunlight Foundation is leading an effort to save it.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, the Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability (ICSCS) is taking on the hard challenge of counting up NYC’s artist population.
• Nancy Duxbury writes that she has co-edited an issue of the journal “Culture and Local Governance” focused entirely on “culture and sustainable communities” from an international perspective. Check it out here.
• Munira Khapra reports on a survey of students and teachers about education priorities, and the intriguing finding that more than twice the proportion of students as compared to teachers “consider the arts absolutely essential to gaining an understanding of other nations and cultures.”
• Michael Rushton examines the recent NEA report on arts education research by Nick Rabkin, and (shocker alert), doesn’t buy it. I heart Michael Rushton, but think there’s such a thing as being too skeptical when it comes to interpreting research. The comment section on that post has some additional back-and-forth between us on the subject.

Etc.

• A nice article on the ultra-cool Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco.
• Good news for journalism: revenues from online advertising exceeded those from print advertising for the first time last year. Bad news for journalism: most of that revenue went to Google rather than news organizations.
• Look out, Gisele: choral composer Eric Whitacre is now a fashion model. (For serious.)