Digital Painting Caricature of Paul Ryan by David Lacasse | via Creative Commons

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare, will live to see another day after the American Health Care Act (AHCA, a.k.a. Trumpcare or Ryancare) failed to make it to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote March 24. Despite the president’s campaign promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, Republicans who had spent eight years vehemently opposing the ACA could not come to an agreement on a bill that would appease enough conservative GOP Congressmen to secure passage. The kibosh placed on the AHCA means the survival of the status quo, at least for the time being. It remains to be seen whether the administration will take any measures to save the current system from “exploding,” as Trump termed it. The longer Obamacare (or some form of it) survives, the bigger of a win it is for self-employed artists and creative workers, many of whom have depended on Obamacare to gain access to health insurance. (See Createquity’s coverage of the original passage of the Affordable Care Act here.) For now, Trump seems disinclined to try again with a new healthcare bill, preferring to move on to new legislation including tax reform and infrastructure.

Trump follows through on threats to cultural agencies. In a widely anticipated move, the Trump administration’s initial budget proposal cuts large swaths of the arts and culture sector, fully defunding several key federal agencies including the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB, which funds NPR and PBS), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and others. We shared our thinking on this development earlier this month, but it’s hard not to notice that the NEA and CPB tend to suck up all the energy in this particular debate. In reality, the NEH and IMLS are significant in their own right, with IMLS’s budget greater than either Endowment. As with most policy questions, the issues here are not black and white: in an op-ed for the Washington Post, for example, CPB board member (and Obama appointee) Howard Husock questions whether federal subsidies on television and radio remain necessary in a totally different media landscape that now creates plenty of content for audiences that, 50 years ago when the CPB was formed, had few to no options. People can and do make similar arguments about whether public libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions are still needed in the digital age, but we tend to side with Cosmo on that one. Ironically, some of the greatest contributions of agencies like the NEH, IMLS, and NEA are in research, which is useful in determining whether such institutions are remaining relevant. In any case, Congress ultimately must sign off on the new budget, and while it may not vote strictly down party lines, state agencies, philanthropic organizations and arts organizations are bracing for a blow, with rural, red states standing to lose the most if Trump gets his way.

Borrowers “cannot rely on” student loan forgiveness. For the 550,000 people working in public service, the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program provides an “out” to student loan debt. Or at least that’s what they’ve been led to expect. The program promises to cover student loan debt for individuals who work at least ten years in the public sector for national, state, or local government agencies; service fields such as public school teachers, police and firefighters; or non-profit organizations, many of which serve the arts. While the program especially benefits professionals such as lawyers working as public defenders, it has also enrolled many artists who work in the public sector and have likewise amassed considerable debt. But enrollees got a jolt when, on March 23, the Department of Education issued a legal filing indicating that borrowers enrolled in the program may no longer qualify for loan forgiveness, and that the offer may be rescinded at any time. This filing comes on the cusp of the program’s tenth anniversary in October of this year, when the first wave of qualified workers can file claims after the required ten years of service. While legal battles over loan forgiveness will likely unfold case-by-case, the development has raised red flags among student-loan advocacy groups. For his part, President Trump campaigned on the idea of an income-based repayment program for everyone, whereas the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program requires consistent full-time employment with an organization for ten years (which is perhaps less beneficial for artists given the growing freelance economy).

Disney refuses to go back in the closet for Malaysia. The new live-action version of the beloved 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast has received a whole lot of press, in part because it’s the first Disney film to include an openly gay character. The reaction has been mixed, with LGBTQ activists questioning the choice of Gaston’s bumbling sidekick LeFou as its only LGBT character ever, while anti-gay activists at home and abroad are either refusing to screen the film or asking for amendments to the “gay moment.” In Malaysia, Disney postponed the film’s release in response to film censors’ request that they cut out the “scenes promoting homosexuality,” which is punishable by law in the country. But befitting a Disney movie, this story has a happy ending … kind of. Shortly after Disney announced it would not alter the film, the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia relented and will let the four minutes of gay stuff slide, but you’ve got to be 13 years old to get in to see it.

Destruction of cultural heritage is now a war crime. While the rise of ISIS and the Syrian war have taken their toll on precious art, artifacts and global heritage sites in a culturally significant region of the world, donors and the United Nations are fighting for conservation – with dollars and legislation (if that’s any kind of reassurance in a war zone). The UN was already focused on addressing the looting and an international trafficking ring of artifacts from war-torn areas of the Middle East into Europe and the US, but upped the ante significantly on March 24 when the UN Security Council declared that intentional destruction of cultural artifacts and heritage sites could be punished as a war crime. While a welcome measure, it remains to be seen whether this move will successfully prevent the total demolition of culturally relevant sites such as Palmyra as the conflict continues.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• The New York Times announced that Jesse Green (formerly of New York magazine) will fill the vacancy left by Charles Isherwood on May 1 as a co-chief theater critic with Ben Brantley. Isherwood, who was suddenly fired by the Times last month, is reportedly moving to Broadway News, a new online source spearheaded by the daily theater newsletter service Broadway Briefing.
• The New Yorker hired Kevin Young as its new poetry editor. He replaces Paul Muldoon, who stepped down March 15 after a decade in the job.
• After 15 years, executive director Pam David will step down from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund at the end of 2017.
• Baltimore’s Mid Atlantic Arts ‏Foundation named Theresa Colvin as its new executive director following the retirement of Alan W. Cooper. Colvin is leaving behind 30 years at the Maryland State Arts Council, 16 of which she served as executive director.
• The Vermont Arts Council’s Alex Aldrich has announced he will step down as executive director after 20+ years at the agency.
• In the past year, three of the six major Hollywood film studios have had a change in leadership involving replacements of top executives.
• London-based charity Julie’s Bicycle has multiple administrative positions available. The organization focuses on creativity as a resource for combatting climate change and promoting environmental sustainability.
• Metris Arts Consulting, a firm based in Easton, PA, and committed to measuring and evaluating arts impact and improve cultural vitality, is seeking a senior researcher.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• A number of new studies look at artists’ attitudes about engaging with new technologies and the sharing economy. An arm of the UK-based Nesta analyzes the digital economy across Europe, ranking Bulgarians and Spaniards most optimistic about incorporating new technologies, and Germany the most skeptical. Regarding the arts, Nesta suggests that technology is changing audience expectations at a rapid pace, and adopting new digital technologies could bolster arts organizations toward sustainability and reduce barriers to arts participation. Across the pond in Canada, two extensive reports by Canada Council for the Arts explore how the arts in that country have adapted to, and impacted, the digital era.
• Another Nesta report offers ideas on how a revised, more inclusive definition of “R & D” might better serve creative industries pursuing cultural knowledge.
• The Economist reports that conducting statistical analysis on literature presents a unique set of challenges for researchers, as when one author imitates another, but new and improved computational analysis leading to correct attribution provides useful contextual clues.
• A nationwide study conducted by NYU found that middle-school students of all races are likely to have more positive perceptions of teachers of color than white, non-Hispanic instructors. And Boston-area Brandeis University researchers suggest that white, non-Hispanic Americans likely inherit the economic mobility enjoyed by previous generations under racially discriminatory policies, challenging the “bootstrap theory” that the racial wealth gap results from effort alone. Nevertheless, mid-life mortality rates are rising among white, non-Hispanic people in the U.S. with a high school education or less, mainly attributed to increased “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.
• Ghent University researchers found that boys who consider themselves “typical males” or feel pressure to conform to gender stereotypes show less interest in cultural activities.
• In her RAND Graduate School dissertation, Jennifer Novak-Leonard investigates un- and under-explored questions regarding arts participation, noting the significant impact immigrant groups make to the arts and culture sector.
• Music psychologists from Oxford and Exeter have conducted research on the effects of world music. The results indicate that as little as five minutes of listening to West African or Indian pop music can elicit more positive attitudes towards those cultures.
• A UN report by Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights Karima Bennoune analyzes the impact of fundamentalism and extremism on the pursuit of equality and the expression of cultural rights across genders, races, religions, and sexualities.
• A new report from PolicyLink provides examples of policies that utilize arts and culture to help reach goals in communities of color and low-income communities.
• Rising rents and gentrification in London may force 3,500 artists out by 2019, according to a new report by the London Assembly Regeneration Committee.
• A University of Pennsylvania study examines the impact of culture on social wellbeing in NYC, with a focus on micro-cultures existing within urban neighborhoods. The social, economic, and psychological impact of arts and culture were also measured in Minnesota, through a joint effect of Creative Minnesota and Minnesota Citizens for the Arts.
• An evaluation of Aesop’s Dance to Health program suggests that dance specialists can deliver effective health care programs at a lower cost to participants. The report suggests that such programs aimed at fall prevention and social interaction could be a viable source of income to arts organizations.
• Despite decrements in executive function, older adults maintain the ability to detect dissonance in music as they age. Meanwhile, new fMRI data contributes to scientists’ understanding of musical anhedonia, in which a person has no physiological response to music, and finds it boring or distracting.
• Dolby Labs is using EEG and other biofeedback technologies to conduct its own research on physiological responses to TV and films. The results may be used to create media that elicit a particular response.
• In the audience engagement arena, a report by the Audience Agency revealed trends in classical music attendance. Results indicate that most participation in the UK is through single ticket sales, with patrons booking once in a two-year period and gravitating toward lower prices. And WolfBrown recently published a two-year study assessing the audiences of 23 North American choirs; participation and personal relationships with the performers were cited as having a positive impact on audiences.
• Attendance at cultural institutions benefits from marketing to adults rather than families, according to research from the IMPACTS consultancy. Promoting family-friendly events and institutions as “just for kids” can be a barrier to adults, even if they have children. The same group’s surveys suggest the reputation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art got a boost after featuring Muslim artists as a response to the travel ban.
• Museums are presenting more exhibitions than ever as they try to draw in new audiences, focusing on a wider variety of offerings that cater to niche crowds.
• A report by the Motion Picture Association of America indicates that 2016 was a record year for movie theater attendance by African Americans.
• The 2017 edition of the TEFAF Global Arts Market Report indicates art sales are up worldwide, with the Asian art market particularly booming. While purchases continue to away from declining auction houses, private transactions are on the rise.
• Mindless television is thought to make people impressionable and vulnerable. A working paper in Italy questions whether it is a factor in the rise of populist leaders. Meanwhile, in their new book, psychologists Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson push back on the belief that video games are responsible violent behavior and an uptick in school shootings.
• According to the Center for Effective Philanthropy, limited life foundations share few similarities regarding spending down strategies apart from a desire to create impact.
• Timothy Ogden weighs the pros and cons of randomized controlled trials in a section of his new book, Experimental Conversations: Perspectives on Randomized Trials in Development Economics.

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

BIG IDEAS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

• 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.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

BIG IDEAS

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

Learning about programs like this, I had a hunch that partnerships between arts organizations and health organizations will be the next big thing for both groups. I thought with some research I would learn that the number of partnerships between an individual health organization and an individual arts organization has grown in the last five to ten years, and to an extent, that’s true. But some of the best, and even the fastest-growing, programs for the arts in healthcare have been around for decades. The commonality between most of these very robust programs, old and new, is they are not one partnership – they are many partnerships. Programs for the arts in healthcare appear to thrive when they are created and supported by a network of groups, each contributing their own specialty.

Background

I present as informed speculation the idea that programs for the arts in healthcare work best as networks, and suggest it as an area for further exploration. My analysis is based on a subjective impression of which programs are thriving, as demonstrated by the number of patients an organization has served or visitors to an organization’s public galleries, and by an organization’s reputation within the arts or the healthcare communities. Several of these programs have received accolades or positive appraisal from external organizations. For example, CosaCosa’s Healing Art Project has been featured in Designing the World’s Best Children’s Hospitals, a publication of the National Association of Children’s Hospitals, and both NYU and Audience Focus, Inc. have conducted evaluations of New York MoMA’s Meet Me at MoMA that demonstrate the program’s effectiveness.

As the number of arts and healthcare partnerships increases, so does the number of ways the arts and healthcare interact, including therapeutic initiatives, increasing accessibility to the arts (for people whose disabilities may be a barrier), and decreasing the stigma of a disease. The Global Alliance for Arts & Health (formerly the Society for Arts in Healthcare) defines five focus areas for arts and health: patient care, healing environments, caring for caregivers, community well-being, and education. While all of these are valuable, the programs discussed here primarily relate to the first two categories (patient care and healing environments), although many of them may have other benefits.

Art therapy as a field of study originated in the late nineteenth century, as psychologists began to study the connections between art and mental and emotional wellbeing. As early as the 1930’s, psychologists used art in “milieu therapy,” encouraging patients to enjoy and create art as a part of healthy self-expression. More recently, the practice expanded from mental health to physical health. Music therapy as a discipline has followed a similar trajectory, emerging between the First and Second World Wars and first used for war veterans. These fields provide a substantial foundation for programs that combine arts and healthcare, and many healthcare organizations hire art and music therapists directly or through partnerships.

Musicians Care by Sherman Hospital on Flickr

Some of the earliest programs uniting art and healthcare were simple introductions of visual art into healthcare spaces. The British organization Paintings in Hospitals was founded in 1959 by a hospital employee who saw the positive effect that bringing the visual arts into a healthcare environment had on patients’ health and wellbeing. This type of program is still popular today, and now, many art-in-hospitals programs have blossomed into extensive networks of artists, art organizations, and hospitals. National networks such as Paintings in Hospitals and Scotland’s Art in Healthcare are thriving, and many other programs exist on a smaller scale, such as Oakwood Arts for the Spirit in Michigan. These early programs focused on improving the healthcare environment rather than giving patients opportunities to create art themselves. In the next few decades, more participatory arts and healthcare programs were created in a variety of disciplines, such as Dance Exchange’s Metlife Foundation Healthy Living Initiative program, founded in 1978.

Beginning in the 1990s, arts and healthcare partnerships have become increasingly common. Notable organizations include Dance for PD, a partnership between the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinsons Group which has spread to over 100 communities, and Concerts in Care, which brings live music to residential care facilities across Canada. Over several decades, the concept of using the arts in healthcare has gained broad currency, as evidenced by numerous articles in mainstream medical journals and popular science periodicals (for example, this study showing that music can ease chronic pain and depression). It has also captured the attention of national policymakers.

The principle of network effects applies here; the more people who participate in a network, the more benefit users get from it. In the case of arts and healthcare partnerships it isn’t the number of people participating that makes the difference, but the number of organizations, and the people are still the ones benefiting. However, there is still a parallel. The more points of access there are for the users, with multiple healthcare organizations and multiple arts organizations participating, the more likely users are to find the program in the first place and find a part of the program that addresses their needs. Presumably, the network also creates opportunities for networking in the sense of making professional contacts, and new collaborations arising out of existing partnerships. The main drawback of having a network is that more people contributing ideas also means a more complex and often less efficient system of implementing them. For networks of organizational partnerships, having clarity and consensus around the group goals for working together as a whole can help to mitigate this drawback.

The Power of Networks

In our highly networked world, partnerships between three or more players have a lot going for them. A number of arts in healthcare programs consider their network of partnerships fundamental to what they do. For example, Shands Arts in Medicine, the hospital described in the introduction, says on its website, “An essential component of [our] mission is to create collaborations with other hospital departments, community arts organizations and hospitals around the world. These collaborations spark projects that move the message of art and wellness to a broader audience.”

A Network of Skills and Specialties

While many thriving arts in healthcare programs are organized as partnerships and networks, there is no set template that works best. In many cases, either a dedicated organization facilitates programming by reaching out to both health and arts organizations, or a healthcare organization brings in art by partnering with several different arts groups in their community. It is less common for one arts organization to partner with several health groups, but this approach seems just as effective.

Networks of program offerings, built on combining the strengths of multiple partners, allow arts organizations to leverage a set of related skills and expertise in multiple ways to target a variety of healthcare needs. For example, through a variety of partnerships the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts in Washington, DC offers different programs for cancer patients and survivors, military members and veterans, the general public, and health centers. This array of offerings and of recipients would likely be much smaller if the Smith Center limited itself to partnering with one hospital. Since the healthcare landscape is so multifaceted, the corresponding partnerships with the arts must also extend to many specialties.

Moreover, a network of partnerships can help an arts organization reach one particular audience more fully. For example, the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me at MoMA offers programs at the museum and on-site for organizations that work with individuals with Alzheimer’s. It also has a monthly interactive gallery program for individuals with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers to come independently. This combination of services, made possible by the museum’s connections to a variety of health care organizations, enables MoMA’s programming to reach people with Alzheimer’s in a variety of stages, at a variety of levels of independence, and in a variety of family and professional care situations.

Healing in the Community

The diversity networks provide helps organizations capture the best opportunities their community has to offer. For example, Snow City Arts in Chicago offers art classes to hospitalized children. While their teaching artist-in-residence program is the core of their offerings, the organization proclaims, “By working side-by-side with local arts organizations, performance groups, music ensembles, and prominent universities, we help ensure our children are learning from Chicago’s brightest artistic minds.” The program works with hospitals to bring this instruction to children who regularly miss school because of their health needs.

Artist Hein at Work by Virginia Lockett on Flickr

The advantage of networks goes in the other direction, too, helping arts and healing organizations play a more connected, more visible role in the community. In the case of COSACOSA’s Healing Art Project, this connection is intentional: “The Healing Art Project reaffirms the time-honored role of artists in sustaining the health of a community.” The project brings together children and youth of a variety of health experiences – healthy kids, kids with disabilities, and kids living in pediatric healthcare centers – to create collaborative artwork. The artwork is displayed in pediatric healthcare centers, and in some cases is an integral part of the design of these centers. Thus, the program is community-oriented both in the creation and the use of the art.

The visibility advantages of being in a network can also help a program expand and connect to the community of people it serves. For example, Dance for PD, which now has branches from Pasadena to Philadelphia to Pune, India, has been given the opportunity to participate in a number of high-profile events, such as the Parkinson’s Unity Walk in New York, which draws around 10,000 attendees.

Looking Ahead

The funding climate for this type of partnership appears to be growing friendlier as art therapy becomes more mainstream. There are several foundations and grant programs with a specific interest in bringing the arts into healthcare, such as the grants made by the Global Alliance for Arts & Health and the Metlife Foundation’s Healthy Aging grant program. Networks of partnerships have the opportunity to maximize their ability to seek support, since different funding avenues may be available to organizations on different sides of the partnership. However, networks also increase the number of variables involved, and any innovative program, especially one that is tangential to an organization’s mission or primary activities, may turn out to be a hard sell to grantmakers and donors if it appears on the surface to be riskier than traditional offerings. Organizations looking to enter partnerships should bear this in mind.

Arts organizations looking to get involved in an arts and healthcare partnership would do well to research the health and arts landscape in their area, to see whether there is an existing network they can join, and to learn what needs are not yet being met. There are a number of great resources put together by established organizations (see below); another benefit of networks is that they encourage a culture of freely sharing information. However, most of the literature out there on partnerships between the arts and healthcare is focused on providing practical guidance on what seems to work; little has been written on why it works. I am hoping to start the latter conversation with this piece, but the topic deserves more thorough attention than I am able to give it here. I envision studies that involve interviewing the leadership and staff of dozens of organizations across the country, including stand-alone projects, one-on-one partnerships, and networks. Such an effort would hopefully demonstrate whether networks are one successful model that has a lot of advantages and happens to be very popular right now, or whether they are truly the best model. The resulting lessons would equip many more organizations to unite healthcare and the arts.

Resources

• The University of Florida and UF&Shands Arts In Medicine have an online toolkit called AIM Together for organizations interested in the intersection of arts in medicine.
• The Global Alliance for Arts & Health has a basic toolkit for organizations which was created for a presentation at an event but has useful and in-depth information, and provides more resources in the members-only section of their website.
• The University of Florida also has an online toolkit specific to Arts in Healthcare for Rural Communities.
• New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Meet Me At MoMA program provides museum programs to Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. MoMA provides guides for museums, care organizations, and families on how to start or engage with this type of program.
• The National Endowment for the Arts has a page on the arts in healthcare on their website.