ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies concluded its sixth World Summit on Arts and Culture in Chile earlier this month. Nearly 400 arts leaders and policymakers from 67 countries gathered to address shared challenges facing the arts world.  The summit coincided with the launch of IFACCA’s report detailing arts advocacy campaigns and best practices.
• The NEA’s Director of Design, Jason Schupbach, talks about the agency’s next steps in creative placemaking “in the spirit of openness and oversharing,” and telegraphs a gradual shift in Our Town’s focus from local case studies to national initiatives.
• New Jersey is the first state in the country to include data on student enrollment in the visual and performing arts in its annual report on school performance. Slightly less than half of Garden State high school students are enrolled in a course in one of the four art forms.
• The New York Times provides a glimpse into the capricious process used by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs to review and approve applications from prospective residents seeking to live in lofts legally reserved for artists.
• A proposed noise ordinance in New Orleans drew a musical protest outside of city hall when musicians gathered to ensure their political voices, and their music, are not only heard, but heard at a proper volume.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Joan Finkelstein, formerly Director of 92^nd Street Y Harness Dance Center, is the new Director of the Harkness Foundation for Dance, replacing Theodore S. Bartwink.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• More good news for Gibney Dance: Director Gina Gibney’s dreams of turning their new space previously occupied by Dance New Amersterdam into a resource for emerging artists are $3 million closer to becoming a reality thanks to a  gift from the Agnes Varis Trust to make repairs to the facilities.
• Can an accounting change by SoundExchange impact the ability of middle-class performers and indie labels to create more music? The Future of Music Coalition thinks so.  A frequently disbursed stream of income that pays performers on a monthly, rather than quarterly, basis can help free up musicians to concentrate on their work rather than wonder how they’ll pay next month’s bills.
• Internet radio service Pandora pays nearly half its revenue to performing artists and labels, while only 4.3 percent goes to songwriters and publishers. Think that’s unfair? So does the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) which represents the latter. But it was Pandora that brought suit to lower the royalty rate paid to ASCAP members. At the heart of the issue is whether music publishers can remove their catalogs from digital transmissions, while still using professional recording organizations like ASCAP to represent their work on issues such as collecting money from terrestrial AM/FM radio stations.
• Meanwhile, back in the world of terrestrial radio, this is what happens when you leave cultural taste-making to the whims of the commercial marketplace. More than ever before, radio stations are playing the same damn songs over and over. The article is interesting throughout, including such tidbits as the fact that the top 10 songs last year were played twice as much as the top 10 songs a decade ago, the fact that this trend is an example of data-driven decision-making on the part of radio stations, and this quote:
  

  In the new intensely scrutinized world of radio, said Mr. Darden, “taking risks is not rewarded, so we have to be more careful than ever before.”

IN THE FIELD

• Ever admire the shelves of beautiful art books as you exit through the gift shop? Turns out they rarely turn a profit, so commercial publishers often avoid them. Enter the Artist Book Foundation, a new nonprofit dedicated to filling the gap.
• Norwegian readers are in for a treat: 135,000 titles, still protected by copyright, are going online for free in Norway thanks to an agreement arranged between the National Library of Norway and Kopinor, an umbrella organization of major authors and publishers.
• Sometimes, when you want a concerto, you really want a concerto: during the Minnesota Orchestra’s lock-out attendance at smaller community orchestras jumped noticeably. We won’t know the long-term effects until well after concerts at Orchestra Hall resume on February 7.
• Just as the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra prepare to head back to the stage, the entire board of Minnesota Dance Theater abruptly resigned last week, with no explanation yet as to the reason.
• Confused about the difference between a “cultural cluster and a “cultural district”? Learn more in a podcast highlighting work in Cincinnati led by ArtsWave and the Kennedy Heights Arts Center.
• In a victory for Venn diagrams, Americans for the Arts and 12 other national arts and education organizations have endorsed “A Shared Endeavor: Arts Education for America’s Students,” which defines shared delivery of arts education and identifies advocacy priorities generalist teachers, art specialists and teaching artists can support together.
• Arts administrators take note: Americans for the Arts has announced its spring webinar series, which includes sessions on the NEA, rural and small communities, and assessing social impact.

BIG IDEAS

• American artists are taking note of an international movement to ensure a “basic income” for all as a way of ending poverty. In a model proposed by Swiss artist Benno Schmidt, every citizen would receive a modest monthly check, regardless of need or merit.
• Is a permanent facility an asset or a prison to the modern arts organization? Diane Ragsdale shares four steps to scrutinize and reframe organizational core beliefs, and applies them to commonly-held assumptions regarding building-based arts organizations.
• Founder and CEO of The Teaching Company Thomas Rollins, whose nerd-tastic “great lectures on world history” got an affectionate nod in Createquity’s article on MOOCs and arts education, wades into the MOOC debate himself and finds the idea that they can transform higher education to be “utter nonsense.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• What does the cultural data landscape look like? Get a bird’s eye view from the report New Data for the Cultural Landscape: Towards a Better Informed Stronger Future just published by the Cultural Data Project. Barry Hessenius pulls out key highlights and probes the persistent challenge of educating leaders in our field to make strategic decisions using data.
• AFTA’s Randy Cohen digs deep into the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s recent report on the contributions of the arts to GDP. Turns out, it omits a lot of architecture, design and creative writing at the college level, and many arts grantmakers. Fortunately, the BEA is open to suggestions for improving its strong first cut. Follow the link to contribute your thoughts.
• The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center is out with the second issue of The Digest, which summarizes academic research on the cultural sector from the around the world, which is often inaccessible to a broad audience. The issue examines “creative cities in theory and practice.”
• A new Pew report finds that, although the typical American read five books last year, nearly a quarter of us read none at all. In related news, libraries continue to draw patrons in innovative ways, such as installing 3D printers, shifting collections from the academic to the popular, and offering hog-butchering seminars.
• Big Data may be a boon for marketers, but when does segmentation cross over the line into discrimination? A research fellow at MIT argues that this is the central ethical dilemma of today’s data analysts.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – FEDERAL

• Republican House members are back on the warpath to eliminating public broadcasting money (along with other government programs).
• The first 1:36 of this interview with Grammy-winning jazz musician Esperanza Spalding has the makings of a great arts advocacy video.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – STATE AND LOCAL

• Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Ryback doesn’t understand why artists don’t have his back when people make fun of public art that his administration has commissioned. The link also contains the complete video of the recent creative placemaking panel featuring Rocco Landesman, which was the context of the comments.

ARTS POLICY AROUND THE WORLD

• NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, aka the most influential person in the arts you’ve (probably) never heard of, submits four highly entertaining and thought-provoking reports from the 5th Annual World Summit on Arts and Culture in Melbourne, where he and Rocco Landesman were representing the United States. Check them out: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4.
• During the World Summit, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies released the WorldCP International Database of Cultural Policies, based on the fantastic European version here. Good ol’ US of A isn’t represented yet, but I trust it’s in the works.
• Sad: BBC to cut 2000 jobs by 2017.
• Ugh: it sounds like Arts Council England’s new austerity-induced performance measurement system for its grantees is kind of a mess.
• The former Irish Minister for Arts, Culture, and the Gaeltect is now running for President of Ireland. He is making “a creative society” a centerpiece of his campaign. Is he the first serious candidate for national office in modern times to do so?
• A new report from the British think tank DEMOS finds that creative industries in the UK present no special investment risk to banks as compared with the rest of the economy.
• Chinese censors have abruptly canceled the premiere of a new opera by American composer Huang Ruo over complaints that the music was not sufficiently glorifying of its subject, China’s first president.
• Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for this discovery: the Singapore Complaints Choir. (Apparently a Fringe Festival production!)

PHILANTHROPY

• California has brought two new corporate forms into being: the benefit corporation and the flexible purpose corporation. Here is more on both from the Nonprofit Law Blog, and more on the flexible purpose corporation from CharityLawyer.
• The Acumen Fund has been working on a list of “lessons learned” from its work in global poverty in celebration of its tenth anniversary. See them all in this slick but hard-to-navigate web feature, or read them one by one at the blog.
• PhilanTopic interviews Orlando Bagwell, director of the Ford Foundation’s new JustFilms initiative, which will distribute $50 million over five years to fund social issue documentaries.
• Here’s a data point I bet we wouldn’t have seen five years ago:
  

   

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Urban Institute and LINC have released a new white paper on artist spaces and community development.
• The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s Tom Kaiden writes up GPCA’s new Portfolio research report for the Foundation Center’s PhilanTopic blog. Portfolio is one of the best examples of Cultural-Data-Project-derived research out there, not just because it looks beautiful (though it does), but because it actually starts to tap into some of the targeted analysis made possible by that rich data resource.
• Researcher Elizabeth Currid-Halkett challenges the wisdom behind recent national initiatives such as Our Town and ArtPlace, arguing that policy interventions can’t always be relied upon to spur economic development. The op-ed has its flaws (she doesn’t seem to realize that ArtPlace is separate from the NEA), but the underlying point–about the complexity of the ways in which the arts and economies interact–is worth consideration.
• Yes, journals sometimes retract research, and the trend is on the rise.
• Fun to see my peeps from the Yale School of Management getting into economic impact studies for the arts.

IN THE FIELD (AH, ORCHESTRAS EDITION)

• The Philadelphia Orchestra musicians are taking a 15% pay cut under their new contract.
• More on the Brooklyn Philharmonic‘s new artistic direction, from New York Times critic Steve Smith.
• Lee Streby has a new entry in his Project MAD (Musical Arts Development) series outlining a forward-looking business and programming model for orchestras. And Paul R. Judy laments on the NEC blog how little real-life orchestras have changed in recent decades.

BIG IDEAS

• I love how Barry Hessenius just tucks these stealth ideas into his posts sometimes. Here’s one of recent vintage:
  

  It occurred to me that an interesting pilot project would be for the arts in a given area to open an Apple like store for the two months before the Christmas shopping season – with simple, clean lines in the design, with high tech monitors on tables, and a cadre of Arts Sales People available to answer questions and move the shopper through the experience of looking at all the available performing and visual arts options in the local area — videos of the best of the operas, symphonies, museums, dance companies, theater offerings, and the other arts – and the shopper could instantly buy tickets to a single performance or season tickets  or memberships in museums etc. for themselves or as holiday gifts for others.  There would also be offerings of local classes in various arts disciplines for all ages and , opportunities to join boards of directors or otherwise volunteer at local arts organizations.  If you packaged it right you might be able to recreate some of the same kind of excitement an Apple store generates.  Bottom line:  we have wonderful products, and perfect gifts alternatives to the same old boring stuff people give to each other every year.

• Franz Nicolay reports firsthand on the life of the middle-class musician:
  

  Most music fans, and most musicians, only have two models with which to think about a life in music: the Starving Artist or the Rock Star. The starving artist has moral authority and credibility, and the rock star is rich as hell and has total independence. Most Starving Artists imagine, in their heart of hearts, that they’ll eventually be Rock Stars.But most musicians who spend their life in music fall somewhere in between – the Middle-Class Musician. Somewhere in between blue-collar and white-collar; making enough to live on – let’s say $20k-$60k – and caught somewhere along the margins as far as things like health insurance, mortgages, and car payments.And it’s on the head of the Middle-Class Musician that most judgments about morals and ethics in the music world fall, about licensing songs for commercials, about which other bands to tour with, about signing with particular labels (major v. indie v. major indie) – and independent fundraising. A lot of arguments against things like commercial licensing are the ethics of the Starving Artist, which the Rock Star has the comfort and flexibility to ignore or indulge them.

• Composer Kevin Clark riffs on my post about usability testing and arts organizations, asking what it would take to apply the idea to the art itself.

TALKS AND SPEECHES YOU MISSED

• Marc Vogl and Jeanne Sakamoto of the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations, respectively, hosted a Grantmakers in the Arts webinar on the subject of retaining emerging leaders in the arts field. Here is the full 40-minute presentation, and Marc and Jeanne have also put together a NextGen Arts Leadership microsite with other resources on wikispaces.
• Andrew Taylor gave this keynote at the Arts Enterprise Summit in Kansas City last month called “The Art of the Business Model.” And he had a co-keynote with the wonderful Russell Willis Taylor at American University’s Spring Colloquium, which you can view here.
• Nina Simon’s keynote from the 2010 NODEM conference on design for participation.

THE LETTER OF THE LAW

• Did you know that Canada has a law against the broadcasting of false news?
• Great analysis from my Fractured Atlas colleague Marie Ortiz on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as health insurance reform.

PUBLISHING AND THE ACADEMY

• The American Association of University Presses considers new business models for university publishing.
• Christopher Madden argues for the role of academic publishing in strengthening international cultural policy.
• Lucy Bernholz considers the future of the publishing and information industries.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

• Pianist Vijay Iyer is one of the smartest thinkers in the arts anywhere (his undergraduate degree was in cognitive science). His essay on supply and demand from a jazz perspective is a must read. (h/t Brian Newman, who extends the argument to film.)
  
• Future of Music Coalition looks at how musicians make money.
• If the demand for new teaching jobs is so much higher than supply, why are salaries for newly hired econ professors still so high?
• In honor of Marginal Revolution’s migration to WordPress, here is a quartet of good reads from that site: prediction that small-government policies actually lead to bigger government in the end; considering the consumer surplus of the internet; thoughts on common mistakes of right-wing and left-wing economists, with summary by Arnold Kling; and thoughts on common mistakes of economists in general (thank you Ezra Klein!).

TRENDS AND THOUGHT PIECES

• We focus a lot of attention on using arts and culture to reframe urban life. But what about the suburbs? Yonah Freemark imagines a more sustainable suburbia.
• Doug McLennan writes of the walled garden problem and the economic incentives for new technologies not to adhere to the open-standards practices that have helped us make so much technological progress over the past couple of decades.
• Crowd-curation marches on, this time at museums.

PARTNERSHIPS, MERGERS, AND EXPANSIONS

• CultureBot’s Jeremy Barker marks the public debut of New York Live Arts, the new company formed by the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop.
• Not a merger, but this collaboration between fellow Lincoln Center tenants the Metropolitan Opera and Juilliard does beg the question of why it didn’t happen sooner.
• More on the Awesome Foundation’s, uh, awesome growth.

PLANNING AND EVALUATION

• GiveWell describes an interesting method for self-evaluation: giving an independent observer a chunk of money to allocate using GiveWell and other sources, and testing how useful GiveWell was in the process. It’s kind of like a lab experiment for smart giving.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy has released its strategic plan for 2011-14.

NEW PROJECTS AND RESOURCES

• Foundation Source Access is a new fundraising website from Foundation Source, a company providing back-end services to many small family foundations. While at first glance it might seem redundant with other types of crowdfunding sites aimed at individual donors, this project is interesting because of the audience. The huge national foundations don’t control all that much of the nation’s institutional giving, but it’s always been difficult to tap family foundation money without personal connections because of those organizations’ lack of infrastructure. If family foundations actually use this tool to seek out grantees instead of sticking with the tried and true (and that’s a big if), it could be an important new resource for fundraisers.
• Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) is launching craigconnects, a project to curate nonprofits and get them wider attention.
• TicketForce is looking to sell tickets to your Facebook events…in Facebook. (Thanks to Thomas Cott for the above two links.)
• Travel search engine Hipmunk has a new mapping overlay feature for its hotel searches. You can now see heat maps of food, shopping, tourist opportunities, and “vice” in the area around your hotel. I tried it out in my own neighborhood and found the data a bit suspect, but it’s still an interesting and very practical application of cultural asset mapping.
• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies has a cool new resource called “Ask IFACCA.” Not only will they take your questions, they’ll publish some of the answers as well. Geek out alert!
• Great to see the DiMenna Center for Classical Music (new home of Orchestra of St. Luke’s) up and running in Manhattan, especially since the genesis of the project was a 2004 feasibility study by Exploring the Metropolis.

News and announcements

• In what is undoubtedly the highest-profile and most unusual merger of arts organizations since the Great Recession hit, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theatre Workshop will join forces into a new entity known as New York Live Arts. The new organization will be led by a triumvirate of executives from the existing firms.
• A National Creativity Network has launched out of the Creativity World Forum in, of all places, Oklahoma City, with TED talker Sir Ken Robinson as founding chair. Not clear if there’s any funding for it as yet, but the list of participants is pretty interesting.
• The LA Philharmonic will soon be joining the Met Opera on movie screens around the country.

Readings and research

• The NEA’s research department has released a trio of documents of relevance to its initiatives and focus on “creative placemaking.” The first is a white paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa that reviews literature on the role of the arts and creative industries in promoting livability and economic development outcomes in local communities; identifies common themes in successful efforts to use the arts to transform neighborhoods and cities; and presents 15 in-depth case studies to illustrate those themes in action. Here’s Markusen presenting the report at the recent National Council on the Arts meeting. The second is a set of notes from the agency’s convening this past June on defining metrics for livability. And finally, the Endowment has published a research report examining the unique role of outdoor arts festivals in attracting nontraditional audiences and defining the character of a place. (The last one definitely features the best cover photo of any NEA research report past or present.)
• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies is working on an international database of cultural policy profiles. It will be based on the Council of Europe’s Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, available here.
• UNESCO has been active lately. The international agency for culture has released a summary of its email discussion and symposium on the intriguing topic of “funding culture, managing the risk.” Not sure how new this is, but this is a pretty rad index of cultural industry mapping reports and studies organized by region of the world.
• Animating Democracy has a new research study out mapping the grantmaking landscape for the arts and social change. And AD’s co-founder, Barbara Shaffer Bacon, has written a lovely eulogy for the sadly defunct Community Arts Network, whose trove of resources on community arts is luckily still available in archive form here.
• Rebecca Novick has a very interesting article on the travails of midsize theater organizations in the Theatre Bay Area magazine.
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has published a wide-ranging report on the technology needs and usage patterns of the performing arts field, conducted by Callahan Consulting for the Arts.
• Melanie Beene, head of Community Initiatives, writes about how fiscal sponsorship is maturing as a field in the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader. (If you haven’t already discovered it, the GIA Reader is a great resource for arts policy and funding material, with freely available archives going back over 10 years.)
• Americans for the Arts has published the results of a 2009 survey of 554 self-identifying emerging leaders in the arts. The entire report is only available to AFTA members, but the executive summary as well as this blog post on the subject by the report’s author, Stephanie Evans, are open to the public.

Interviews and Conversations

• With Dennis Scholl, Vice President for Arts at the Knight Foundation, talking about the innovative Knight Arts Challenge in Philadelphia.
• With Edward Clapp, editor of the 20UNDER40 anthology, on Barry’s Blog.
• Between Robert Lynch, Fred Lazarus, and Edgar Arceneaux on the subject of the arts and community change in the current issue of Next American City.

Adventures in advocacy

• Is this idea so crazy it’s brilliant? Barry Hessenius argues that arts organizations should join local Chambers of Commerce en masse, thereby forcing the business community (and the Republican party) to pay attention. Key graph:
  

  There are some 10,000 nonprofit arts organizations in California. If 20% of those arts organizations were to join their local Chambers of Commerce (dues are modest and local chapters welcome arts organizations) and get involved on the statewide committees and move up the ranks to chair some of those efforts – thus moving up the ranks of the organization – in just a couple of years the arts could constitute a formidable bloc within the state Chamber – and in so doing we could begin to seriously impact the policies and positions the Chamber takes. If 40% of all the arts organization would join their local chambers, and work into postions of authority, we could virtually take over the whole structure by 2016.  That’s only five years from now.

• Leonard Jacobs passes along the news that NYS Arts, the main arts advocacy vehicle in the Empire State, is closing down.
• The CBC reports that some prominent artists and administrators in Canada are now backpedaling from an economically-focused arts advocacy strategy. What’s interesting about it is that Kevin Stolarick, who has worked with and for Richard Florida for over a decade, is quoted extensively in the article saying that framing the arts in terms of their economic impact has been a “trap.” Florida, of course, is the great popularizer of this line of thinking, although his focus is much wider than the nonprofit arts specifically.

And so on…

• Another wise post from Brigid Slipka. To paraphrase: if you want to increase high-impact giving, trying to convince the average donor to do their own research is a losing battle. Your audience, instead, should be the gatekeepers to givers: ministers, corporate giving managers (who organize employee donation drives to specific charities), and the like.
• Very good sentences: “when Americans insist on total liberty against external molestation, it motivates both good responses and bad ones.  It supports a libertarian desire for freedom against government abuse, but the same sentiments generate a lot of anti-liberal policies when it comes to immigration, foreign policy, torture, rendition, attitudes toward Muslims, executive power, and most generally treatment of “others.”  An insistence on zero molestation, zero risk, isn’t as pro-liberty as it appears in the isolated context of pat-downs.  It leads us to impose a lot of costs on others, usually without thinking much about their rights.” – Tyler Cowen @ Marginal Revolution
• Academics like to rag on Wikipedia, but a new pilot initiative will make updating and improving the quality of pages part of college students’ required coursework. The democratization of who gets to be an expert continues apace.
• Visualization fun with the budget here and here.
• Guy Yedwab asks, could art survive without alcohol?