• Seems that New York City’s recent bill forcing schools to report out on the availability of arts education in its schools comes not a moment too soon: an audit from the state comptroller found that roughly half of seniors graduated from high school without having met arts education requirements.
• Denver is out with a bold new seven-year cultural plan, “Imagine 2020.” Among other things, it seeks to “increase the visibility of local and creative talent” by inventorying and ranking the availability of the arts in all neighborhoods, and supporting micro-art projects that can create new gathering spaces across the city.
• A federal court has ordered Google to remove the infamous “Innocence of Muslims” film from YouTube after an actress who appears on screen for only five seconds – and was told she was appearing in an adventure movie – asserted that posting the film against her wishes violates her copyright in her performance. The injunction is preliminary; Google is appealing.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The two latest articles to document artists’ struggle to make ends meet, even once they are established: on writers in London and artists in New York City.
• Hooray for practicing what you preach: the Hewlett Foundation takes stock of the two strategies of its Effective Philanthropy program – and announces that it will wind down and replace the one that the evidence suggests wasn’t working.
• Aditi Kapil from Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theater Company unpacks lessons from the company’s free ticket initiative, such as the idea that infrastructure costs make “free cheaper than cheap.” And thanks to to a new grant, all visitors to the Wilma Theater can now enjoy $25 tickets during the first four weeks of a show’s run. The newly flattened price structure will be in place for three years.

IN THE FIELD

• The Future of Music Coalition has been quizzing musicians on their knowledge of current copyright law, and the results are mixed, suggesting “there remains widespread confusion about the difference between musical composition and sound recordings” and musicians are generally unaware of “the changes in the digital landscape that have altered the way that money flows back to creators.”
• After managing to squeeze twelve years out of what was intended to be a three-year program, the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program ended with its final fellows last November.
• Getty Images has released 35 million photos to be used freely for non-commercial purposes, bowing to widespread, often ignorant infringement of its images. There are a few catches: the interface is clunkier than for paying customers, Getty can track usage data, and they reserve the right to put ads in the embedded image viewer. Now that we’ve liberated images and music, are books and movies next?
• Yes, data-driven decisions can come from cocktail napkins: Nina Simon offers a nifty example of how a simple measure of “success” can help draw comparisons across programs.
• The new performing arts center planned for the World Trade Center site, in the works for over a decade, faces an uphill battle to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for construction with former mayor and big-ticket arts champion Michael Bloomberg no longer in office. The project will have to compete with several recently-opened theater spaces of similar size as well as the nearby 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

BIG IDEAS

• An example-driven look at how grantmakers are building innovation into their programs to tackle large social problems in Stanford Social Innovation Review pairs well with this examination by four Boston Consulting Group strategists of what nurtures the “evolvability” of big companies like Google and Netflix. Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor poaches more lessons from the for-profit world by examining what the “Minimum Viable Product” familiar to tech start-ups might mean for the arts.
• March 20 was both the first day of spring and the UN’s International Day of Happiness, co-sponsored this year by Grammy winner Pharrell Williams. The designation of the day was inspired in part by Bhutan’s embrace of Gross National Happiness as a critical indicator of the country’s health. Culture is one of the pillars of GNH, so Createquity readers have special reason to celebrate.
• The Future of Digital Longform Project is out with a whopper of a report on how “long” (i.e. 5,000+-word) pieces of nonfiction are evolving, what “designing a story” can mean, and how and if writers can hope to make money from these efforts.
• Digital platforms continue to creep into the edusphere, with the College Board announcing a plan to (finally) counter the overpriced SAT-prep industry via a partnership with Khan Academy, and EdX, the only major non-profit MOOC provider, expanding its list of course partners to include NGOs and nonprofits ranging from the Smithsonian to the IMF.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Egads! First we learn we can’t always trust research; then we learn we can’t always trust the research that tells us not to trust research.
• The UK’s cultural sector’s hiring practices unfairly stifle diversity, a report from Creative and Cultural Skills finds. CCS calls out a widespread preference for unpaid workers and a tendency to hire people already known to existing employees as particular problems.
• A new report from the National Center for Arts Research has found that well under half of directors of the nation’s largest art museum directors are female, and they earn roughly three-quarters the salaries of their male counterparts.
• Southern California’s “creative industries” are booming with roughly 1 of 7 jobs in the Los Angeles area tied to the creative sector, according to the 2013 Otis Report on the Creative Economy. However, the relationship between the report and the fiscal health of the arts sector — and the economic stability of artists in the region — is murky.
• The international art and antique market, meanwhile, is  almost back to pre-recession levels. The uptick, however, is more due to the rising cost of artwork rather than an increased number of sales, suggesting a continued and worrisome creep toward a “winner take all” economy.
• The Brookings Institute tried out a badass new research methodology — a “survey with placebo” — in a recent attempt to measure the impact of advocacy organizations on the passage of school choice legislation. The method is one of several new and intriguing practices in advocacy evaluation.

• The even playing field that is the Internet might be about to tilt in the favor of the powerful, in this case AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and the like. Net neutrality is in the hands of the DC Circuit Court.
• The National Initiative on Arts & the Military has released a new advocacy white paper on arts and health in the military context, just as the NEA has announced that it will expand its Creative Arts Therapy Program through a new three-month pilot at the Department of Defense’s Fort Belvoir Community Hospital.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Ralph Remington is stepping down as the NEA’s Theater/Musical Theater Director to become the western regional director and assistant executive director at Actors Equity Association. He had been at the NEA since 2010.
• Los Angeles has a new mayor, and will soon have a new head of cultural affairs. Olga Garay-English, who served as Executive Director of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs since 2007, announced she is stepping down January 4.
• Kenneth Foster, former Executive Director of the Yerba Buena Center for Arts, has kicked off his tenure leading the new Arts Leadership Program at the University of Southern California and offers some words of wisdom on how funders can best serve the performing community, and why  “best practices” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
• Continuing a string of recent layoffs of classical-music radio staff, Houston’s KUHA has cleaned house. The station claims that the move will actually lead to more coverage of local arts groups.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Consider arts crowdfunding thoroughly kickstarted. Crowdfunding raised more than half a billion dollars for the performing and recording arts last year, almost 20% of the total money raised for all purposes through crowdfunding platforms, according to industry research. Lucy Bernholz is interested in investigating the small but increasing role U.S. foundations seem to be playing in driving this trend.
• Risë Wilson, the new Director of Philanthropy at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, makes the case – and offers a model – for arts grants as risk capital in an interview about the Foundation’s SEED grant program.
• Like many other downtowns, Philly’s is booming these days. But residential developer Carl Dranoff attributes the revitalization of the South Broad Street area to the Avenue of the Arts project, and insists that “anyone who says it would have happened anyway has a very short memory.”

IN THE FIELD

• In his coverage of last month’s 2013 Future of Music Summit for the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot describes a frustrated yet resolved music industry, “Music is generating a ridiculous amount of money, none of it flowing to the people who create it.” Check out the write-ups from day one and day two.
• Nina Simon responds to the backlash that her novel programming at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has generated in recent months locally and, to a lesser extent, nationally. The contention is that encouraging active participation so strongly erodes the traditional museum environment of quiet contemplation, distracting the MAH from its historical charge. Simon argues that the new approach allows for both kinds of experiences, while “balancing priorities, embracing creative tension, including diverse voices, and staying true to our mission.”

BIG IDEAS

• The ambitious Sustain Arts project aims to bring the wonders of Big Data to the cultural sector over the next three years, ultimately strengthening the nation’s cultural infrastructure. The first wave of work is happening now in the San Francisco and Detroit regions; Marc Vogl, Bay Area Field Director of the initiative, explains what he’s up to and how Bay Area folks can get involved.
• New Bonfils Stanton Foundation president Gary Steuer weighs in on the “is ‘innovation’ a nefarious buzz-word” debate (which is really the ongoing argument over how funders find the sweet spot of nurturing, not hindering, their grantees) and provides other thoughtful comments on the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture. (All 27 talks from the Summit, by the way, are now available online.)
• Google has launched Helpouts, a service that provides live on-demand chatting with experts in fields ranging from the arts to cooking and electronics. Udi Manber, VP of engineering, believes Helpouts will offer users a more “precise” mode of online learning.

RESEARCH CORNER

• WolfBrown is out with a multi-pronged report on how to engage college students in the performing arts. It includes case studies of best practices and a survey of student attitudes toward the performing arts across seven different schools.
• The Wallace Foundation has released new research on the challenges of after-school arts programs in low-income urban neighborhoods. The study draws on hundreds of interviews with young people, their families, program leaders and others to provide some answers, including ten principles for developing effective programming.
• More evidence that art therapy helps patients with Alzheimer’s.
• Elizabeth Merritt reviews a new report from European consultancy Arup on Museums in a Digital Age.
• The U.S. may be out of UNESCO, but the work continues: the international cultural agency and the United Nations Development Program have just released a Special Edition of the United Nations Creative Economy Report concluding that world trade of creative goods and services more than doubled from 2002 to 2011, to $624 billion. Unlike the 2008 and 2010 editions, many of the case studies and recommendations this time around focus on the role of culture in sustainable development at the local level, especially in poorer countries.
• So many charts, so little time! The Foundation Center has launched the eminently clickable Foundation Stats, where you can find “the answer to almost every basic statistical question about the collective work of U.S. Foundations.” Emphasis on the “basic” here, but as an added bonus the data is open and free. Meanwhile, A new report from the Foundation Center, Media Impact Funders, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation shows that foundations are stepping up in a big way to support traditional media organizations struggling to adjust to the digital age.
• As cultural asset mapping projects continue to gain popularity, this quick overview of where to get spatial data, and what you can do with it, is particularly timely. And speaking of cultural asset mapping, Philadelphia’s massive CultureBlocks initiative is barely six months out of the gate and there is already an academic paper on it.

• Twitter, Facebook, and now the Minnesota Orchestra: everyone’s going public these days. State legislators announced a bill last week to save the troubled ensemble and gauge public support for its continuation by making it “a community-owned entity in which any individual or group could buy stock.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Robert Vagt, the President of the Heinz Endowments, has announced his resignation, not long after two staff members were fired amidst controversy over Heinz’s support for the Center for Sustainable Shale Development. Vagt himself had faced criticism for his connections to the energy industry.
• Expanding his reach outside of the arts field, Americans for the Arts President & CEO Bob Lynch has been elected to Independent Sector’s Board of Directors.

IN THE FIELD

• Here’s an arts organization that talks about “combining resources” and sounds like it really means it: the Las Vegas Shakespeare Company is rebranding and revamping its building as the “Cultural Corridor Theater Center,” sharing its costume and scene shops with other companies and bringing in commercial tenants to boot.
• Fractured Atlas has launched Artful.ly, a cloud-based platform that helps artists and arts organizations sell tickets, take donations, and track their fans.
• Hoping to replicate the success of the Met Opera, London’s Royal Opera House is simulcasting a portion of its 2013-14 season in movie theaters across the United States.
• A new “due diligence” company has been founded to serve potential investors in art. The good news is you can hire The Art Compliance Company to verify the provenance of that Pollock you’ve been eyeing. The bad news is you may need to.
• DePauw University is making big changes to its music school with the help of a $15 million contribution used to establish the 21st Century Musician Initiative (21CM). DePauw hopes the new program will “better meet the needs of students entering a rapidly changing music industry.”
• Brooklyn-based community art center and co-working space 3rd Ward unexpectedly shuttered its doors last week, leaving artists and members without access to studios and supplies. Hyperallergic details its rise and fall of the financially troubled center and the sometimes “uneasy alliance between businessmen and the ‘creative communities’ they cultivate.”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Chalk one up for data-driven grantmaking: after the First Peoples Fund issued a study showing that training in entrepreneurship and financial management makes a real difference to the economic self-sufficiency of Native artists (a category that includes nearly a third of Native people), the Northwest Area Foundation announced it will give $1m over three years to support a pilot of just this kind of intervention.
• Consultant Marc Vogl argues that more of the millions of philanthropic dollars donated by the tech industry in the Bay Area could make it to the arts with a slight change in tack from arts organizations.
• High demand and low supply have driven housing costs in San Francisco to extremes and sparked migration to places like Oakland. Both cities made the list of top ArtPlaces in 2013.

BIG IDEAS

• As the vaguely Soviet-sounding National Innovation Summit for Arts & Culture gets underway in Denver (attend virtually here), the arts blogosphere is abuzz with meditations on the “i” word. Howlround hosts a three-part series on the importance of organizational innovation; Isaac Butler one-ups them with what he claims will be a four-part series questioning that importance; and Culturebot has a six-part series problematizing the “innovation agenda.”
• Two thoughtful reflections on what could be lost as our cultural landscape is transformed by technology and commerce: Nancy Levinson on print vs digital and the fate of “serious” publishing, and Ben Davis on Big vs Small contemporary (visual) art and the fate of little galleries.
• The bookworms at Fractured Atlas are back with a review of Mission in a Bottle: The Honest Guide to Doing Business Differently – And Succeeding, by Honest Tea co-founders Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff (the latter of whom happened to be Ian’s entrepreneurship professor in business school).

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven has published a data-driven overview of the state of the nonprofit sector in the area, compiling information from the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s State of the Sector report; the Foundation’s own giveGreater database; IRS data; and survey results.
• Major players like JSTOR and the University of California system are starting to offer low-cost or even free access to academic articles and research.
• Charity Navigator released findings from an in-depth study of CEO salaries at 3,929 mid- to large-sized charities around the U.S. On average, a CEO earns about $125,000 annually and Charity Navigator cautions donors to “be skeptical of charities that pay salaries hovering near or above one million dollars.”
• If you feel like studies on the “creative economy” have been all the rage, you’re right. At least 27 reports on the topic were released between 2003 and 2012, and The National Creativity Network went ahead and analyzed them. Seems like we’re all defining the creative economy/industries in slightly different ways, and while “a case for a national data-based definition of the creative economy can begin to be constructed,” we’re more interested in focusing on our own specific regions.
• Researchers examining an 1814 change in British copyright law have determined that extending copyright protections caused payments to authors to nearly double.
• This nifty study on novelty in film from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York suggests that creativity in film peaked in the 1960s, following the demise of the “Big Five” studio system.
• WolfBrown has published a summary of its four-year evaluation of a New World Symphony initiative to develop new concert formats appealing to younger, inexperienced, and more diverse classical audiences.
• Media Impact Funders has released a new report exploring the in-house media efforts of cultural organizations and the funding that supports it. The report, Molto + Media; Digital Culture Funding, profiles nine organizations including Fractured Atlas and Sundance Institute and summarizes funding trends.
• The Future of Music Coalition scours the NEA’s new Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (which we covered in the last edition of Around the Horn) and finds that music has avoided the declines in participation seen in other genres, with nearly a third of all adults attending a musical performance last year.
• Speaking of FMC, a new survey suggests that artists are uninsured at twice the national average and, when they do have insurance, as six times as likely as others to pay for it themselves. All the more reason to get the exchanges working…
• A chorale a day keeps the gerontologist away? Building on previous studies on the benefits to older people of singing in choirs – among other quality-of-life indicators, “choir membership can also reduce snoring, ease emphysema, [and] soothe irritable bowel syndrome” – the NIH is funding a five-year clinical trial in San Francisco.

Infographic from “Why Contests Improve Philanthropy,” published by the Knight Foundation May 2013

A month later, Starr shot back with a post entitled “Dump the Prizes,” in which he eviscerated the weaknesses of contest philanthropy and jokingly suggested “mandatory jail time for crowdsourcing or crowd-judging.” Wrote Starr:

For social sector organizations, money is the oxygen they need to stay alive, so leaders have to chase prizes just like they do other, more sensible sources of funding. Some in the industry justify this as a useful learning process. It’s not. Few competitions (with some notable exceptions) provide even the most rudimentary feedback. Too many of these contests and prizes seem like they are more about the givers than the getters anyway. […]

The Hilton Humanitarian prize is a single winner-take-all award of $1.5 million to one lucky organization each year. With a huge prize like that, everyone feels compelled to apply (that is, get nominated), and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted on fruitless recommendations. Very smart people from the foundation spend a lot of time investigating candidates—and I don’t understand why. The list of winners over the past ten years includes a bunch of very well-known, mostly wonderful organizations…

A lot of people argue that innovation competitions, challenges, and X Prizes are a vital part of that market and that they drive important advances that wouldn’t happen otherwise. I doubt it. There’s no real evidence for it, and I suspect that they do little more than speed things up a bit. The innovators I know do so to solve problems, not to win prizes. The only in-depth analysis of social impact contests I’ve seen was a 2009 McKinsey report, which began with a contests-are-wonderful perspective and carried on for 100 pages in the same vein without even a whiff of skepticism. Like many discussions of prizes, it confused anecdote with evidence and correlation with causation. We need a real study.

Not two weeks later, Patel was back with an on-point rebuttal that basically boiled down to, “we know that contests can be done badly; we’re talking about the benefits of good contests.”

A lot of this discussion reminds me of the perennial debate over the value of measurement and strategic frameworks like logic models. Details matter. It’s much more difficult to implement research-based frameworks thoughtfully than it is to implement them at all. But thoughtful or not, such frameworks can still be time- and labor-intensive to navigate, so when they are not implemented well you just make people’s lives more complicated without really adding any value. Similarly, prize philanthropy, especially when it devolves into popularity contest philanthropy, can easily do more to create stress than to improve outcomes.

I strongly share Patel’s belief in the value of open selection processes (such as those used in Knight’s contests). Nevertheless, I don’t think he comes out the winner here on every point. One of Starr’s key critiques is that, because of the competitiveness of open contests, applicants can invest a lot of time and energy in a game that they are very likely to lose. Indeed, the Knight Arts Challenge, one of the contests Patel mentions, has had over 13,300 applications in its various incarnations and funded only 257 winners, a success rate of less than two percent. (ArtPlace, whose initial formation was heavily influenced by Knight Arts VP Dennis Scholl, operates using a similar model.) While Knight takes care to minimize the administrative burden placed on applicants in the initial round, one wonders how much potential is wasted in the 98% of projects that don’t get funded.

Fortunately, as I mentioned, the report that started things off is pretty great – partly because of its interactive presentation, but more because it actually anticipates many of these issues and offers suggestions to address them. For example, some of the ideas Patel offers to make contests better include:

• Include other funders in your reviewer pool. You can share contest knowledge with them. They may fund ideas you don‘t.

• Treat your applicants as problem identifiers not just solution providers. Even entries that don‘t offer a feasible project idea worth funding still provide you with potentially useful feedback on the issues they think need fixing.

• Make it the default option that applicants post their entries publicly. In the news challenge applicants can opt to submit their entries privately, but generally over 90% of all submissions are posted publicly. Why? Because applicants see the benefits of attracting attention to their ideas and generating support.

It’s obvious that Knight is still figuring things out to some extent, even as it champions the virtues of open contests. But overall, I share the foundation’s faith in the format, especially the open-access nature of it. Kevin Starr brings up some good points, but his foundation doesn’t even accept applications…and he’s far from the only grantmaker who takes that approach. The more who do, the faster we end up with an environment that’s inhospitable to new voices that aren’t coming through the traditional networks. That may well be a problem for innovation in the social sector generally, but I would argue it’s especially important to keep those channels open in the arts, given our field’s emphasis on diversity of expression and individual creativity.

• The NEA has unveiled a new four-point plan for its arts education program, and Kristen Engebretsen has the details.
  
• Yo-Yo Ma gave this year’s Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy at Arts Advocacy Day, and you can watch the video here.
• Fascinating account of the Norwegian jazz scene and how government funding for the arts, at its best, can create an environment rich in experimentation and possibility: “Ambitious ideas aren’t crushed under the weight of impracticality before they can grow and take shape.”
• Wise words from Charlie Jensen about the many forms of arts advocacy:
  

  While it’s true that responding to threats to arts and culture funding, unfavorable legislation, or moves to otherwise impede our ability to serve our communities is a true emergency, it is about 5% of work we need done. Let me say it again: it’s a critical 5%. But it’s 5%. The real work of advocacy—to extend the metaphor, the verses of our song—is already happening, every day, in each of our organizations. It’s happening on Facebook and Twitter, when your staff answer phones, when the curtains go up or the lights come down or the performers take their places or the doors open or the first words are sung or spoken. It’s happening when your patron or audience member has a positive interaction with a member of your staff.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation president Thomas C. Layton is retiring after serving at the helm for 38 years. Stacie Ma’a, a fresh face at only 14 years of service, will replace him. The Gerbode Foundation supports the arts and other causes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii.
• The Foundation Center is expanding Lisa Philp’s Stategic Philanthropy team, hiring Viviana Bianchi as director of partnerships and Jen Bokoff (a self-described “data nerd”) as director of GrantCraft.

IN THE FIELD

• RIP Gainesville (GA) Symphony Orchestra.
• Did you know that some hotels have artist in residence programs? Britain’s Telegraph offers a round-up; they range from the earnest (two months of free space for artists selected by peer panel at the Gershwin Hotel in New York) to the self-congratulatory (fashion illustrator David Downton painting celebrities at Claridge’s in London).
• In an op-ed for the New York Times, Authors Guild president Scott Turow chronicles the industry disruption that has buffeted professional authors thanks to the advent of ebooks and digital technology more generally. It’s strikingly similar to the story of the music industry.
• Is Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood (recipient of an ArtPlace grant) an example of creative placemaking run amok?

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Bill Gates does an Ask Me Anything (AMA) over at Reddit.
• Just when I thought the academic publishing model couldn’t be any more perverted, I learn that they charge authors like Michael Rushton (who already contribute their work without payment or royalties) nearly $3000 for the “privilege” of making their articles available in an open-access journal. Holy crap!
• Wow, no one can say Colleen Dilenschneider isn’t audacious. The Gen Y social media and museum marketing consultant reveals that she has made “a few five-figure gifts this year, as well as several four-figure and three-figure gifts” but recounts an array of frustrating experiences she’s had dealing with the organizations who have been the recipients of her largesse. A worthwhile, if slightly maddening, read.

BIG IDEAS

• DC’s National Building Museum is hosting a series of programs under the banner of “Culture as Catalyst.” The museum’s Scott Kratz and Martin Moeller provide background for the series and video of the first two sessions at this ArtsBlog post.
• In a long post for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson considers New Orleans’s attempt to reinvent itself as America’s next great innovation hub. His comments about the grand experiment in public education made possible by Katrina’s destruction may be of particular interest to arts educators.
  
• Fascinating article on BuzzFeed, a website best known for hyper-shareable content like “The 40 Best Animal Cuddlers of All Time” but which also features a crack political and investigative reporting team led by former POLITICO blogger Ben Smith. Founded by Jonah Peretti (who was previously responsible for much of The Huffington Post’s success as well as the infamous blackpeopleloveus.com), Buzzfeed eschews the usual banner ads and subscription fees in favor of viral advertorials that are all but indistinguishable from the virtual candy normally on offer. It is news source and ad agency in one, and doesn’t apologize for blending the two. It’s undeniably a new model for supporting journalism, but can it work? One clue might be found in this paragraph:
  

  Peretti rejects the notion that the news operation he has built is, as he has put it, “a hood ornament to lend the site prestige.” It was a business calculation that, somewhat to his surprise, pushed BuzzFeed in the same old-media editorial direction he once chafed at during his time at the Huffington Post. Journalism has clickable appeal on Twitter and brings the kind of readers preferred by premium advertisers. He likes to say that journalism works best on social networks with “scoops and quality reporting,” not aggregation. But the head of BuzzFeed’s data-science department frankly told me that the company has found it to be extremely difficult to make a news item go viral.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new meta-analysis from Chinese researchers suggests that listening to music can counteract insomnia.
• UNESCO has a new monograph out on measuring cultural participation.
• Arts Diplomacy Network is “gathering financial, program, and other information from diverse sources to…enable researchers to analyze how much money is invested in international arts exchange by U.S. organizations and in what regions they are working.”
• NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Kate Levin dishes about her department’s use of data in a short video at the NCAR blog.
• Sunil Iyengar summarizes a research study looking at the effect of music-making on “gene expression pathways” in heart disease patients.
• Why you don’t need a Ph.D. in statistics to be a data scientist.

• Sadly, this is what passes for a victory in arts funding these days: the NEA survived the 2012 budget appropriations process with only a 6% cut from last year. This represents full funding of President Obama’s request; yes, that’s right folks, our fearless leader demonstrated his steadfast support of the arts this year by proposing a $9 million cut to a budget that his own handpicked agency head has already described as “pathetic.” The arts in education budget from the Department of Education survived, despite a proposal by the administration to consolidate the program. Other federal cultural agencies, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian, saw their funding hold steady or increase slightly.
• Grantmakers in the Arts is launching a new Arts Education Funders’ Coalition that “will work with an education policy firm in Washington DC to develop opportunities and policies that will enhance arts education at the federal level.”
• A bill has been introduced in Congress that would impose a new royalty in the amount of 7% of any sales of artwork over $10,000 by living artists or other works not yet in the public domain. The royalty would apply to sales at auction houses and the proceeds would be split evenly between the artist (or his or her heirs) and a new federally-administered fund that will help museums purchase works by living artists. To date, I’ve mostly read arguments against the proposed legislation, some of which are more compelling than others, but I still think the best reason to oppose it is that it seems most likely to help established names at the expense of emerging artists.
• The passage of a constitutional amendment in Minnesota tripling the state’s arts funding was heralded at the time as unmitigated good news. But since then, the additional funds have brought their own set of headaches with them.
• Jan Brennan writes about Denver’s newly merged cultural affairs agency, Arts & Venues Denver.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• More on the recently-announced €1.8 billion “Creative Europe” funding program.
• Emilya Cachapero reports on the aftereffects of Palestine’s entry into UNESCO, and the United States’ legislatively-mandated decision to stop funding the agency as a retaliatory action. The funding cut amounts to $35 million annually, or 22% of UNESCO’s budget.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The director of the program that awards the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grants, Daniel Socolow, is set to retire.
• Daniel Kertzner, arts program officer for the Rhode Island Foundation, has been promoted to Vice President of Grant Programs for the community foundation.
• The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance has a new executive director, Jeannie Howe. Former director Buck Jabaily is leaving to become co-founder of Baltimore Open Theatre, which sounds pretty cool.
• Also in Baltimore, Ben Stone is the new executive director of the city’s Station North cultural district.
• Theatre Bay Area has a new managing director, Dana Harrison, who formerly played a key role in managing the Burning Man festival.

IN THE FIELD

• The Fayetteville (NC) Museum of Art is shutting down.
• The contract dispute between the New York City Opera and its musicians is getting ugly.
• With Occupy Wall Street in the rear view mirror, the local musicians’ union in New York City is reviving its Justice for Jazz Artists campaign, which I reported on back in 2009. Two years later, the union has not met with any success in convincing owners of the major jazz clubs in NYC to honor verbal agreements to pass the proceeds from a tax break (which was passed five years ago with lobbying help from the clubs in question) to a musicians’ pension fund.

BIG IDEAS

• The cultural equity conversation continues over at GIA. Barry Hessenius says it’s all about boards of directors. Arlene Goldbard offers her response, and a not-so-modest proposal to shake things up from the very foundations (so to speak).
• Tech toys: this video shows progress in 2011 on Arena Stage’s New Play Map.
• The Emerging Ideas series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council continues with Letitia Ivins’s Pop-Ups for the Populi.
• Minnesota’s Walker Art Center has a new website and it is apparently a trip.
• This has got to be the most epic liveblog I’ve ever seen – one post covering four days of madness at the Doris Duke-funded Continuing Innovation Convening last week in New York City, complete with pics, video, you name it. Karina Mangu-Ward has just declared herself a blogger to watch at EMCArts’s new portal ArtsFwd, which is well worth checking out.

PHILANTHROPY WORLD

• “The typical foundation provides just 22% of its grantees with assistance securing funding from other sources.” I’m actually surprised this number isn’t lower. However, about half of the total is accounted for by simply suggesting other prospects to the grantee, a form of assistance that grantees say doesn’t help all that much.
• GiveWell explains how it chose between its top two recommended charities.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Judith H. Dobrzynski reports on the new Art & Finance Report from Deloitte Luxembourg and ArtTactic.

ETC.

• Andrew Taylor points us to a cool story about the role that South African taxi cab drivers played in curating music consumption in the 1990s.
• Off-topic, but…it’s ludicrous that the penny is still around. I remember calls for them to disappear back when I was a teenager. Can we get some movement on this, finally?
• I named Craige Hoover’s YourTownPerforms.com one of the top 5 new arts blogs in 2010, and the thanks I get is that he disappears for over a year. Luckily, he’s back, hopefully for good this time.

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In many ways I have Grantmakers in the Arts to thank for this blog reaching the people it does today. That’s because, in what can only be called a stroke of dumb luck, GIA Deputy Director Tommer Peterson invited me to be the organization’s first official conference blogger in 2009, which subsequently resulted in bringing Createquity to the attention of many funders who would not have otherwise discovered it. I did not hold any such honor this year, but I’ve decided to write up my thoughts anyway because I’ve since come to realize what an incredible privilege it is that I am allowed to represent Fractured Atlas at this annual gathering of funders that is otherwise closed to non-grantmakers, and I feel a sense of duty to share what I learn and observe with the rest of the field for whom such access is out of reach.

My first experience at this year’s GIA conference, subtitled “Navigating the Velocity of Change,” was the Art & Technology Preconference, which I believe (please correct me if I am wrong) is a first for GIA. Fittingly held in the heart of Silicon Valley at San Jose’s $382 million Richard Meier-designed City Hall, the preconference was the highlight of the trip for me. I was blown away by Joaquin Alvarado‘s wide-ranging opening keynote, which explored issues as diverse as the open-source ethos, participatory web projects (Popcorn, a tool to integrate text, video, and other media from anywhere on the web, and Universal Subtitles, a crowdsourcing platform for translation into foreign languages, were particularly attention-grabbing), and evolving trends in the demographics of tech-savviness. Alvarado is Senior Vice President for Digital Innovation at American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, and he shared the details of an intriguing model of knowledge-sharing for journalists he is working on called the Public Insight Network, as well as a “balance the budget” game his team created that has garnered some 6,000 comments from all sides of the political spectrum. Through his talk, I learned that the #1 generator of data on the planet is the United States government; that a $35 tablet computer has been released in India; that the free and open internet is fast becoming a thing of the past; that internet service providers have more unionized workers than anyone in technology; that the fastest growing segment of video gamers is women over the age of 60; that the library is where 20% of Americans get their broadband; and that there were more votes in American Idol last year than there were votes in all democratic societies combined. Whew! We also had a funny moment when we realized that no one in the room had played fantasy football, causing Alvarado to quip (referring to those in attendance), “This is not America!”

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Another standout session from the Technology Preconference was “Supporting the Ecology of Awesomeness,” led by Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences co-founder Tim Hwang. I’ve written here before about the Awesome Foundation, which is a kind of giving circle model for the 21st century sprung from the minds of irrepressible techies. Every Awesome Foundation chapter (of which there are now 29 around the world) is run by ten board members, who pool $100 each every month and award one grant to…well, pretty much anything that seems really cool. (The inaugural Awesome Foundation grant was for a giant hammock in a Boston park that could hold up to 20 people at a time.) Prospective grantees need only fill out a 10-minute online grant application, and the model is so lightweight that many chapters don’t even have bank accounts. (The 10-member limit is also interesting; Hwang moved from Boston to San Francisco and was only able to join the local Awesome Foundation board because there happened to be someone leaving the very month he moved.)

Hwang and his mates have created an infectious language around what they have created that is full of self-deprecating irony. Calling the concept “micro-funding for micro-geniuses,” Hwang noted the “Virtuous Cycle of Awesomeness” that takes place as a result of the funding opportunity receiving more attention. Each board member occupies a “Chair” that is named after the original board member to occupy that spot – so, someone could be the “3rd David Fisher Chair” of the Boston chapter, for example. When it came time to finally incorporate the Awesome Foundation as a centralized nonprofit, it wasn’t called the Awesome Foundation – it’s called the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies! They’re even planning on publishing a journal.

I love the Awesome Foundation’s low barriers to entry (it’s particularly impressive and important that they don’t arbitrarily restrict the pool of potential recipients by legal status or force them into categories that may or may not fit what they do), the lightweight and portable nature of the model, and most especially, the sense of pure fun that Awesome Foundation trustees bring to the practice of philanthropy. At the same time, the model has its downsides, and I hesitate to leap to too many conclusions regarding its applicability to the rest of our field. There’s an inherent lack of scalability within a particular locality, given the limit of ten trustees (and $12,000 total annual giving) per city. Tim mentioned that several chapters were exploring the possibility of starting another chapter in the same city, but there was no information provided on how, if at all, those chapters would coordinate to prevent duplicate applications, much less grants. Hwang and company believe that accountability is a barrier to innovation, but the absence of strong central coordination means that data collection is, understandably, haphazard, and sometimes the main organization doesn’t even know what all the other chapters are up to. Finally, although I personally love and relate to the word “awesome” and the language and ethos around it, I sometimes wonder if that’s because it resonates with certain aspects of my background – white, male, young, educated, tech-savvy – and whether it would feel a little or a lot exclusionary to people who don’t fit one or more of those descriptions. Hwang reports that the Awesome Foundation boards are gradually diversifying with the growth of the chapter network (the average age of the Florida chapter trustees apparently is far higher than that for the rest of the country), but it’s still kind of hard for me to imagine some of the attendees of the Art & Social Justice preconference being down with the Awesome Foundation. (I would love to be proven wrong on this, by the way.)

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My experience at the main GIA conference was more mixed. A number of the sessions I was most interested in were scheduled against each other, and I was sorry not to have been able to attend several that seemed to get quite a bit of buzz, including the announcement of the NEA/Knight Foundation’s first-ever Arts Journalism Awards, the unveiling of the Irvine Foundation’s new grantmaking strategy; and the release of Holly Sidford’s controversial report on equity in arts funding for the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy. Fortunately, those sessions were covered in depth by “official” GIA bloggers at the links above.

Three sessions I found particularly interesting were Manuel Pastor’s Monday keynote on changing demographics, an offsite session focusing on the evaluation of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, and a “video game salon” organized by Ron Ragin of the Hewlett Foundation and Marian Godfrey of the Pew Charitable Trusts. (Disclosure for those who don’t know: Ron has been my close colleague for the past several years in helping Fractured Atlas build Archipelago and the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map.)

Manuel Pastor is a remarkably engaging speaker. Clearly accustomed to the lecture format, he delivered a tour-de-force presentation on the changing demographics of California and the nation at large. Given the work I’ve been doing around California cultural geography for the past couple of years, many of his revelations (for example, that California is already a majority-minority state and that the US as a whole is headed there by 2042) were familiar to me, but even so I learned that the demographic picture is more complex than often painted. For example, people often think that the explosion in growth is primarily coming from Latino immigrants, and that used to be the case. But immigration is no longer what’s driving growth. Developing nation economies are doing better, and birth rates in those countries are going down. In the meantime, the percentage of foreign-born individuals in California is going down, and Los Angeles was the only metropolitan area in the top 100 to experience a decrease in the number of Hispanic children under the age of 18 in the past decade. Meanwhile, the share of recent immigrants to California that from Mexico was just 1 in 3, although many of the other top countries of origin were in Central America and the Caribbean. I also learned that many Hispanics insist on calling themselves their own race, even though the Census doesn’t classify them that way – in every Census since the question was first asked, approximately half of all Latinos have marked “Other” for race.

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Although I missed Holly Sidford’s session presenting her report on equity in grant funding, I did catch her and the Helicon Collaborative team at “Cultural Equity Grantmaking: How Far Have We Come? What’s Next?” The San Francisco Arts Commission, whose Cultural Equity Grants program was the subject of the titular study, has gone through some tough times recently and as a result the evaluation is apparently suspended from public release for the moment. But we got treated to a preview of the results, which let us know that (shocker alert!) a grant program amounting to $2 per citizen per year and representing only 4% of city funding for the arts has not succeeded in achieving cultural equity. But that’s not to say it hasn’t made a difference. Funded groups reported that the grants helped leverage other funding, enabled risk-taking projects, and deepened artistic relationships. Perhaps more significantly, fully a third of the city’s Grants for the Arts funding now goes to “culturally diverse” sources, although it’s hard to know how much of this increase was influenced by the existence of the Cultural Equity Grants program and how much was due to other factors.

The discussion following the presentation posed some important and intriguing questions. Although everyone seemed to be in agreement that organizations representing non-European cultures should get a bigger piece of the funding pie as a basic tenet of fairness, the picture of what that would actually look like in practice seemed less clear. Many of the largest investments in traditional SOB (symphony, opera, ballet)-type organizations have gone to bricks-and-mortar purposes like new buildings, expansions, renovations, etc., but several in the room commented that the building of massive institutions was not necessarily a priority for organizations that would be the beneficiaries of increased funding. Another interesting strand of conversation related to the question of whether having a separate, dedicated stream of funding for diverse programming, as in the case of San Francisco’s Cultural Equity Grants program, is helpful to the cause or only serves to justify the much larger investments made in the “regular” pool. Finally, as discussion continued regarding the needs of culturally-specific organizations, I kept hearing a lot of the same themes that I hear in discussion of the needs of small to medium-size organizations in general: more general operating support, capacity building, risk capital, etc. Recognizing that I still have more to learn from than to contribute to these conversations, I was nevertheless left wondering whether culturally-specific organizations are really so specific, once you get past the content of their programming and the composition of their audiences.

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“Don’t Get Pwnd! | A Video-gaming Salon for Grantmakers“ was a great way to round out the conference, bringing things full circle from Joaquin Alvarado’s revelations about gaming three days earlier. The session was presented by Jonathan Blow, an independent game developer, and Alice Myatt, director of the media arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Blow spoke first, telling of the trials and tribulations of the indie game market. Once again, I found it remarkable how a creative industry that is outside of what we typically think of as “the arts” can sound so familiar in conversation. According to Blow, creatively speaking, this is the best time in history to make a game. It’s easier than ever before to find an audience through independent distribution, and one no longer need rely on the giant game companies as a bottleneck. Yet there are challenges: intense competition for people’s time means that everything in the game matters, because your audience could lose interest at any moment. And game developer conferences are extraordinarily expensive, sometimes as much as $2,000 per person in addition to travel and lodging, shutting out those with less financial wherewithal. Ring any bells? For her part, Myatt spoke of the recent round of grant applications in which the NEA opened up the process to video game developers for the first time. Of 360 electronic media proposals, 20% were gaming-related.

The session was a veritable coronation for video games as an art form, Roger Ebert’s notorious assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. More than once, the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring video games a constitutionally-protected form of expression was mentioned, along with the fact that the same recognition was granted to film 60 years ago and literature before that. Blow noted that while everyone in America watches movies, it’s not cool to admit to playing video games – yet. But that’s bound to change soon, now that video games are now bigger business than music and film combined. Myatt opined that games need to be put into the public media pot in order to stabilize society, but complained that she rarely sees her colleagues at the video game conferences she attends (such as Games for Change). Funders outside the arts are on the case, though: next year’s Council on Foundations conference will actually have a gaming track – including a video arcade at the conference!

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And that was that. My overall takeaway? It’s hard to generalize from my experience this year, and I am always conscious of the fact that the intellectual diet that I feed on at the conference is shaped by my own tastes. But in general, there seemed to be a real thirst for innovation that was just a bit more urgent than in previous years. The sessions that drew the most positive attention were, by and large, the boldest: the ones that dared to seriously question the status quo or chart forward a path that hasn’t been tried before. It’s as if, having been buffeted by the winds of change for three years now, funders have been convinced of the futility of fighting back. Perhaps, next year, we’ll see some folks getting out the sailboards, ready to ride this gust wherever it takes them.

Through the work of the Emerging Ideas Committee this year, I’ve become acquainted with a wealth of new approaches to old problems and exciting combinations of existing models about which I was previously unaware. You’re seeing some examples of them on the Blog Salon this week, and we’ll be sharing more on this space as the year goes on.

For every strong example of innovation we highlight, however, I’m sure there are five more that we missed. Not because they were not among the ones we chose, but because they were never even brought to our attention.

You see, part of the nature of being “under the radar” is that it’s hard for people who rely on conventional information sources to find you. The five young arts professionals on our committee set out at the beginning of the year to identify novel, smart projects that weren’t getting attention from the field as a whole. We used what resources we had at our disposal – most notably, our connection to the 30+ local Emerging Leader Networks around the country – but inevitably, our ability to “spot” innovative ventures is determined to a significant extent by those ventures’ visibility.

Each of us as human beings only has a finite attention span to work with, and in many situations, that capacity for attention is not enough to handle all of the possibilities before us. As a result, we tend to take defensive measures to limit the pool of choices: we may confine a job recruitment effort to people we already know, for example, or a funder might choose not to accept unsolicited applications. These decisions are almost always understandable in their own right, but as I’ve written in the past, their combined net effect is that unheralded artist-entrepreneurs face increasing pressure and competition to stand out from the crowd, which often forces them to choose between either self-subsidizing to some degree or toiling in obscurity forever. That makes it harder and harder for the outsiders and the economically disadvantaged to get ahead – and our field is poorer for their absence from the conversation. We need dedicated, knowledgeable people who can each “cover” a smaller slice of the arts world comprehensively and with integrity, and who are willing to share what they learn with the rest of us. That’s what good curators do – and we desperately need more of them.

This past weekend, David Dower from Arena Stage drove home this point quite eloquently with a long post about Arena’s curation process. A couple of years ago, Dower reformed the way that Arena Stage  scouts new plays, and one of the consequences was the end of Arena’s open submissions policy. Although it makes sense in theory that if you want to support new plays (or new anything), you should be open to anyone, Dower and his team were bowing to the reality that the volume of aspiring playwrights was such that no one could really get a fair hearing anyway. “When the submission policy was open, writers and agents had the impression they were getting their plays to me by putting them in the mail,” Dower explains. “But they weren’t. They were getting plays to a corps of non-staff readers with no real avenue to impact planning decisions.”

So how does an aspiring playwright, someone with a radically new and wonderful approach to narrative that deserves a fair hearing, get the attention of Arena Stage without an open admissions process? According to Dower,

The answer to that one is by being in motion in the world as a playwright. [Emphasis mine—IDM] If you’re participating in development labs and conferences, if your plays are somewhere in production …you have a much better chance of coming to our attention than if you are mailing a script to a theater that assigns it to a non-staff reader.

Dower goes on to explain that Arena Stage pursues partnerships with new play development labs so as to effectively outsource the curation process to them. The point? Even a huge, highly influential entity such as Arena Stage that is committed to the performance of new plays doesn’t have the capacity to evaluate everyone’s work. If the curation process were only up to them, a lot of people would get lost through the cracks. The only way for new playwrights to get to that level is to first succeed among a network of organizations and individuals who are “closer to the ground” – who perhaps offer less in the way of access to immediate fame, but who are in a position to offer more of their undivided attention.

I’ve spent a lot of time just now talking about new plays, and you might wonder what any of that has to do with new models for arts administration. But the truth is that they are hardly different at all. Either way, someone with an idea, whether an artist or an entrepreneur or both, can rarely bring that idea to life on her own. She needs the help of those with resources and connections to realize its potential. Yet the catch-22 is that those with resources and connections need help too: they need help distinguishing her great idea from the hundreds or thousands of pretty good, mediocre, and terrible ideas competing for their attention. That’s where curators, in whatever form they take, play such an important role. They are the ones who invest their invaluable time, expertise, and attention in sifting through the unfamiliar names, the aspirational efforts, and the half-baked notions. They are the ones who make it possible for the unconnected to become connected, and for the rest of the world to benefit from that connection. The ones who pursue this task with vigor, perseverance, and integrity are the unsung heroes of our field, for without them we would not be very innovative at all.

In January, we decided to initiate a year-long research project by asking, “What lessons can the rest of the field learn or take away from novel, under-the-radar, and locally-based ideas, projects or approaches to old problems?”

[…]

This fall, our committee will present a selection of in-depth profiles on some of the innovative ideas, projects and themes we’ve uncovered throughout the year. This week’s salon is an effort to expand and frame that conversation.

[…]

We specifically looked for two types of writers:

• First, the artist/producer/entrepreneur: someone who is realizing the development of a new enterprise or idea by leveraging talent, harnessing resources, pioneering change, and perhaps creating wealth (economic, cultural, etc.).
• Second, the finder/curator: one who is specifically tasked, through either his/her job or passion, with uncovering new voices and bringing them to the attention of others.

Our hope is that the conversation is as much about the process of innovation (and tuning innovation into reality) as the content of the innovation itself.

Happy reading!