• The backlash against unpaid internships has spread beyond our borders: Ontario’s Ministry of Labour has ordered two high-profile Canadian magazines to immediately end their internship programs. The Ministry also announced it plans “an enforcement blitz this spring focused specifically on internships across a variety of sectors.” (NB: while nonprofits are generally exempt from the US Department of Labor requirements for unpaid internships, state laws, including New York’s, can be more stringent.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• After nearly 30 years as CEO of National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Jonathan Katz is set to make his exit soon.
• Margit Rankin has resigned as Executive Director of Washington State’s Artist Trust. The Trust plans to “focus on internal efficiencies and statewide reach before hiring [her] replacement.”
• Carolina Garcia Jayaram was recently appointed the new CEO of United States Artists, and will be taking the Los Angeles-based organization back with her to Chicago.
• Miguel M. Salinas, formerly Program Director at the Adobe Foundation, is moving into the newly-created position of Program Officer for Local Grantmaking at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. His portfolio will include arts funding for Northern California’s Monterey County and surrounding region.
• Ken Cole of the National Guild for Community Arts Education will be taking over the role of Vice President of Learning and Leadership Development with the League of American Orchestras.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Detroit Institute of Arts saga continues. Not to be outdone by the “grand bargain” that would offer the city (and its creditors) over $800 million in exchange for taking the art museum (and more importantly, its art) off the table in bankruptcy negotiations, one of those creditors, Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. (FGIC) is now soliciting bids for the DIA’s entire collection. So far, four bids have been received with a high of $2 billion, but they’ve drawn a cool reception from the city’s Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr. Curious why Wall Street types care so much about a bunch of old paintings? Well, one estimate puts the opportunity cost of displaying Breughel’s “The Wedding Dance” at $1,200 per viewer.
• The CEOs of the Hewlett, Ford, and McKnight Foundations got together to discuss the results of a report that suggests a kind of Lake Wobegon effect among foundation leaders: they tend to be pessimistic about their field’s overall progress toward achieving goals, but optimistic about the work of their own foundations. The three executives acknowledged their incentives to demonstrate individual leadership get in the way of the collaboration and coordination to which they aspire and promote to their grantees.
• Speaking of foundation strategy, Daniel Stid, senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, candidly asks on the foundation’s blog whether Hewlett’s nascent bid to advance democracy by supporting both political parties and campaign finance reform makes any sense. Score one for philanthropy transparency – and zero for the rest of us: several days after the post went up, there were exactly no responses.

IN THE FIELD

• In response to an uproar from patrons, the San Diego Opera formed a special committee of the board to explore ways to avert the closure it announced abruptly last month, and a board member has announced a $1-million gift. Also, and we’re not sure which way this cuts, PR doctor Mark Fabiani has volunteered his crisis-management services, putting the Opera in the august company of Whitewater-era Bill Clinton, doping-era Lance Armstrong, and kleptocracy-era Goldman Sachs. Alas, it all seems to have been for naught.
• Portland, Oregon is about to go on a Bard binge: more than fifteen local theater companies are collaborating to produce all of Shakespeare’s works across the city over the next two years.
• Scape Capital, a Russian management firm, has purchased ARTnews from long-time owners Milton and Judith Esterow.

BIG IDEAS

• One possible result of investing in a “STEAM” (science/technology/engineering/math + arts) approach to K-12 education: shifting to a framework of “deeper learning” as amusingly outlined in this recent Hewlett blog and pioneered by San Diego’s High Tech High. High Tech High, incidentally, scores extra awesome points for launching their own MOOCs (with the help of their students) on how to design and build schools using this approach.
• A simple point, but one not made often enough: nonprofits see growth in their costs in part because growth in their revenues makes it possible.
• Are think tanks doomed in the face of human irrationality?

RESEARCH CORNER

• The state of the nonprofit sector is pretty grim, according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund: more than half of surveyed organizations reported they were unable to meet demand for their services, and are operating with three months or less of cash on hand. You can dig into arts-specific data using this interactive tool. Some nuggets: only about a third of arts nonprofits reporting an inability to meet demand, and arts orgs are significantly less likely to regularly collect data long-term data on impact than the nonprofit sector as a whole.
• A new NEA analysis of monthly census data reveals that the unemployment rate for artists continued to drop slightly in 2013 (7.1% vs 7.3% in 2012) and has recovered considerably from its Great Recession peak of 9.5% – though it remains much higher than the 2006 low of 3.6%. Two interesting sidebars: 1) Some findings about those for whom the arts are a secondary job, including the fact that 20% are teachers in their day jobs – and 20% are artists in a different capacity. 2) Although artists are classed as professionals, their 2013 overall unemployment rate was much closer to the total population’s (6.6%) than to other professionals’ (3.6%).
• This handy infographic breaks down the differences between US and UK philanthropy. The gold for sheer size goes the US, where the average person gives almost three times as much and the non-profit sector represents almost seven times as large a share of GDP, but the authors caution their fellow Brits against imitation in the full paper.
• Nifty data crunching suggests that films passing the Bechdel Test — a standard, albeit depressing, measure of gender bias — are actually a much better return on investment than Hollywood execs claim.
• Think there’s no way to judge creativity? Think again: new research suggests that people can be trained to accurately identify “subcomponents” of creativity. Interestingly, the control group  didn’t deem the same works “creative” as the group that received the training. Control group members did, however, tend to identify the same works as other control group subjects, implying they were all reacting to another, unknown component of the art.
• Speaking of assessing creativity, education leaders who bemoan American students’ consistent “underperformance” relative to counterparts in other countries may have a glimmer of hope: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted its first test of creative problem solving and found that American students did much better than they did on standard reading, math, and science tests. The bad news? They still trailed students from several countries like Singapore and Australia, both of which happen to put heavy emphasis on arts education. Hint, hint…

On Thursday, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jane Chu for the position of Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Chu, the president and CEO of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, MO, brings big-institution arts industry experience and a middle-America background to the job. If confirmed, she will become the first Asian American permanent chair of the NEA, although Joan Shigekawa has served that role in an interim capacity for the past year and a half. Reaction from the field has been one of pleasant surprise, but she’s getting rave reviews from back home.

Meanwhile, two of Chu’s predecessors warn that her task will be all about money, money, money. Earlier, in yet another down-to-the-wire process, the United States Congress authorized a spending bill in January covering the rest of the current fiscal year, which ends September 30, 2014. The NEA and other federal cultural agencies were essentially level-funded compared to last year’s appropriations, which is effectively a (small) raise from the amounts each agency had to work with after the so-called sequester kicked in last year. However, the NEA’s budget is still down from its recent peak of $167.5 million from fiscal year 2010, and far below its inflation-adjusted peak from the Carter years.

The budget friction is affecting the arts in other ways, too: for example, the Department of Transportation has failed to meet a deadline to require airlines to accommodate musicians’ instruments on flights because it says Congress didn’t provide it with enough funding to hire the people necessary to write the guidelines. A group of Congressional representatives led by Jim Cooper (D-TN), for its part, is calling BS and asking the DOT to get its act together. Meanwhile, the European Union is moving toward a uniform policy for instruments brought on airplanes.

It’s been a rough 2014 so far for net neutrality. Last month’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals means that cable and telephone companies could privilege certain kinds of content, which could endanger the wealth of artistic innovation on the web. AT&T, for its part, says nothing is about to change – possibly because the decision leaves open other means of regulation that could be worse for internet service providers. In fact, Wired seems to think that the court order has given the FCC carte blanche to regulate the entire internet. Yet if you thought the invisible hand of the market would help secure net neutrality on its own, you might be concerned that America’s largest cable company is buying its second-largest. Time Warner Cable’s proposed merger with Comcast seems to bode ill for open Internet advocates, given that Comcast already has a monthly cap on bandwidth in place; if things continue down this road, a former FCC Commissioner warns of scenarios like cable companies bundling internet content the way that cable channels currently are, and censoring stories about their own terrible customer service. All eyes are on the FCC as it considers its next steps.

STATE AND LOCAL

While Los Angeles awaits the appointment of a head of its department of cultural affairs, new mayor Eric Garcetti met with arts leaders to drop hints on “a more cohesive arts policy” — which apparently does not include any increase in city funding. Meanwhile, alleging mismanagement, Fairfax County in Northern Virginia will pay $30 million to take control of the Lorton Arts Center and avoid foreclosure.

INTERNATIONAL

The UK’s Building a Creative Nation has been launched to create 50,000 creative sector jobs for young people ages 16 to 24 by 2016. Part of the initiative aims to combat unpaid internships in the arts industry by subsidizing 6,500 training positions. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg claims the program is “paving the way for a new wave of young British talent,” who will contribute “billions to the economy” in the fastest-growing employment sector of the British economy in 2011-2012. Nearly 1.7 billion Britons (5.6% of the workforce) are employed in the creative industries, more than half of them in squarely cultural areas like the performing and visual arts, film, photography, and publishing.

Not all is rosy in the UK, though: Parliament is investigating the fairness of grants made by Arts Council England, which a report found gives five times as much per capita to London organizations vs. others. Philanthropic dollars are similarly concentrated. (By way of comparison, 82% of private UK arts giving went to London; in the US, according to the Foundation Center’s database, 20% of major grants go to New York State.) That might be part of the reason that space for art in London is now at such a premium. Meanwhile, the Council will require new grantees to capture, report, and share information about audience size and composition and has called on the BBC to collaborate with arts organizations.

Elsewhere in the British Isles, Creative Scotland has announced a new 10-year strategic plan; Wales’s capital city is trying to transfer responsibility for two arts venues to the private sector; Newcastle hasn’t been able to raise any money for a matching fund campaign aimed at private donors; and Irish arts funding is down 7% after having been cut for the sixth consecutive year.

In Spain, four years of funding cuts to the cultural infrastructure by that country’s right-wing and debt-ridden government have increasingly spurred protest, and now the Spanish film community is starting to fight back, claiming political conspiracy. Even Pedro Admodóvar is speaking out against what he calls Spain’s “awful cultural policy.” Elsewhere in Europe, Iceland’s state broadcaster has cut almost half its music staff. But in a bit of good news, regulators in France have decided to reverse a decision that would have raised the import tax on artworks from 7% to 10%, instead reducing it to 5.5%.

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.”

The internet just got a little less friendly for pirates. A new “Copyright Alert” system, the product of a voluntary agreement between internet service providers such as Comcast and AT&T, Hollywood movie studios, and major record labels, will inconvenience persistent illicit downloaders first with warnings and then stronger measures such as slowed service. The Future of Music Coalition (consistently the smartest folks in the room when it comes to the arts and copyright issues) is wary but hopeful.

STATE AND LOCAL

Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan is pushing to cut in half the state’s generous subsidy to film producers, which currently gives up to $50 million a year in credits for qualifying expenses to firms that set up shop in the state. Michigan had one of the most aggressive film incentive programs in the country just a few years ago, which attracted such productions as “Gran Torino” and “Up in the Air,” but Snyder has since put on the brakes (even as he supported a rebound last year in the state’s arts council budget).

INTERNATIONAL

My goodness, the stream of news flowing out of the United Kingdom just gets fatter and faster. First, the embattled Arts Council England has a new head in Peter Bazalgette, a former TV executive and chairman of the English National Opera. Local governments continue to cut arts budgets in the face of financial pressures: Newcastle went through with eliminating its £2.5 million culture budget despite intervention from national Labour party leaders, and is attempting to move towards a privatized model instead; Westminster (part of London) has confirmed that it’s cutting its annual £350,000 subsidy out of the picture; and Scotland’s Moray is ditching its more modest £94,000 culture budget. At least Belfast is increasing its local arts support by 27%, to £1.4 million. A survey of UK theater companies suggests that many are cutting back on productions, commissions, and cast sizes due to the cuts, though small sample size should be taken into consideration. In this environment of austerity it’s a great time for university tuition fees to be tripling for artists, but the British government is hoping that the Creative Employment Programme, a rapidly expanding paid apprenticeship system in the creative industries for youths aged 16 to 24, will offer a smooth pipeline for new grads. (Joe Patti has more.)

The combination of the eurozone crisis and austerity policies has decimated Spain’s system of public support for the arts, with funding dropping as much as half since 2009 according to a recent report. The litany of second-order impacts cited in that article includes 100 employees laid off at a single opera house in Barcelona, a cancelled Lucian Freud show at the Museo Nacionale del Prado in Madrid, and a cancelled three-year collaboration between Madrid’s Teatro Real and the Berlin Philharmonic. The Orquestra Girona is down to one concert a year. But depending on who you talk to, there are opportunities lying in wait amidst the upheaval.

Australia’s government is out with a new cultural policy, and Ben Eltham (author of A Cultural Policy Blog) declares it a hit for artists. (Annoying registration required, but it’s free.) The policy commits $236 million in Aussie dollars in mostly new money over five years to various federal arts and culture agencies and programs. The government has also chosen to adopt many of the recommendations made in an independent review of the Australia Council last year, including a controversial proposal to do away with the Council’s discipline-based system of funding. (NEA, take note!) The package even includes $4 million for a “data collection program to inform research for the sector and to  track public value of investment.” More here. And they’re considering a media reform package while they’re at it Down Under.

In other news, Russia may adopt a restrictive rule shutting out small concert promoters, China is considering royalty rights (droit de suite) for visual artists, and UNESCO has pledged to raise an $11 million fund to restore the destruction in Timbuktu, Mali, but at least one observer is skeptical that the money will be used wisely.

• Americans for the Arts’s Narric Rome provides a vital update on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind), and what it all means for arts education, as it makes its way through the Congressional committee process.
• Proposed copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is mobilizing a lot of opposition from the “geek” community – and within the arts.
• A transportation bill making its way through Congress is potentially bad news for public art.
• This isn’t good: citing “budgetary constraints,” the NEA will no longer accept consortium grant proposals in FY13. It’s one organization, one grant from here on out.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The European Commission is betting big on culture, with a €1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) commitment to film, visual, and performing arts over six years under the name “Creative Europe.” ARTINFO is calling it “the world’s largest-ever cultural funding program,” although that seems doubtful once you take the six-year time horizon and inclusion of film into account. For example, in 2007 alone, Germany allocated more than 1.2 billion euros to culture. (via quiet.quiet.quiet.)
• Arts Council England is cracking down on unpaid internships among its grantees (they’re already illegal in the UK). Good for them.
• The Toronto Arts Council is facing a 10% cut.

PHILANTHROPY NOTES

• It’s giving season, and that means the advice is flying fast and furious. The Wall Street Journal is out with its annual special section on philanthropy, which features some stupid debates like “Should Charities Act Like Businesses?” (Umm, you mean like Lehman Bros.?) This year, as in the past, I plan to entrust my non-arts giving to GiveWell, which conducts the most comprehensive and intellectually honest research on giving opportunities I’m aware of anywhere, a veritable wonky wet dream. GiveWell just released its top recommendations for 2011, and they include two disease control charities, Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
• Philanthropy futurist Lucy Bernholz is out with her annual forecast for philanthropists and social investors, Blueprint 2012. Here’s Lucy on the importance of open data as the building block for the future.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is convening a multi-agency task force to fund and promote research on the arts and human development, and has already published a white paper on the subject. This level of engagement with other agencies of government, centering on Health & Human Services, is unprecedented for the NEA’s research department, and has the potential to turn into a big deal if they stay on it. Sunil Iyengar has more.
• Whaddya know? Two of the ten happiest jobs in the United States, according to the highly respected General Social Survey, are authors (#4) and artists (#7). In fact, every single one of the top 8 exist largely or entirely within the nonprofit and public sectors.
• Speaking of happiness, a new study from the co-creator of the “Mappiness” iPhone app, who happens to be a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics, attempts to determine the association between various kinds of (self-reported) activities and (self-reported) happiness for the app’s UK-based users. Clay Lord did some honest-to-goodness journalism and found out that four out of the six happiest activities are arts-related. (#1 on that list, of course, is “intimacy/making love.”) Linda Essig has more.
• WESTAF has published the proceedings of a symposium called “Engaging the Now” featuring the participation of leading arts research lights Ann Markusen, Julia Lowell, and Steven Tepper among others.
• Theatre Communications Group has published the latest version of Theatre Facts.
• Alex Tabarrok on the problems of regression-based studies regressing to the mean. (Translation: small sample size can be a problem even when your sample size isn’t that small.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Adrian Ellis is stepping down as executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center to return to his consulting firm, AEA Consulting.
• And the arts journalism attrition continues: the Denver Post has offered buyouts to a number of longtime staffers, including at least two arts critics.

IN THE FIELD

• Things that make you go hmm: Knoedler & Company, a 165-year-old New York art gallery that was one of the most prestigious in the country, abruptly ceased operations last Wednesday. The next day, a lawsuit was filed by a collector claiming that Knoedler & Company sold him a fake Jackson Pollack for $17 million. ARTINFO has more.
• Well, it was just a matter of time: Occupy Wall Street Occupied Lincoln Center, with composer Philip Glass joining in a protest outside a performance of his own opera, Satyagraha.
• Videos from the National Arts Marketing Project conference are now available on Livestream.
• The blog series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council on notable trends in the field continues with Gabi Jirasek’s entry on the Grand Rapids Lip Dub project and Ebony McKinney’s analysis of arts incubators.
• Some blog salons going on now: Grantmakers in the Arts is having a discussion of Holly Sidford’s recently published cultural equity manifesto “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” from December 6-16, and Americans for the Arts is hosting its first ever local arts agency salon December 5-9.
• Rachael Wilkinson writes up some of the crowdfunding options available to artists. It’s worth noting that Fractured Atlas has partnerships with both IndieGoGo and RocketHub that allow fiscally sponsored projects to receive tax-deductible contributions through those platforms. For for-profit crowdfunded concepts, a bill making its way through Congress would loosen the investor regulations that currently apply.

ETC.

• The Pittsburgh Steelers have a unusual way of selling season tickets: fans can buy a “personal seat license” that gives them theright to buy season tickets for that particular seat. These PSLs are like real estate – they are durable goods, so therefore they increase in value over time. And boy, are they a hot property – Freakonomics reports that on average, prices have increased over 700% in ten years. And you thought dynamic pricing in the arts was bad! (Actually, could this be applied to the arts?)

What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the NATIONAL level?

Organize a national media campaign with celebrity spokespersons, catchy slogans (e.g. “Got Milk”), unified message, and compelling stories – 27%

• Create a Department of Culture/Cabinet-level position which is responsible for implementing a national arts policy – 23%
• Lobby elected political officials for pro-arts policy and funding; demand arts policy platform from candidates – 14%
• Create a coordinated national performing arts policy campaign involving artists and organizations – 12%
• Collect, analyze and disseminate data demonstrating the value of the arts (e.g. economic, intrinsic, developmental/educational values) – 12%
• Establish a National Arts Day/Festival with free performances, open houses, and art-making opportunities – 8%
• Explore interactive new media initiatives to increase access and relevance (e.g. create a “Google Arts”-type resource, blogs,YouTube) – 5%

I’ve talked before about the national media campaign idea. My favorite among these, though it wasn’t a strong one, was “Lobby elected political officials for pro-arts policy and funding.” My experience at the Saving Our Cultural Capital event last month reminded me that politicians will listen to pretty much anyone if they just squeak loud enough. Artists up until now have been hopelessly disorganized in their grassroots political engagement, so this is the area with perhaps the most room to grow. Best of all, it doesn’t require cash falling from the sky in order to make happen.

What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the LOCAL level?

Create an arts coalition to get involved in local decision-making, take leadership positions, and strengthen relationships with elected officials – 21%

Forge partnerships with other sectors to identify how the arts can serve community needs – 21%

• Foster cross-disciplinary conversations to share data and best practices, develop common goals, and create joint activities/ performances – 14%
• Mobilize audiences to be advocates for the arts – 13%
• Utilize existing advocacy and data to influence local funding, policy and public support for the arts – 9%
• Create collaborative local marketing campaigns in mass media and public venues – 8%
• Develop and promote recognizable champions for the arts – 7%
• Create new cross disciplinary events and festivals to promote the local arts community – 6%

My favorite for this one was “Create collaborative local marketing campaigns in mass media and public venues.” Unlike national advertising, local advertising is cheap enough that pooling of resources among arts organizations really can make an impact. There is an effort not totally unlike this in the Bay Area that was initiated by the Wallace Foundation: arts organizations are banding together to create a giant mailing list of arts patrons in the region. The first of the winning suggestions (creating an arts coalition) is a good one as well. I really believe that local is where it’s at as far as advocacy for the arts is concerned.

What should we do about arts advocacy and communicating our value at the ORGANIZATIONAL/INDIVIDUAL level?

Build relationships with non-arts groups, including governments, corporations, community development organizations, etc. – 26%

• Create opportunities for active participation in the arts for all ages (including interactive websites, open rehearsals, etc.) – 24%
• Expand relationships across the community to find and develop new leaders (e.g. through Board development) and local champions for the arts – 12%
• Participate in the local political process by lobbying city council, school board, etc. – 10%
• Create multi-media marketing strategies (including YouTube, Facebook) to communicate and demonstrate value and relevance – 9%
• Connect the stories and experiences of local community members to new and existing artwork – 9%
• Create arts supporters out of our audiences – 7%
• Build relationships with local media to widen their coverage and exposure of the arts – 4%

Again, I feel that local is where it’s at for advocacy. Having arts-aware and -friendly leaders is the surest path to achieving policy changes when we need them. Thus, I voted for “Participate in the local political process by lobbying city council, school board, etc.” The most popular suggestion also addressed this idea in a broader (but vaguer) way.

What should we do about arts EDUCATION on a NATIONAL level?

Devise an advocacy campaign to promote the inclusion of performing arts in core curricula – 36%

• Enlist artists as full partners in all aspects of arts education through training and creating an AmeriCorps/WPA-type program – 22%
• Lobby for education reform, including rescinding No Child Left Behind – 20%
• Form partnerships with national education infrastructure (e.g. National Education Association, PTA, teachers unions) – 13%
• Invite new constituencies to experience the performing arts and create opportunities for lifelong learning by providing more points of entry – 5%
• Research successful models / best practices and disseminate via the web – 2%
• Establish diverse cross-sector committee to create an enriched arts curriculum – 2%

This is the topic on which I’m least knowledgeable, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt. I voted for “Form partnerships with national education infrastructure,” since I’m always for collaboration whenever possible, and this one seems like a natural fit. I considered voting for rescinding No Child Left Behind since that just seems like a good idea regardless of its bearing on the arts.

What should we do about arts EDUCATION on a LOCAL level?

Mobilize and collaborate with K-12 and higher education institutions to strengthen arts education and arts participation as core curriculum – 23%

• Strengthen relationship with school boards and policy makers through lobbying, electing “arts friendly officials”, involvement in local politics – 17%
• Innovate financial models to fund the arts: link to tax base, develop dedicated sales tax, connect to corporate funds – 15%
• Integrate arts teaching in educators’ professional development and integrate teaching programs in artist organizations – 16%
• Bring art into non-traditional spaces (e.g. parks, workplaces, social programs) to create new educational opportunities — “enter into the communities we serve” – 14%
• Develop joint arts education programs across disciplines and within the community for fuller distribution and comprehensive programming – 8%
• Establish and share assessments that create empirical data to demonstrate correlation between arts and educa
  tional impact – 7%

I chose “innovate financial models to fund the arts” not because I see any connection whatsoever to the issue of arts education (I don’t), but because I think this is desperately needed. Denver has a very interesting system tied to the local sales tax that has resulted in a funding base for the arts of $40 million a year, quite remarkable for a city its size. Money isn’t everything, but it’s amazing what actually having enough of it can do for achieving one’s goals.

What should we do about arts EDUCATION on an ORGANIZATIONAL/INDIVIDUAL level?

Lead lifelong education programs that actively involve people in multigenerational groups. “Make the arts part of a lifelong wellness plan.” – 23%

• Directly engage teachers to integrate the arts into their teaching and create professional development programs to address their needs – 19%
• Commit your entire organization to arts education in mission, budget, programs, and collaborations – 13%
• Create new partnerships to share responsibility for planning and delivering local arts education – 11%
  
• Leverage new technology to create art, engage more people (especially young people), and support learning. – 10%
• Run candidates for school boards and local government – 9%
• Use comprehensive education models to engage the whole family in your mission and programs. – 8%
• Join, be active, and take leadership roles in civic organizations – 7%

I may sound like a broken record, but of course I voted for “Join, be active, and take leadership roles in civic organizations.” Local is where it’s at!

What should we do about DIVERSITY on a NATIONAL level?

Charge national service organizations to create dialogue at convenings, create training programs, promote diverse art and artists, and partner with grassroots organizations who are already connected to diverse communities – 43%

Diversify boards, management, and staff in all national arts organizations – 26%

Create a media campaign with artists from diverse communities including celebrities to provide exposure to diverse art – 15%

Raise national funds to support internships, reduced price events, and under-represented artists – 9%

Create national forums, listserves, and websites to support sharing of successful diversity efforts – 7%

So, my question about this one is: why put it all on the service organizations? Why is it their responsibility to create this change? I mean, of course they have a role to play, but I really think this thing is larger than that. As I said to my table, any discussion of diversity has to acknowledge that there are groups of people in this country that simply don’t talk to each other. A few band-aids here and there won’t do anything to solve the underlying problem, which is that our social circles are too often defined by these stupid labels, and that our school funding systems (among other things) exacerbate race and class divisions in particular instead of easing them. So my reluctant first choice here is “Diversify boards, management, and staff in all national arts organizations”–because I think these social divisions make it important to welcome people who can serve as bridges between communities into the fold–but realistically, that will at best make a small dent in a problem that is much too large for the performing arts community to handle alone.

What should we do about DIVERSITY on a LOCAL level?

Open an honest dialogue across community groups and sectors to share priorities and identify barriers to participation – 31%

Partner within the arts, as well as with community organizations, to build relationships – 23%

Expand beyond traditional venues to establish new points of access – 17%

Create programming to address the experiences of the diverse elements of the community – 11%

Engage community leaders from outside the arts to serve in arts leadership positions – 7%

Use diverse voices, experiences, and traditions to market arts programming – 7%

Organize a recurring local performing arts convention – 4%

I actually agreed with this one. I think an honest dialogue is so important, and once again, the local level is where to have it. I got so frustrated with being at tables with other white people at this conference and feeling like we were talking in circles around this issue. But the dialogue can’t be a one-off kind of situation–it has to be sustained and fed and followed up on. And both (or all) sides have to want it, too.

What should we do about DIVERSITY on an ORGANIZATIONAL/INDIVIDUAL level?

Discover arts in your community offered by cultures other than your own and establish peer relationships – 37%

Set long term goal and plan to have staff, board, programming, and audiences reflect the demographics of your community – 32%

Program more diverse artists and content – 15%

Create an internship / entry-level staff program that attracts and recruits diverse staff – 6%

Convene diverse ad hoc steering committees (including youth) for specific projects – 6%

Produce at least one large-scale, publicly accessible event per year – 5%

I agreed with this one too. At one point one of my caucus table-mates was talking about how audiences tend to want to stay inside their comfort zone, and I said, “Yeah, totally–like when was the last time any of us at this table went to a hip-hop concert?” Of course, nobody could remember the last time. So much of the performing arts community is afraid to collaborate outside of its own peer group, much less with an entirely different culture (unless the group representing that culture is from another country–then it’s hip).

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, can we talk for a second about the internship program idea? Someone thought that the way to empower underrepresented minorities is to have them stuff envelopes for $100 a week for three months? Because that’s what most internships in the performing arts are, slave labor masquerading as “educational opportunities.” I would call that one problematic.

Anyway, I think that’s the last post I’ll do on NPAC, at least for now. These are important issues and I’m glad we at least got a conversation started about them.

Note: for more on this, read Adam Natale on the Fractured Atlas blog.