“Netflix” by flickr user Jenny Cestnik.

This month, Netflix moved one step closer to media domination, launching its streaming service in 130 countries, bringing the total number of countries-where-one-can-watch-Netflix to 190, including India and Russia. (Notably missing: Indonesia, which banned the service because of its “unfiltered content.”) With some 70 million users and dozens of award-winning original series, the streaming giant is causing some in Hollywood to freak out. (Cable, meanwhile, is already in full-fledged panic mode with cord-cutting numbers rising dramatically.) But Netflix is only part of the story: Amazon, which closed 2015 with more US subscribers than Netflix, and earned serious accolades for its original series Mozart in the Jungle, Transparent, and Man In The High Castle, is now elbowing its way into film distribution. At Sundance this month, Amazon outbid Sony Pictures Classics, Universal, Fox Searchlight and Lionsgate to nab the Matt Damon-produced drama Manchester by the Sea. This is part of a larger trend of streaming services outbidding traditional theatrical distributors and is a major reversal from last year, when both Amazon and Netflix were shut out of the Sundance bidding, indicating streaming services are gaining ground not just with the casual watcher at home, but with directors, producers and actors on the international stage.

Canada Council commits to diversity regulations with teeth. Last June, the Canada Council for the Arts announced a major restructuring of its grant making programs, with plans to reduce its 147 separate programs–each with its own guidelines, deadlines and reporting–to six. The model will go live in April 2017, in honor of the Council’s 60th anniversary. Details of the plan emerged this past month, and the most interesting–and perhaps even radical–of them is the fact that the Council has decided to include diversity among the list of criteria considered when making recommendations of grants and grant amounts. For institutions with revenue of more than $2 million, the diversity of the arts “on stage” as well as that of the team “behind the curtain” will be judged. If your institution does not demonstrate a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of your organization’s geographic community or region,” this will now affect the size of grant received from the federal arts council. If the liberal government keeps its campaign promise, the Council’s annual budget will grow to $360 million over the next two years–enough for the Council to have a real impact on the diversity of the country’s arts organizations. The Council’s decision follows that of Arts Council England, which made a similar shift to towards increasing diversity in December 2014 (though organizations there have until 2018 to get in line.) The United States is not quite there yet, but the nation’s two largest cities seem to be laying groundwork in place: in New York, a survey by the Department of Cultural Affairs released this month indicated that by and large the city’s arts organizations do not reflect the city’s diversity, and Los Angeles County recently formed an advisory committee to examine “proposals that would lead to more diverse arts boards, staff, audience members, and programming at appropriate arts institutions.”

#OscarsStillSoWhite…but not for long? In what the LA Times described as “another embarrassing Hollywood sequel,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced for the second year in a row a roster of all-white acting nominees (and no best picture nominations for films focusing on minority populations despite various viable options). This prompted a resurgence of the 2015 hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (and the birth of its offspring #OscarsStillSoWhite), with actors such as Will Smith pledging to boycott the February 28 awards ceremony or calling for host Chris Rock to step aside. The Academy’s board and President Cheryl Boone Isaacs responded with an emergency meeting that resulted in a unanimous vote for “radical changes” with the goal of doubling the number of female and minority members by 2020. These include plans for reviewing and possibly revoking the voting status of the (94% white) lifelong members who are less active in the motion picture industry to make way for more diverse voters; an “ambitious, global” recruitment campaign (as opposed to the old small group nomination system); and the addition of three new board seats (to hopefully be filled by members of color). Though this year’s still-so-white Oscars announcement, and the Academy’s sweeping response, provoked a flurry of media attention (even a statement by President Obama), as we documented in our 2015 annual news roundup, Hollywood has been slowly waking up to the need to do something about its diversity problem over the past year. Despite grumbles from some established Academy members, the overall 2016 public and institutional reaction is in sharp contrast to Jesse Jackson’s failed 1996 protest against a similarly homogenous Oscars lineup. While the effectiveness of the Academy’s latest measures remains to be seen, one can be sure that the organization’s diversity efforts will receive some red-carpet-worthy scrutiny.

Philadelphia Media Network donated to the Philadelphia Foundation. In October, as part of a larger story on alt-weeklies and their perhaps dubious future, we noted that Philadelphia’s beloved City Paper had published its last edition. Philadelphia journalism captures our attention once again this month, but for much better reason. In a surprise move, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, the sole owner of the Philadelphia Media Network, gifted the PMN, which runs The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com website, to the Institute for Journalism in New Media, a subsidiary of the Philadelphia Foundation. It’s the first time a major local newspaper has gone “nonprofit” since the advent of the internet, and the structure is certainly complicated. While unique and untested, the new alignment has the promise to preserve and enhance public-interest reporting while new electronic distribution methods are developed. The nonprofit status is not yet a done deal (the IRS has yet to weigh in), and the new format won’t necessarily solve outright the newspapers’ varied struggles. However, with newspapers continuing to struggle across the board, if this unusual structure is successful, it’s possible other papers will follow suit.

New directions at the Irvine Foundation. For the past year, James Irvine Foundation president Don Howard has been leading his staff in an deep exploration of what the foundation might change or do better. (You can read many of the responses to this question here and here, and Diane Ragsdale’s response, which pushes back against the foundation’s perspective that arts engagement is the most important issue facing the arts, here.) The foundation, which is the largest funder of the arts in California, has in recent years focused its resources on three areas, (1) engaging in the arts; (2) advancing democracy in California; and (3) preparing youth for success. Now, the foundation has announced an evolving focus: “expanding economic and political opportunity for families and young adults who are working but struggling with poverty.” This new direction seems squarely focused on two of those three areas, with the arts notably absent. The foundation has made assurances that it will remain committed to current grantees for the time being, and work continues apace on several existing programs, including the Arts Regional Initiative which just published a new report. In the long term, however, the arts’ role seems much murkier; a response to an inquiry about continuing arts support promises only that the foundation is “excited to explore how new initiatives focused on creative expression and the arts can be part of new initiatives aligned with our evolving focus.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Bruce W. Davis has been named President and CEO of ArtsKC, Kansas City’s regional arts council.
• Charles Thomas, an experienced social entrepreneur and civic innovator, will join the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as a program director based in Charlotte.
• The School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, invites applications for a full-time lecturer faculty position in the area of arts management. Posted January 23; no closing date.
• The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage hiring a Senior Visual Arts Specialist. Posted January 26; no closing date.
• ArtsKC is hiring a Director of Programs and Grants to replace the retiring Paul Tyler. Closing date February 26.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A research article published in AERA Open this month lends new evidence to argument for the benefits of arts engagement at an early age.
• Ingenuity’s third State of the Arts in Chicago Public Schools released this month details the arts assets available to CPS students in the 2014-15 school year.
• A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies released this month suggests implementing diversity training programs does not actually increase diversity. On the flip side, a report published by Stanford Graduate School of Education found that at-risk high school students benefit from taking ethnic studies classes, which introduce a diversity of perspectives and may better align with personal cultural experience.
• New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman’s office sheds light on widespread abuses in ticketing industry in New York.
• A white paper from the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University examines the distinguishing characteristics of arts organizations that primarily serve communities of color, in a response to the widely discussed (and criticized) report from the DeVos Institute on the same topic last year.
• Move over TV: Repucom, which researches sports and entertainment markets, surveyed adults between 13 and 34 in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States and found that music is the top leisure interest for the millennial generation.
• Linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer analyzed all the dialogue from the Disney princess franchise and found that even in movies where the princess is the protagonist, male roles speak more than female roles.
• A few studies this month looked at art through a city lens. One, published in the academic journal Economic Development Quarterly, looks at the links between big performing arts organizations (those with budgets over $2 million) and the change in what Richard Florida defines at the ‘creative class’. A report commissioned by the Boston Foundation shows Boston trails other cities in institutional arts funding, and the Three-City Arts Study, released by Partners for Sacred Spaces, provides a scalable, replicable model for matching small to mid-size dance and theater companies having space needs with historic sacred places that have available space.
• Two reports this month looked at the contemporary art market. One, released by economics professors at the University of Luxembourg suggests that the international art market is overheating, creating the potential for a “severe correction” in the postwar and contemporary and American segments. Another looks at what kind of person who opens a private contemporary art museum.
• And finally, looking to the international stage, UNESCO released a report on the impact of the “Convention on Protection & Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions,” and the 2016 Global NGO Online Technology Report provided insight into the global NGO sector and its use of online technology.

Image by Florent Lemieux

If you’ve read a study about arts participation in the United States in the past few years, it’s a fair bet that it was authored, co-authored, or influenced by Jennifer Novak-Leonard. The University of Chicago researcher has maintained a breathtaking pace of output recently, nearly all of it focused on better understanding the ways in which people engage in and feel about arts and culture, broadly defined. The first five months of 2015 alone have seen the publication of no fewer than five texts listing Novak-Leonard as the lead author, picking apart arts participation statistics in every way imaginable over the course of some 250+ not exactly beach-reading pages.

The James Irvine Foundation, which has been a critical enabler of this work for nearly a decade, came out this spring with a cluster of arts participation studies by Novak-Leonard and others. Chief among these is “The Cultural Lives of Californians,” which synthesizes lessons from a new telephone survey of 1238 Golden State residents specially designed by Novak-Leonard and her colleagues at NORC at the University of Chicago. This so-called California Survey is an attempt to model a different approach to measuring cultural participation by offering a broader take on what “counts” as arts and culture than the statistics we typically hear about. Rather than limit the inquiry to questions about specific types of participation, the survey begins with an open-ended prompt about what role arts and culture plays in the respondent’s life:

People are involved indifferent types of activities that they enjoy or that are important to them. Please briefly tell me about any creative, cultural or artistic activities that you do.

If stumped, respondents were encouraged think broadly, with suggestions like “You could include anything you do that involves making music, dancing, roleplaying or telling stories, writing or making art. Also think of activities when you make something, or build, customize or repurpose something to your liking.” The resulting range of activities recorded is highly illuminating, and includes such seemingly off-the-wall responses as sandblasting mirrors, customizing old cars, and my favorite, making bowties that incorporate people’s personality characteristics. Clearly, Americans (or at least Californians) define cultural participation very broadly indeed. Importantly, about 15% of the responses had no correspondence with later closed-ended questions in the survey that asked about a range of specific types of participation, meaning that surveys that rely solely on closed-ended questions, such as the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, likely miss a substantial portion of the cultural activity that goes on. Yet even with this open-ended (and, let’s face it, highly leading) approach, a little over 6% of respondents to the California Survey either only mentioned sports-related activities or couldn’t come up with a single way in which they engage culturally, which probably sets a pretty hard upper bound on the percentage of the population that is culturally active for reasons elaborated on below.

While the bulk of “The Cultural Lives of Californians” is devoted to findings that are familiar from previous participation literature, a few new perspectives are offered. In particular, the report brings valuable attention to a consistent pattern of lower participation among immigrants, even those of the same ethnic background as non-immigrants. The authors explain that immigrants work more hours and have less leisure time than the rest of the population, which could account for the difference. “Cultural Lives” also documents a significant pattern of decreased art-making (as distinct from arts attendance) as people age, which overshadows the effect of income and education on that particular form of participation.

More than anything, the report repeatedly emphasizes the wide range of ways in which Californians engage with culture, and makes an argument for funders, researchers, and arts practitioners to use a wider aperture in conceptualizing participation. In particular, art-making activities that take place inside the home or outside of traditional arts spaces receive much attention from the authors, and the survey provides data on the demographic breakdowns of participants in such activities at a greater level of detail than we’ve seen in any other study.

Informal Yet Not (Fully) Inclusive

It turns out that “The Cultural Lives of Californians” is very timely for Createquity’s research process for that reason. A big question running through our investigation into socioeconomic status and arts participation earlier this year was whether poor and less-educated adults are less likely to participate in the arts generally, or just have different patterns of participation that don’t show up as readily in surveys and market research that focus on traditional nonprofit institutions. It’s long been an article of faith in the community arts field that the latter of these two assumptions is true; in other words, that the people who are not coming to the symphony or the ballet are instead experiencing music, dance, and other art forms in their homes, places of worship, and other “informal” contexts.

Despite its explicit goal of uncovering the hidden ways in which Californians participate in culture, there is not a lot of evidence in “Cultural Lives” to suggest that poor and less-educated adults are more likely than others to engage in the informal arts. For example, 60% of respondents with less than a high school diploma spent time with friends or family making music, compared to 73% with an advanced degree; there is a similar slightly upward trend by income associated with that activity. While we don’t see the kinds of dramatic differences across education and especially income as we do with various forms of physical attendance – the ones noted above are within the margin of error for the survey – there is no category of participation that demonstrates a clear pattern in the opposite direction, of higher participation by adults in the bottom income quartile or who never attended college. Put another way, while poor and economically disadvantaged adults may be more likely to sing to themselves or dance with friends than see the opera, the same is true of people with college degrees and well-paying jobs.

Survey Says…Don’t Trust (Most) Surveys?

Discussion about “The Cultural Lives of Californians” will no doubt focus primarily on its content and findings, but the study is no less notable for what it has to teach us about survey methodology and the art of measurement.

The project of which “Cultural Lives” is a part represents an ambitious and serious bid to move the practice of measuring cultural participation forward. In addition to the survey and accompanying analysis, the Irvine Foundation has also published a technical appendix that is longer than the report itself; a review of theoretical constructs and issues in arts participation research; and an entirely separate analysis of the California-based respondents to the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). This last bit is especially important because it provides for direct comparisons between the “old” and “new” ways of measuring participation – the researchers even used the exact same question wording across surveys in many cases in order to facilitate such comparisons.

As a result, and because of the tremendous level of transparency provided by the authors, we can learn a lot about the effects that survey design and administration have on cultural participation data. Fortunately for the sake of making this article interesting, but unfortunately from the perspective of researchers and practitioners, it turns out that conclusions can differ substantially depending on the choices made in constructing the survey.

In her forward to “Cultural Lives,” Irvine Foundation arts program director Josephine Ramirez declares, “the new narrative is not about decline! Californians actually have a deep interest in the arts and lead active cultural lives.” While the report can’t comment one way or another on decline since there is no longitudinal component to the data, what I take Ramirez to mean here is that when you broaden the definition of what’s included in arts and culture, all of the sudden you see a lot more people participating than you did before. That is true, but it turns out that much of that apparent increase is attributable to the survey itself.

The values observed in the respondent set to “Cultural Lives of Californians” are consistently higher than seen in comparable questions in the SPPA and other data sources, sometimes dramatically so. For example, the California Survey reports a prevalence of acting six times higher than California respondents to the SPPA; four times higher for purchasing or acquiring art; and double the rate of attending a cultural fair or festival. These are not deceptively small adjustments within the margin of error; some of the differences here approach or exceed 30 percentage points. To their credit, the authors noticed this pattern and even made a table to summarize some of the most eye-popping differences in the technical appendix:

By way of explanation, Novak-Leonard et al. cite the broader frame of the California Survey as a whole (although this doesn’t explain the difference in directly comparable questions), and credit the open-ended question about participation at the beginning of the survey and example prompts throughout for jogging respondents’ memories. Most notably, they cast doubt on the methodology of the SPPA, implying that the abrupt transition to the set of questions about arts and culture as well as the switch in recall period from the past week to the past year are confusing for participants and result in false negatives.

These explanations are quite plausible and (with the exception of the broader frame, as discussed above) very likely account for at least some of the gap between survey results. However, the authors seem to go out of their way not to consider another possibility, which is that the California Survey may suffer from increased nonresponse bias. The response rate to the survey is substantially lower* than that of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which opens up a higher risk for bias in light of the targeted nature of the survey. The SPPA is an attachment to a larger, multi-modal measurement exercise called the Current Population Survey that is administered by the Census Bureau; thus, respondents to the CPS agree to participate in the survey without knowing that they’re going to be asked questions about their arts engagement habits. By contrast, the California Survey is a telephone-only survey that was upfront about being interested in people’s cultural lives, with the result that people who have richer cultural lives may have been more likely to respond. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the discussion of volunteering for an arts organization, as follows:

Forty-one percent of California adults donated money, goods or services to an arts or cultural organization or project and almost one-third (30 percent) otherwise volunteered to help an arts or cultural organization….These rates of support are substantially higher than those generally seen in other studies that ask about support for arts and culture….In addition, a report released by the United States Census Bureau in early 2014 finds that approximately 26 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 and older volunteered in any way…

In other words, the California Survey found that adults in California volunteer for arts organizations at a higher rate than adults nationally volunteer for anything!

This is not the first time that we’ve seen this phenomenon in evidence with participation data. In 2008, Irvine published the results of a survey by Novak-Leonard (then known as Jennifer Novak) and Alan Brown that purported to measure cultural engagement patterns among Californians living in the state’s inland regions. Createquity’s analysis of that report noted the following:

While most of WolfBrown’s measures cannot be compared with those in the SPPA, many that do show significantly higher levels of activity. For instance, 30% of Cultural Engagement respondents said they “regularly” attend stage plays; only 12.5% of SPPA respondents in the Pacific region claim to have done so even once in the past year. Six percent of Cultural Engagement respondents perform dances, but just 2.1% of Pacific region SPPA respondents do.

Now, with even more direct comparisons possible with the SPPA, we see such differences persisting or even expanding. Is the variance the result, as the authors suggest, of the SPPA not giving people enough to go on as they try to think of ways in which they’ve participated in the arts? Or is the culprit nonresponse bias, meaning that the California Survey’s numbers are inflated? My guess would be that it’s some of both, and that “true” participation rates are somewhere in between these estimates. Seemingly mundane details like where a question appears in a survey have indeed been shown to have surprisingly large impacts on results in some cases. However, in its 2012 review of the threat of nonresponse bias to public opinion surveys, the Pew Research Center observed, “survey participants tend to be significantly more engaged in civic activity than those who do not participate, confirming what previous research has shown…This has serious implications for a survey’s ability to accurately gauge behaviors related to volunteerism and civic activity. For example, telephone surveys may overestimate such behaviors as church attendance, contacting elected officials, or attending campaign events.”

Regardless of the explanation, the fact that two different surveys asking the exact same questions of the exact same target population could come up with such disparate results has important implications for anyone who uses survey research in their work. Ultimately, the lesson here is that survey results are much more sensitive to both design and administration choices than we would like to think. And with response rates for surveys getting worse and worse, there seems to be a strong suggestion that even with a random sample and a professional approach, a survey that signals too strongly the subject under study can bias results if part of what’s being measured is interest in that subject. That should be a heads up for every arts organization that surveys its own audience members, an extremely common practice throughout the industry. If your market research relies on people taking the time to tell you whether they’re interested in what you have to offer, odds are you’ll be hearing from the most interested people.

Fortunately, all hope is not lost for cultural participation research. As if publishing five reports in five months wasn’t enough, Novak-Leonard has been working closely with the NEA for several years now to address some of the deficiencies in the SPPA and introduce more inclusive questions. A marriage of the more thoughtful survey design elements from the California Survey with the increased resources for ensuring a representative data set that the federal government can provide would result in the best cultural participation data we’ve yet seen. Let’s just hope that those government statistics-gathering efforts can survive political pressure and budget cuts long enough for that vision can come to pass.

* NORC researchers actually calculated two versions of the weighted response rate, each of which used different assumptions for estimating what percentage of telephone numbers that didn’t result in a completed survey were eligible to be included in the first place. The higher of these response rates, 31.6%, is the one shared in the report’s technical appendix. Following a lengthy email exchange with two individuals at NORC who worked on the survey, my sense is that the lower number, 9.9%, is likely a better estimate. I am happy to share the details of the exchange with anyone who is interested. By comparison, the response rate to the Current Population Survey, of which the SPPA is a part, is 75%.

• A federal judge recently ruled that Pandora must continue to pay ASCAP, which represents song writers and publishers, a 1.85% composition royalty. It was a (not entirely clean) victory for Pandora, which was arguing against a rise to 3%. The Future of Music Coalition has a good primer on the issue. (Note that the royalty paid to record companies for sound recordings is much higher – above 50%, in some cases – and it is this larger royalty that Pandora cited last week in increasing the cost of their premium service.)
• FMC similarly offers a concise but thorough summary of the Congressional testimony debating the “notice and takedown” copyright enforcement system for hosting sites like YouTube.
• Amtrak’s writers’ residency is getting some amusing pushback from conservatives that points to some deeper issues regarding its role as a national service.
• Advocacy for publicly-funded arts agencies has a new platform: Stand for the Arts, an online initiative funded by Ovation TV, champions the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Americans for the Arts’s Arts Action Fund.
• Is that the pitter-patter of li’l artist feet in the distance? A female musician predicts Obamacare will prompt a “creative professionals baby boom,” and offers ideas for how the music community can better support it.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Vice President of Paul G. Allen Family Foundation Susan Coliton resigned last week after 15 years with the foundation.
• Judi Jennings, executive director of Kentucky Foundation for Women, is set to retire June 30, also after 15 years of service. Barry Hessenius has an exit interview with Judy.
• The Bay Area’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced the promotions of Shelley Trott and Katie Fahey to Director of Arts Strategy and Ventures and Associate Program Officer for the Arts, respectively.
• The beleaguered Minnesota Orchestra faces continued challenges following the end of a 16-month player lockout: President and CEO Michael Henson announced he is stepping down, prompting the resignation of eight board members and speculation regarding the possible return of the orchestra’s former music director Osmo Vanska.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Ford Foundation now has an artist on its board of trustees: Lourdes Lopez, artistic director of the Miami City Ballet and strong arts education proponent.
• More family foundations – nearly a quarter – are choosing to spend down their assets during the donor’s lifetime.

IN THE FIELD

• In a decision that has perplexed many, the San Diego Opera announced that this season will be its last after nearly fifty years of performances. Subsequent to the announcement, the organization gave itself a two-week reprieve in a last-ditch attempt to raise money.
• Big Brother is watching the opera: Lincoln Center, Alvin Ailey, the Public Theater, and five other NYC arts stalwarts have joined Audience 360, a new alliance that will share ticketing and customer information across the group. As many as forty institutions are expected to join when Audience 360, one of more than twenty such big-data organizations across the country, is launched in June. The information is expected to be useful for government advocacy in addition to marketing.
• The BBC has hired National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone as part of a new push to infuse arts programming across the media organization “like never before.” The new initiatives will include filming live arts events and a miniseries following young orchestra musicians, among others.
• Netflix’s CEO has come out in favor of a strong form of net neutrality after a deal with Comcast cleared up customers’ performance issues. Meanwhile, Apple and Comcast are exploring a TV streaming partnership with sterling connectivity, which would fulfill Apple’s hopes of playing in the TV space.
• The full story of how the reclusive Cornelius Gurlitt wound up with a 1,280-piece trove of Nazi-looted art – which he is now returning to the original owners.
• Bookstores in Manhattan may be a dying breed; bookstores in Brooklyn are thriving.
• Have a great idea for a creative placemaking project but no time to get off the ground? Take advantage of National Arts Strategies’ Creative Community Fellows Program, which includes a week-long retreat with fellow cultural “entrepreneurs,” a distance learning track, and an opportunity to pitch to funders and/or create crowdfunding campaigns. Applications are due May 7.

BIG IDEAS

• As Netflix-style aggregation of content spreads from music and movies to books, magazines, and newspapers, “almost all the value in media has come from bundling.” Consumers like it because it offers centralized curation and lower transaction costs than hunting-and-gathering individual items; providers like it because it can give them more data. (Whether it’s good for creators, of course, depends in large part on how the proceeds are split with the provider.) But don’t get too excited – it turns out that existing legal agreements may prevent Netflix itself – or anyone else – from offering anything approaching a comprehensive slate of films before 2020.
• Meanwhile, total revenue for recorded music has fallen each year of the millennium; at $8 billion a year, it is now less than half of its (inflation-adjusted) 1999 peak. Venture capitalist David Pakman argues that the only way to reverse this trend is to lower the price of streaming services to $3-4 per month, bringing the annual cost closer to more consumers’ historical willingness to pay.
• The Wu-Tang Clan’s new double album will be released in an edition of one, which will tour museums before being sold for millions of dollars.

RESEARCH CORNER

• To what degree do family and peer groups influence our perceptions of the label “artist”? Researchers parsing data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project found a sizable chunk of people creating artistic works do not self-identify as professional artists. Those with artists in their families, or those who attended arts-focused schools, were more likely to use the label. Can’t help but wonder about the degree to which socioeconomic status plays a role in this…
• …since a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data paints a portrait of the artist as a model of downward mobility. Creative types tend to grow up in relatively affluent households and to make less money than their parents, to a much greater extent than those in other careers. Let’s hope some things are more important than money, since art schools are the most expensive in the country after taking financial aid packages into account.
• The Arts Education Partnership’s database of statewide arts education policies has been updated and renamed as ArtScan. It includes a state-to-state comparison feature as well as information about past efforts to survey the status of arts education in each state.
• The Hewlett and Irvine Foundations have released an external assessment of their Next Generation Arts Leadership program, which they have renewed for another three years, to inspire other regions facing a potential arts leadership deficit. (The full report and executive summary are online.)
• The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture is out with a nationwide survey of media arts organizations – the “first-ever, comprehensive data set documenting the media arts field.” With nearly a quarter of respondents self-identifying as local cable TV operators, television still reigns as the primary focus of these organizations’ work.
• Two weeks ago we noted the ever-rising cost of sales in the international and antique art markets as a possible sign of an emerging “winner take all” economy. Others think it’s an insidious sign of something more akin to insider trading.
• March Madness = time to reflect on whether economic impact arguments for the arts really make any sense.

• A consortium of City of Detroit creditors have made the first legal move towards pressuring the Detroit Institute of Arts to sell city-owned artworks to help pay for debts owed. Executive Vice President Annemarie Erickson defends the museum against Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s demand that the museum find one way or another to contribute $500 million in assistance to the bankrupt city.
• The California Arts Council will apply a $2-million funding windfall it received from Assembly member John Perez to several new initiatives in arts education and community improvement, including Creative California Communities, The Arts in Turnaround Schools, and Jump stARTS. In the face of a 7.6% budget cut handed down last year, the state arts council is taking a gamble on the success of these programs winning fresh credibility with policymakers and an increase in annual funding.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jamie Bennett, chief of staff and director of public affairs at the NEA, will take over as executive director of the creative placemaking funder collaboration ArtPlace America starting in January. He succeeds ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta, who joined the Knight Foundation back in March, and interim head Jeremy Nowak.
• After a decade serving Californians as president of the James Irvine Foundation, James E. Canales will step down in the spring to become the first president of another arts funder, Boston’s Barr Foundation.

• There has been some shuffling in the world of state and local arts councils. Ohio Arts Council ED Julie Henahan has retired after thirty years; Milton Rhodes, President of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in North Carolina, has retired and been succeeded by Jim Sparrow; and Glenda Toups was dismissed from her position as ED of the Houma Regional Arts Council in Louisiana in the wake of the discovery by the board that the Council was not in compliance with state reporting law.

• We’ve known for a while that Michael Kaiser is leaving his post as President of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; now it turns out he’s taking the DeVos Institute of Arts Management with him. Both are moving to the University of Maryland, where Kaiser will be a professor of practice beginning in the fall, and hopes to expand the Institute to include a master’s program.
• Financial news giant Bloomberg has decided to discontinue its cultural journalism brand, Muse, in favor of focusing more on leisure and luxury. Along with the reassignment of Muse editor Manuela Hoelterhoff and a cadre of employees and contracted writers, the news outlet laid off theater critic Jeremy Gerard.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a rigorous new “Openness and Transparency” policy, which assumes from the outset that information the foundation creates should be made public to improve outcomes, spark debate, and foster collaboration. Hewlett’s President Larry Kramer offers context in a post on the foundation’s new blog; transparency watchdogs celebrate the policy.
• The D5 Coalition has released a scan of best practices and a guide to online resources for foundations wishing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion at every stage of their work.

IN THE FIELD

• Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall share profiles of El Sistema “encounters” in five of approximately 55 countries – Sweden, Austria, Korea, Japan, and Canada – that have borrowed from Venezuela’s seminal movement to realize youth development goals through “intensive investment in ensemble music.” The global umbrella for El Sistema has also released the first literature review of “research, evaluation, and critical debates” related to Sistema-inspired programs around the world.
• The Arts Council of Lawrence, New Jersey has shut down after 42 years, having, in the words of one member, “outlived [its] usefulness.” Originally formed by a group of female volunteers, the Council struggled to recruit younger members throughout the recession.
• The August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh is struggling mightily. After a struggle to find an audience and keep backers the organization has been forced to move further and further from its original intention to create a cultural home for the people portrayed in Wilson’s plays, working class African Americans. A conservator has been appointed to try to avoid liquidation.
• The Warehouse, an all-ages music venue in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has filed to become a nonprofit after 22 years as a for-profit, prompting some musicians to wax lyrical about their time there. Financial pressures were the primary impetus, but owner Steve Harm has indicated he will open the space to the local community in new ways to provide a public good.
• Fractured Atlas has added another tool to their encouraging-and-rewarding-arts-entrepreneurship tool belt. The Arts Entrepreneurs Awards will recognize artists and arts organizations who have “innovated new business practices or paradigms” or  “developed novel solutions to old problems.” Nominations will be accepted until December 22nd at 5:59pm.

BIG IDEAS

• A report from the Next Generation Evaluation Conference forecasts “game-changing” trends in impact evaluation, including shorter evaluation cycles and simpler measurement systems.
• “Is social practice gentrifying community arts out?” Arlene Goldbard parses the difference between the art world’s latest obsession and community cultural engagement.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research is about to release its inaugural report, drawing on what it calls the “most comprehensive set of data ever compiled” on arts organizations.  In addition to a statistical overview of the field – did you know that performance of an arts organization is lower in communities with a higher concentration of graduate degrees? – the report attempts to answer the question, “What makes one arts organization more successful than another?” The key turns out to be leadership.
• Speaking of data aggregation, Markets for Good has a progress report on the BRIDGE (Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities) project, an ambitious collaborative effort to identify and map philanthropic entities across the world.
• A new report by the Consumer Federation of America bashes “abuse of market power by a highly concentrated music sector,” argues against the need “to expand copyright holders’ rights,” and suggests that digital file-sharing (aka “piracy”) may, in some cases, actually be good for both artists and consumers. One well-circulated chart suggests that it is the proceeds of live performance, not recordings, that drives artists’ income.
• Gold standard at Crystal Bridges? In a rare, randomized, controlled (albeit “natural”) experiment on the effects of art on students, a single school-group visit to the major new museum appears to have raised students’ scores on vague but desirable traits such as critical thinking, social tolerance, historical empathy, and likelihood of future museum visits. It’s too soon to parse out the effect of contemporary art in particular.
• A study of STEM graduates from the Michigan State University’s Honors College found that graduates who went on to earn patents or start companies had more arts and crafts experiences than the average Americans – and believed their ability to innovate was influenced by that experience. (The paper itself is behind a paywall.)
• How “rampant” is gentrification? New research suggests that most urban areas experienced only “moderate” gentrification in the past decade, with significant variations across cities. Unsurprisingly, gentrification was most prevalent in large and dense metro regions with solid public transit infrastructure.

• The National Endowment for the Arts has shared a draft of its strategic plan for FY14-18, and in what I believe may be a first, is inviting public comment on it via SurveyMonkey. Ah, these modern times we live in. Now let’s just hope House Republicans don’t succeed in slashing its budget by 49%.
• A new report from the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and the Center for an Urban Future details 15 policy innovations for cities that are “novel, proven and scalable.” While no arts-specific innovations made the list, one of the ideas is a type of “digital badging” program found in Philadelphia, Providence and Chicago that “allow[s] students both inside the K-12 system and outside to earn credentials for skills they learn in a wide variety of educational settings, from digital tools workshops at public libraries to art classes at museums.”
• The City of Buffalo is at risk of losing over $1 million worth of donated musical instruments if it follows through with cuts to music programs in its schools.
• The City of New York has taken over management of the financially troubled South Street Seaport Museum.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The McKnight Foundation has hired Arleta Little as arts program officer, replacing Laura Zimmermann. If she’s looking for advice on how to settle into her new role, she can check out this completely awesome video Laura made as a goodbye kiss to her old employer.
• After 25 years in various positions at the Ford Foundation, philanthropy data nut and friend of the blog Kyle Reis is now Senior Director of Global Data Services at TechSoup. Here he is writing about the Foundation Center’s Reporting Commitment.

IN THE FIELD

• Doug Borwick offers a range of thoughts from the Americans for the Arts Convention.
• So long Codaex, a European classical music distributor.
• A new national network of Latino theater companies has formed in Southern California. Service organizations will note with interest that a Theatre Communications Group conference was the forum that provided the initial push.
• In very sad news, Rick Lester, founding CEO of arts marketing consultancy TRG Arts, passed away suddenly last weekend while participating in a bike ride for charity. TRG, which is notable for its management of nearly two dozen community arts patron databases across the country, has a memorial page up with a myriad of touching tributes from colleagues past and present.

BIG IDEAS

• The NEA’s Jason Schupbach reflects on the Our Town program now that its third round of grants has been announced.
• The Internet is democratizing all sorts of things, not just the arts. Here, the Atlantic reports on the rise of citizen cartography.
• Rather than trying (or refusing) to do more with less, why not use the challenge as an opportunity to explore constructive partnerships?
• Two more than worthwhile perspectives on the past and future of online marketing, from Seth Godin and Adam Thurman.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Attention study-at-home MBA candidates: the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan points us to a motherlode of Stanford philanthropy case studies made available for free recently via Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s ProjectU. CEP also has some tips for communicating with grantees.
• Rick Noguchi of the Irvine Foundation offers an inside look into grant deliberations and explains how the foundation made some of its decisions in the most recent round of the Exploring Engagement Fund.
• Streaming music services in general, and Spotify in particular, have come under increasing criticism from musicians for their ultra-low royalty payout rates. Most recently, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and several associates decided to pull their music from the site in protest. But is Spotify actually undercutting music piracy rather than album sales? As usual, the folks at Future of Music Coalition have turned in the most thoughtful analysis we’ve yet seen on this issue.
• Thinking about starting a crowdfunding project and not sure how to figure out the budgeting? You might want to try Taylor Davidson’s financial modeling template in Excel.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new report from Americans for the Arts details the mostly modest salaries of local arts agency employees. But who says you can’t get rich being an arts administrator? Indeed, the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar has a long post on income inequality in the arts, and the idea that it may be portending changes in the economy as a whole. And Diane Ragsdale considers the interesting question of whether being paid too much “crowds out” one’s existing intrinsic motivation to work.
• Can we make a dent in poverty just by teaching parents how to parent better? A long-term study from Jamaica suggests maybe so. Meanwhile, the achievement gap between rich kids and poor kids is now twice as large as that between black children and white children. The cause of poor performance by poor students? No one’s quite figured it out yet, but it’s not bad teachers, nor is it moms on crack. (Seriously – a 23-year longitudinal study in Philadelphia has revealed that being born to poverty affects kids’ cognitive development far more than whether or not their mothers were on crack while pregnant. Think about that one for a bit.) Here’s a map of poverty and race in America.
• Boston’s Charles River is finally swimmable again – a concrete example of a data-driven policy success. (And it took nearly two decades to make it happen.)

ETC.

• Congratulations to Andrew Taylor on a full decade of his blog, the Artful Manager. That is quite a milestone in this space! Andrew had it going on pretty much light years before any of us.
• Ben Huh, the head of I Can Has Cheezburger (better known as the home of LOLcats), on “bad art”:
  

  [W]e are entering an age where there is very little in the way between an idea and an expression online, and that means more and more people are participating in ways of expressing themselves. What we do is encourage that artistic expression even if we don’t recognize their creations as “fine art.”

  Human beings have this incredible desire to connect and express themselves and that is what is filling up our time on the Internet, and I don’t think that is bad. It is actually a wonderful thing.

There are so many threads to the discussion that it’s easy to get lost. But the core of it comes down to this: do arts organizations whose audience is mostly white have an inherent obligation to diversify their audiences? In his post, Clay writes the following:

[A]s I continue to evaluate data for this forthcoming paper on the diversity of Bay Area theatre, I have been struck strongly by the homogeneity of the cohort, particularly when it comes to race.  It should be said that among the 25 companies I am looking at there are no truly culturally-specific theatres (because they had insufficient information in the various data banks from which I pulled to take part), but it should also be said that these companies do represent a strong cross-section of the type of work, structures, and sizes that make up the majority of the nonprofit theatre system.  [….] There is basically no difference in the level of diversity among the theatres’ audiences across counties at all, even in the counties where the actual total populations are majority-minority….On average, these twenty-five companies have audiences that are over 80% white in one of the most diverse regions in the country.

[snip]

A mission is a driving principle, not a shield….A mission should not allow a company to opt out of serving a wide array of people unless the mission is to only serve a narrow range of people–which is, to point it out, decidedly not the mission of any of the twenty-five organizations in the study.

The art we make is local.  It is place-based, which means it is community-based, whether we want it to be or not….Fundamentally, a graph like the one above, where our theatre culture is just a large white smear across a canvas of many different varying shades of beige, is wrong, and is exactly reflective of the endemic problems of our field.

I’ve heard and read a lot of similar rhetoric in the past, and there’s something about the way these discussions are often framed that bothers me. Recently in a comment to Clay’s post I was able to put my finger on it: the urgent call for “white” organizations to diversify audiences, and the provision of funding to help that process along, strikes me as weirdly paternalistic toward people of color. Here’s (most of) what I wrote:

Is it “wrong” for an individual theater to have a mostly white audience, if its mission is broad and its community diverse? You declare it to be so, in no uncertain terms. But I’m not so sure. I think we have to accept that certain genres and artistic traditions, for all sorts of reasons having to do with social history and notions of community identity, are going to resonate more for certain cultural groups than others. And since “educated white people in the United States” is a cultural group, albeit a privileged one, by nature there are going to be types of programming that appeal more to this audience than they do to others.

Sure, we could invest lots of energy and hand-wringing in trying to change patterns of cultural participation, but I question what that ultimately accomplishes. It seems to me it’s really just moving around preferences in some kind of shell game for no real purpose other than to sustain specific institutions like those 25 companies in Clay’s post.

The real question is whether people feel like they have opportunities to lead an expressive life at a level that feels appropriate and in contexts that are meaningful to them. Just diversifying a theater audience isn’t necessarily going to do that, especially if in doing so you’re reducing opportunities for that theater’s former audience.

We have to remember that institutions can’t change the composition of their audiences single-handedly. They can modify their programming and marketing strategies all they want, but at the end of the day, it’s still up to individual people of color to decide whether that institution is worth their time or not. If there exists a theater that is of, by, and for a particular nonwhite community, why wouldn’t we focus on building up that theater’s capacity and reach instead? To make the value judgment that the current picture of theater attendance is “wrong” inadvertently calls into question, I fear, the validity of the existing aesthetic choices and preferences of people of color.

I should note that I haven’t yet touched upon money. That’s where the moral dimension of diversity in the arts comes into play. Is it right that a theater mostly serving a white audience can raise $30 million for a capital campaign while a theater with a substantially nonwhite audience struggles to get a $10,000 grant? Well, that’s another story. But we have to remember that there are plenty of mostly-white-serving arts organizations in the “have not” category as well. I think it’s easier to change patterns of cultural subsidy than it is to change patterns of cultural participation. (Not that it’s easy to change either!) It’s great to see a mainstream institution’s audience reflect its community, but in order to ensure real equity, our discussion of this issue must be person-centric (what are the opportunities for an expressive life available to this person?) rather than institution-centric (why aren’t there more butts of color in these seats?).

That last line does a good job of getting at my discomfort with the carrot-and-stick approach to addressing diversity. I worry that strong funder incentives to racially diversify audiences inadvertently encourage institutions to value people of color for their skin rather than for what’s underneath, and reinforce visible markers of diversity (which, God knows, don’t need any reinforcement) at the expense of no less important measures of the same. Worse, in designating certain arts organizations as “white” and others as “diverse,” we completely dismiss and devalue the inevitably nonzero proportion of nonwhites who do patronize and enjoy these “white” institutions. In my more subversive moments, I sometimes wonder if some of the motivation behind the drive to diversify audiences for traditionally European art forms comes from a place of wanting to assimilate people of color so that we can all be one, big, happy family – on white people’s terms.

But this is all speculation on my part; I can only tell one side of the story. In fact, one thing that I have a hard time ignoring is that virtually all of the recent discussion about race, audiences, and funding in this particular corner of the blogosphere is happening among well-meaning white liberals who just can’t help themselves from occupying public space with their opinions (myself included). (When I dared to point this out on Twitter, the ensuing defensiveness was kind of hilarious.) Luckily, it just so happens that we’re less than a week out from SphinxCon, the inaugural convening on diversity in the performing arts organized by the Sphinx Organization, a Detroit-based group that aims to develop young black and Latino interest and talent in classical music. Judging from the speaker list, it looks like the organizers have done a great job of ensuring a truly diverse mix of voices at the table for what will no doubt be some stimulating conversations. (If there’s any forum in which racial diversity matters, it’s conversations about racial diversity!) I unfortunately can’t attend, but I’d love to feature some first-person perspectives from the event on Createquity. So if you’re going to be there and feel like sharing, please go ahead and submit one paragraph about your experiences, takeaways, new insights, remaining questions, etc., via the contact page. I will compile submissions received by February 22 and present them here, preserving anonymity on request – assuming I get enough of them.

[Update: Clay responds to my post.]

• RIP Artnet Magazine; more here. I will always be grateful to Artnet’s Ben Davis for being just about the only arts journalist worth his salt during the whole Yosi Sergant debacle.
• Congratulations to GiveWell, which has announced a not-quite-merger with Good Ventures, an emerging foundation led by Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz (the latter is one of the founders of Facebook). The blog post is a bit thin on details, but it sounds like this arrangement will ensure GiveWell’s financial security for some time to come while substantially enhancing its real-world impact.
• Indiana University is set to open the country’s first School of Philanthropy later this year. It’s early, of course, but these snippets from the article suggest to me that buyer beware: “As with any academic setting, funding is an issue….With the nonprofit sector roughly 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and 10 percent of the workforce, such [a] school could be a profit-center for the university, Rooney said.”
• One of the NEA’s lesser known programs, the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, will now be a partnership between the NEA, the Department of Agriculture, Project for Public Spaces, the Orton Family Foundation, and CommunityMatters. CIRD facilitates and hosts workshops on community design in places with fewer than 50,000 people.

BIG IDEAS

• Michael Kaiser has a penchant for inciting digital controversy, and his recent two–part post calling bullshit on “new business models” was no exception. At the core of the debate is this central question: how much is the nonprofit arts sector going to change in the next 50 years? Kaiser says not so much; Adam Huttler, on the other hand, thinks quite a lot. Huttler’s second post on the subject, in particular, is one of his most thought-provoking and brilliant in quite some time. EmcArts’s Richard Evans and Sarah Lutman also weighed in.
• Whither the future of open data and philanthropy? The Knight Foundation is currently considering a proposal to digitize 10 years of IRS 990 nonprofit data and make it available to the public for free. GiveWell’s Alexander Berger, writing on his personal blog, argues that this presents a clear opportunity to GuideStar’s next president to reform its business model around open data. (GuideStar’s current president, Bob Ottenhoff responds in the comments.) And the Foundation Center’s Brad Smith makes a passionate case for data standards and greater transparency among foundations.
• We’ve now entered an era in which college-age students have never known what it’s like to have to pay for music. Casey Rae and J. Holtham have more.
• What is the future of museums?

BIG MONEY

• The Irvine Foundation has announced its first set of grants under its new arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement.
• Jon Silpayamanant makes the interesting point that sports teams have a performance income gap (i.e., expenses that outpace ticket revenue) just like symphony orchestras do.
• Wait, nonprofits are allowed to have shareholders?
  

  The deal will settle a lawsuit the Koch brothers filed in February over shares that determine control of Cato. It results from the original division of shares between the two Koch brothers, Crane and late Cato Chairman William Niskanen. After Niskanen died of stroke complications in October, the Koch brothers claimed a founding shareholder agreement gave them the option to buy Niskanen’s shares. Crane held they should go to Niskanen’s widow, which would leave him in effective control of the organization.

  The settlement involves dissolving the shareholder agreement. In addition, Crane is expected to retire under an agreement that allows him to select his successor, though the Koch brothers could veto the hiring.

RESEARCH (AND EVALUATION) CORNER

• FSG’s Valerie Bockstette points out the dangers of measuring what’s easy to measure instead of what’s most important.
• The Colorado Health Foundation’s Anne Warhover describes her organization’s approach to impact assessment.
• If you thought the theory of change and measurement framework for ArtsWave was ambitious, just take a look at this new comprehensive sustainability plan for Rockford, IL, which intends to measure economic, social, and environmental outcomes in 16 categories including cultural life and the built environment. The transportation category alone tracks 43 indicators.
• Kudos to the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago for the most blockbuster release of an arts research study so far this year. Called “Set in Stone: Building America’s New Generation of Arts Facilities 1994-2008,” the report takes a critical look at the billions of dollars thrown by arts institutions at new buildings, museum wings, expansions, renovations, etc. during the decade and a half in question. Authored by then-grad-student Joanna Woronkowicz (as her dissertation), Carrol Joynes, and about a half dozen others, “Set in Stone” argues that much of that building boom was of questionable wisdom. The report is available in full multimedia regalia, even including an animated video, and scored a feature in the New York Times, along with reactions from The Atlantic Cities, Lucy Bernholz, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, and Sunil Iyengar (now Woronkowicz’s boss at the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis). Elizabeth Quaglieri has a helpful summary over at Technology in the Arts. Congratulations, Chicago, you sure know how to get our attention!

ETC.

• Umm, please apply for the Createquity Writing Fellowship, Delali Ayivor?

SUMMARY

WolfBrown’s 2008 Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions, commissioned by The James Irvine Foundation and written by Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak (now known as Jennifer Novak-Leonard) with Amy Kitchener, aims to provide a broad view of how residents in California’s Inland Empire and Central Valley regions engage with the arts. These regions are similar to many parts of the U.S. that boomed during the aughts and were subsequently hit hardest by the 2008 recession. The Inland Empire (San Bernardino and Riverside counties) blends slowly east from metropolitan Los Angeles and Orange counties to the mountains and desert, and is a rare region of cheap housing in Southern California. Meanwhile, the Central Valley makes up a huge geographic area that includes the cities of Bakersfield, Fresno, and Modesto, the majority of California’s farmland, and a growing cadre of commuters to job hubs like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite the recession, they continue to be rated the fastest-growing regions in California, and are home to approximately 10.5 million residents out of the state’s 38 million.

This study diverges from previous research on arts engagement in that it explores a much wider array of formal and informal settings for the arts, and more forms of participation. The home, churches, parks, and other community spaces are measured against museums, theaters, and concert halls, and the authors also start to look at activities like stitchery, social dancing, and digital photography. Differences among racial/ethnic cohorts, ages, and education levels are also parsed.

WolfBrown divided the study into two phases. In Phase 1, researchers under the supervision of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts conducted an initial door-to-door survey of 150-200 randomly-selected households in each of three Fresno area neighborhoods and three San Bernardino/Riverside neighborhoods, for a total of 1,066 households surveyed. The results from this phase were used primarily to develop hypotheses and to cross-check data from Phase 2, a non-random sample of approximately 5,000 respondents who were surveyed for the “California Cultural Census” via online and on-the-ground intercept surveys at cultural events. Phase 2, the primary focus of the Cultural Engagement study, isolated data from four racial/ethnic cohorts (White, Non-Hispanic; African-American, Non-Hispanic; Hispanic; and Native American, Non-Hispanic) and five focus samples (Hmong; Culturally-Active Latinos; African-American Faith-Based; Latino Faith-Based; and Mexican Farm Workers). Finally, the data was also viewed through the lens of Alan Brown’s five modes of arts participation below, a framework developed for a previous study on behalf of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

Cultural Engagement’s major finding is that the home is a hugely important setting for arts and cultural activities across genres, and yet funders and nonprofit service providers have completely overlooked it as an arts space. Other “alternative” spaces loom large: places of worship, parks, and community centers figure prominently across genres as locations for artmaking and creativity. The wide variety of venues parallels the study’s documentation of the immense range of artistic activities. In several instances, racial/ethnic identity resulted in significant variances in venue and type of participation; I’ll highlight some of this specific data.

The responses to questions regarding arts venues revealed the significance of alternative venues for several of the genres investigated: music, theater and drama, dance, and visual arts and crafts. Two genres, reading/writing and what the authors term the “living arts” (which involve a range of informal/amateur activities like preparing traditional foods, gardening, or taking photographs) were not surveyed for venue variation, presumably because the study’s authors assumed those activities take place outside formal venues by nature. Some of the more interesting findings here include:

• The home ranks as the most common location for three of the four arts genres measured: music (70%), dance (34%), and visual arts activities (51%). Eleven percent of respondents said theater activities took place at home, and a range of alternative venues were ranked similarly.
• The Internet is a significant venue for music activities. Thirty percent of the total adult population experience music online, and 46% of 18-24 year-olds download music, a sign that the figures for online engagement will continue to grow (and have undoubtedly already done so since the publishing of Cultural Engagement in 2008). Visual arts show the next highest online activity level at a relatively low 8%.
• Traditional venues still hold power. The theater ranks as the best-used venue type for drama activities (31%), museums and galleries second-highest for visual arts (26%), and theater and concert facilities third-highest for music (32%, about the same as the Internet).

Within the broader venue results, a number of variations by race/ethnicity also surfaced:

• Different racial/ethnic cohorts show a preference for certain types of venues. African Americans tend to prefer places of worship as venues across genre, with the exception of visual art. Hispanics and Native Americans are twice as likely as whites and African Americans to use nontraditional spaces for theater, likely in part because they also practice informal dramatic activities (like acting out stories) more frequently. The home dominates as a setting for dance activities for non-white populations (38-47%), compared to only 18% of white populations taking part in dance activities at home.
• Racial/ethnic differences in participation exist for reading and writing activities. For example, three quarters of whites reported reading books or poetry for pleasure, compared to 45-55% for the other three racial/ethnic groups.

Responses to a series of open-ended questions on active arts participation (inventive and interpretive on the Five Modes of Arts Participation scale) demonstrated an incredibly wide variety of activities within each genre. For instance, musical instruments played include the autoharp, beatbox, computer, and gamelan; theater/drama activities include improv theater, skits, and Renaissance Faires; and arts and crafts activities include scrap-booking, woodworking, and creating floral arrangements.

Brown and Novak note that this variety might point to the increasing fragmentation of artistic tastes, and also describe some findings that indicate unfulfilled interest in arts participation in a number of genres:

• Approximately a fifth of adults have some music background, but are no longer active, about as many as are currently active. The authors argue that this finding may show a reservoir of unfulfilled interest in musical participation.
• In the visual arts, 19% indicated an interest in visiting museums and galleries more frequently, and a massive 49% would like to take part in more participatory activities like painting, making quilts, or taking a class.
• While one third of respondents dance socially, the same number wanted to take dance lessons, more than in other genres. (Only 16% indicated an interest in music lessons, for example.)
• Eleven percent of respondents reported an interest in taking part in a book club, in contrast to 6% who currently do it.

As with the venue measures, the data for participation and unfulfilled interest in participation reveal some significant disparities by race/ethnicity and education levels:

• Respondents without college degrees showed higher levels of interest in inventive and interpretive modes of participation. The authors note that most public and private investment tends to focus on observational modes of engagement, and support the idea of expanding funding for the more active forms.
• Hispanics and Native Americans showed high levels of unfulfilled interest in informal/participatory theater and dance activities compared to whites and African Americans, who indicated a much greater interest in observational engagement.
• Spanish-speakers have a higher level of unfulfilled interest in reading, versus 20% for whites (who, according to the study, presumably don’t speak Spanish as their primary language).
• Within visual arts and crafts, the Hispanic cohort reported the highest level of interest in making quilts and other types of needlework at 21%, with even higher levels seen in the Hmong (34%) and Mexican farmworker (48%) focus samples.

Finally, to ensure as broad a coverage of participatory arts activities as possible, Cultural Engagement included questions addressing what Brown and Novak term the “living arts.” Living arts, in the authors’ estimation, are activities that are potentially undertaken without artistic intent, do not necessitate formal education or expensive materials, fall outside activities typically labeled as “art,” and may involve easily-accessible digital tools. The list of activities they wanted to include, but could not due to limits in the study scope, is instructive: body decoration like tattooing and hair weaving, a longer list of culinary and food preparation activities like cake decorating, engagement in genealogy, more writing activities, a more detailed breakdown of digital imaging activities, and various forms of household decoration. What they were able to include, however, indicates strong engagement in several “living arts” forms:

• Sixty-four percent watch movies, a level of engagement only exceeded by figures for listening to music on the radio and reading newspapers and magazines, and 52% of those surveyed take photographs. In both cases, whites were somewhat more likely to do so than other racial/ethnic cohorts. Forty-two percent prepare traditional foods, with relatively even participation across racial and ethnic groups.
• Twenty-nine percent reported gardening or landscaping activities, an activity most popular among whites (42%) and Native Americans (41%).
• Fifteen percent reported making videos, an activity least popular among whites (11%), with the other three racial/ethnic cohorts showing about 20% participation.

ANALYSIS

Overall, Cultural Engagement both challenges the traditional arts infrastructure and provides encouragement for the expansion of arts services to traditionally underserved places. The data shows that a great deal of arts engagement falls well outside the traditional boundaries of arts nonprofits; at the same time, it also indicates relatively high levels of unfulfilled interest in the activities currently provided by these organizations. However, the fact that the study relies heavily on a non-random sample of people already interested in the arts makes it difficult to extrapolate conclusions to the wider population, undermining one of the study’s five major goals. In addition, surprising results for some of the racial/ethnic cohorts indicate some interesting opportunities for further analysis.

Brown and Novak reason that the use of two data collection phases–the smaller, randomized sample from Phase 1, and the larger, non-randomized sample from Phase 2–allows them to eliminate a great deal of pro-arts bias from the report. Indeed, most of the questions from the two phases are nearly the same, and one might assume that the Phase 2 dataset is strengthened by similar results in Phase 1. They also weighted the Phase 2 data according to known characteristics of the surveyed counties in an attempt to eliminate potential bias. However, a close look at the report raises questions as to how effective these strategies ultimately were in eliminating pro-arts bias from the study.

First, the randomized Phase 1 component may include some pro-arts bias of its own, weakening its usefulness as a control. Brown and Novak mention in quite a few places that the door-to-door Phase 1 survey asked the respondent to reply in reference to any adult in the household, not simply him/herself. It’s unclear whether this instruction led people to respond for multiple arts participants as a single person with a high level of arts interest (as in the case of a someone who plays an instrument, but lives with a brother who attends plays), and if WolfBrown researchers accounted for this issue by filling out multiple forms for each represented person. In addition, even though data collection was attempted from a randomized sample pool, the respondent set might have suffered from some selection bias—the report refers to some difficulty in attaining cooperation from neighborhood residents, and in one neighborhood researchers had to abandon efforts to conduct door-to-door surveys and send mail-reply questionnaires instead. Those who did respond may have had more of an interest in the arts than those who did not.

Second, some of the Phase 2 results don’t stack up with arts participation figures from the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), which does use a random sample. While most of WolfBrown’s measures cannot be compared with those in the SPPA, many that do show significantly higher levels of activity. For instance, 30% of Cultural Engagement respondents said they “regularly” attend stage plays; only 12.5% of SPPA respondents in the Pacific region claim to have done so even once in the past year. Six percent of Cultural Engagement respondents perform dances, but just 2.1% of Pacific region SPPA respondents do. Meanwhile, 14% of Phase 2 respondents indicated they earn some income from their art, a data point that was not collected in Phase 1 or in the SPPA. This figure strongly suggests pro-arts bias, since the NEA’s estimate of 2.3 million full- and part-time arts workers in the United States represents only about 1.5% of the total labor force.

The survey bias may significantly undermine one of the five goals of the study, to “measure levels of cultural engagement, broadly defined” in the Inland Empire and Central Valley. Given that both Phase 1 and Phase 2 display signs of pro-arts bias, it’s difficult to take the reported levels of overall cultural engagement at face value. The four other goals don’t require as broad a view of the data, and Cultural Engagement serves them much better. They include exploring and defining what arts engagement means for the target regions; understanding differences in engagement across demographic cohorts; investigating the settings in which people engage with the arts; and developing recommendations for how Irvine can more effectively support arts and culture. Even if the report’s numbers for the general public represent an already arts-interested population, results showing an expansive definition of arts and culture, differences in engagement among racial/ethnic cohorts, and a wide variety of arts settings are likely relatively unaffected. WolfBrown’s recommendations to adjust Irvine’s funding to reflect these findings seem to rest on a fairly strong foundation.

The results for two subgroups merit further exploration in future studies: the Asian/Pacific Islander ethnic group and the Mexican farmworker focus sample. Surprisingly, the researchers were not able to survey enough Asian/Pacific Islander respondents to include them as an independent racial/ethnic cohort, other than the Hmong focus sample, despite the fact that Asian/Pacific Islander residents make up a significant population group in many surveyed counties. Because the Hmong are a minority ethnic group in several Southeast Asian countries, and maintain a unique set of traditions and cultural activities, it is potentially misleading to rely on the focus sample results to describe the tendencies of larger, mainline Asian populations in California.

The Mexican farmworker focus sample results were reported along with all other subgroups, parsed by arts activity and mode of engagement. Looked at as a single group, however, a number of surprisingly high engagement results indicate that this cohort may be ripe territory for further, more detailed study. They report higher arts engagement than the general Hispanic population in several areas:

• A much higher frequency of reading books or poetry for pleasure, at 68%, compared to the general Hispanic population, at 49%.
• A higher level of participation in many dance activities, including performing dances as part of a group (28% vs. Hispanic population at 6%), going to community ethnic or folk dances (28% vs. 13%), and social dancing at night clubs or parties (65% vs. 42%).
• In the visual art sphere, 48% responded that they make quilts or engage in other needlework, vs. 21% of the wider Hispanic population.
• In the living arts, they also reported by far the strongest participation among all focus samples or racial/ethnic cohorts for almost every category: 32% reported making videos, 42% design clothes, 77% prepare traditional foods, and 49% garden or landscape.

IMPLICATIONS

Cultural Engagement takes a big step toward recognizing the multitude of ways in which people engage with the arts. By including activities like preparing traditional foods, making videos, home decorating, and social dancing, the study expands the definition of an arts activity to include almost anything that involves some level of creativity on the part of the participant. The living arts section, in particular, hints at the massive range of activities that could conceivably be considered art. In light of the pro-am revolution, amateur and hybrid forms will likely continue to come to the fore.

Cultural Engagement records high levels of unfulfilled interest across a wide range of activities and racial/ethnic cohorts, but because no questions were included asking why people don’t participate as much as they want, we are left to speculate. Some sections of the report seem to imply that if only arts organizations can provide the right kinds of services, the one third of adults who desire dance lessons will come around. But why haven’t they already? Arts organizations might be tempted to dramatically re-imagine the types of activities they support on a broad scale, but perhaps it’s of more utility to think about how to expand their work to include amateurs without losing focus. For instance, an organization might move to support amateur drama activities by providing a venue free of charge, or send budding visual arts curators to tour decorators’ homes and provide advice to help them realize their visions. At the same time, if a gardening-specific arts organization appears, perhaps funders should consider supporting it, rather than rejecting it for falling outside traditional guidelines.

The James Irvine Foundation has responded to the results of Cultural Engagement with a few funding initiatives. Most recently, it created the statewide Exploring Engagement Fund, designed as risk capital to help nonprofit arts organizations produce programs outside traditional venues, for underserved audiences, and better utilize participatory forms. The foundation also cites the Inland Empire and Central Valley as priority regions, thereby aiding the growth of arts organizations within these communities. Irvine recently announced its first round of grantees, which includes support for the Center for the Study of Political Graphics’s effort to launch a new format for traveling exhibitions, Memoir Journal’s memoir-writing workshops hosted in nontraditional venues, and many other projects focused on experimenting with new forms of engagement.

But there’s plenty of room to discuss how to expand on Irvine’s work. Given that so many arts activities take place outside of the nonprofit arts, it’s worth considering how other foundations might support these activities more directly. For instance, a funder could create a micro-grant program directed towards things like book clubs, online video production, in-home crafting and decorating groups, or community-based folk dancers. This type of program would certainly seem risky from a foundation perspective, but what grantees lack in institutional knowledge regarding funder requirements, they might make up for in direct community connection and authenticity. Programs that expand funding eligibility beyond traditional 501(c)(3) organizations would allow foundations to respond more nimbly to an arts landscape that continues to grow more diffuse with every passing year.

Further Reading

• WolfBrown, Philadelphia Cultural Engagement Index, 2009
• Kelly Dylla, Arts Policy Library: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, Createquity, 2012
• Diane Ragsdale, A New Conversation About Culture, Grantmakers In the Arts Reader, 2009
• Andrew Taylor, The Audience Around Us, ArtsJournal, 2009

Folklorists are uniquely suited to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Their research methods address uncovering artists outside the nonprofit arts infrastructure, a factor essential to building a sustainable local arts network.  If foundations and arts policy decision makers want to build such an environment for the arts, folklorists can aid them in taking steps towards authenticity and sustainability.

The Importance of the Informal Arts

Several studies over the last ten years have emphasized the importance of informal arts as well as nonprofit arts organizations, commercial arts, arts education, government, and businesses, in creating a healthy environment for the arts.

Cultural Development in Creative Communities (2003) came out right after Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class. Published by Americans for the Arts, it cites Portland, Oregon as an example of the new creative city, having “an especially large number of mid-sized and smaller organizations . . . [where] informal arts activities thrive . . . [and] many arts spaces sponsor project based collaborations . . . .” The authors (among others, Bill Bulick and Carol Coletta, current ArtPlace spearheader) continue: “Community asset mapping must encompass this breadth [commercial, nonprofit, and informal] in order to ferret out nodes and catalysts of cultural vibrancy, synergy, and impact.”

The authors recommend developing funding for project-based creative work with individuals and informal groups. They conclude,

The opportunity for our field is to broaden our definitions of culture, maximize participation and engagement, develop a climate that encourages creativity among all citizens, and channel that creativity towards building-and sustaining-our communities.

One of the key findings of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Research into Action: Pathways to New Opportunities (completed as part of a study of culture in Philadelphia in 2009) is that “Personal practice (including creating music or dance, painting or drawing, and sharing photos, music or videos online) is a gateway to attendance.“ The report goes on to cite Steven Tepper’s book Engaging Art, in which he predicts that “the twenty-first century will be shaped by the Pro-Am Revolution.”

In Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places (2002), Alaka Wali and colleagues make a convincing case that there is mutual benefit and reinforcement flowing between the informal and formal arts. The formally trained teachers and group leaders often derive benefits from teaching, such as new ways of thinking about techniques or ideas and hands-on experience in organizing and administrating. The students and less skilled artists benefit from the formal training of their teachers and gain inspiration from performances and exhibitions at formal arts institutions. Informal activities can also serve as incubators for experimental ideas in the arts.  Wali et al. recommend that the informal arts be incorporated into community development, that institutions that already intersect with informal arts be supported in expanding that activity, and that arts advocacy be built across informal-formal divides.

Barriers between Theory and Practice

It’s clear that many grantmakers and arts agencies agree that the path to a healthy, sustainable local arts ecosystem will necessarily include informal artists. Yet, their strategies by and large remain focused on nonprofit arts organizations. Research into Action hammers home the need for more programming that encourages personal participation in the arts, but it doesn’t even mention informal arts groups. A recent solicitation of perspectives from of regional arts councils participating in Americans for the Arts’s Local Arts Network yielded several examples of individuals who happened to be amateur artists serving on planning and advisory committees, but little targeting of “informal” artists specifically. Although many informal groups are led by professional artists, it is important to focus on the activity of the informal arts and their amateur practitioners, not simply viewing them as another source of revenue for practicing artists.

To be certain, there are significant barriers that have up to now kept funders from partnering with the informal sector.

• Visibility Barriers

In the Informal Arts report, Wali et. al. found that informal arts activities tend to fly under everyone’s radar. Activities occurring in “artsy” neighborhoods were more visible in the media than activities occurring in neighborhoods lacking that reputation. Additionally, researchers found no widespread recognition of informal arts practice as a concept within the informal arts world.

This means that it takes considerable effort just to find these groups. Combined with the economies of scale offered by larger nonprofits (enabling them to reach a larger number of beneficiaries), it should come as no surprise that informal artists often seem to escape the notice of arts leaders engaging in cultural planning and policy development efforts.

• Structural Barriers

The informal arts are—by definition—informal. Most groups are casual in attendance, unselective in ability required, and run by volunteers. They come and go according to availability of resources, popularity of the activity, and dedication of volunteers.  Some have organized leadership and discrete financial accounts, but many do not.

These factors make informal arts groups challenging to work with, especially for funders. Grantmakers are under heavy pressure to show exactly where their grants went and what kind of impact they had. This is difficult if not impossible to do with a group that may or may not exist from year to year. No wonder that when grantmakers do get involved with participatory arts, they often end up “formalizing” the group—building it into another institution.

• The Quality Barrier

Many, if not most, of the funders that support the arts have the word “excellence” in their mission statements or program guidelines. They want to support, and be associated with, high-quality art. The problem is that high quality participation and high quality art can’t be measured by the same factors. Some informal art is amazing, and some is amateurish in every sense.  If the goal is to create a more sustainable arts ecosystem, however, that means encouraging more people to experience the process of art-making, not just consume amazing art.

Barriers of structure, visibility, and perceived quality keep the informal and formal arts from collaborating at a strategic level.  The result is that informal artists’ voices are rarely heard in discussions about regional development, robbing grantmakers and arts agencies of the valuable information they could contribute about regional culture and what resources they need to thrive.

Folklorists Can Bridge the Gap

As Brendan Greaves points out, folklore is all about process—both the research process and the artistic process. Folklorists first locate practitioners of traditions and ask them about their involvement, in a method known as fieldwork. Some of this fieldwork is structured—that is, a folklorist will start with a list of persons of interest and gradually grow that list by ending each interview with “Who else should I talk to?” Unstructured fieldwork, by contrast, involves exploring an area through any means possible: attending festivals and talking to people, perusing community bulletin boards, and shuffling through the stacks of business cards at gas stations and talking to the attendants. The first result of such investigation is a list of arts practitioners, making that which was previously invisible, visible.

The second step in this process is to articulate why this tradition is practiced (the artistic process). What motivates the artist? Through interviews, folklorists get the answer to this question in the practitioner’s own words. This is extremely important because it ensures authenticity of the study.

Most often, folklorists have been asked to document cultural traditions that are rooted in community identity. However, the skills and methods described above don’t have to be limited to the realm of folk art. The North Carolina Arts Council demonstrated this when they worked in collaboration with the North Carolina Folklife Institute to map the cultural assets and needs in Wilmington, NC. Folklorists Sarah Bryan and Sally Peterson conducted structured and unstructured fieldwork, along with academic research and a public survey, resulting in a series of documents that outlined existing informal arts groups and distinctive regional traditions and recommended steps to be taken to grow these assets. Notably, this work uncovered informal arts practice across the spectrum of creative activity, including a network of artists employed in the film industry and a genre of music called “holy hip hop.”

Wayne Martin, Senior Program Director for Community Arts Development at the North Carolina Arts Council, explains that involving folklorists in this project enabled the Arts Council both to identify and begin engagement with artists outside the nonprofit infrastructure, and to understand community culture in an authentic way. “Folklorists are trained to seek out and recognize creativity in a variety of forms,” says Martin. “Folklorists understand how artistry is a window onto a community. They are able to articulate how the art that is produced there reflects the values of that community and makes it distinct.”

As beneficial as folklore research is, it has its own set of advantages and disadvantages relative to other methods of community research. This is a labor-intensive method that takes adequate time and human resources to be done well, and some communities that are extremely cosmopolitan might be too overwhelming to take on comprehensively. Furthermore, while folklore research can paint a rich picture of a subset of the community using qualitative data, quantitative data can be more useful for seeing the “big picture” in a region. That being said, folklorists can aid grantmakers and arts agencies in collaborating with informal arts groups by addressing the barriers of structure, visibility, and perceived quality.

–          Research addresses barriers of visibility

Through structured and unstructured fieldwork, folklorists uncover informal artists and groups that don’t have the resources to advertise themselves, making them visible and bringing them to the attention of grantmakers and arts agencies.

–          A collective approach addresses structural barriers

Instead of asking informal arts groups to propose projects that will fit a foundation’s mission, folklorists ask what resources they need to operate and grow and who they collaborate with.  By approaching the informal arts as a collection of individuals and groups, folklorists could help foundations and arts agencies identify resources the sector needs as a whole, instead of trying to work with each specific group.

–          Focus on process and participants addresses the “quality” barrier

The informal arts place more of an emphasis on the process of creating and experiencing art, not only on the “excellence” of the finished piece. A folklorist’s focus on the artistic process (why art is created, how it is created) as well as the process by which it is shared and experienced with others, gets at the reasons people participate, and how and why they bring their art to their community. It is imperative to know why and how people participate in these informal arts if foundations and arts policymakers seek to encourage such participation.

The Irvine Foundation’s new Exploring Engagement Fund, accompanied by a white paper written by WolfBrown, is an exciting step towards foundations supporting participatory and informal arts. The study points out various projects being undertaken by arts organizations around the world that embrace and encourage participatory art  (e.g., the Art Gallery of Ontario’s In Your Face open submission art exhibit;  inviting community members to create, perform and witness Headwaters, produced by the Sautee Nacoochee Community Association in rural Georgia; enabling anyone to learn to dance, together, at The Big Dance (2012) in London and the Bal Moderne in Brussels). Although the informal arts are certainly nothing new, it is novel for a leadership institution like the Irvine Foundation to actively encourage this kind of arts participation.

In the 21^st century, technology continues to make it easier to learn and practice art. The Pro-Am Revolution has blurred the lines between audience and artist, making arts participation more important than ever to the strength of the arts as a whole. The problem is that funders operate in a wholly different world from the informal arts. Because folklorists already work with the informal arts subgenre of folk arts and music, they are uniquely suited to seek out and find informal artists and groups, learn from them, and report back to grantmakers. Funders and arts policy leaders would do well to turn to folklorists to help them work with and strengthen the informal arts for the benefit of the sector as a whole.

Grand Rapids LipDub – photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.