• With a rare, wide-open mayoral race underway, Boston’s arts community has come together to assert some political sway of its own. The new advocacy coalition MassCreative organized a nine-candidate forum that actually pushed back a televised debate. The primary is today.
• North Carolina’s Randolph County just banned Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man from school libraries following a parent complaint that the novel is “too much for teenagers.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation welcomes Createquity’s own Daniel Reid as its new executive director and Courtney Hodell as director of the Whiting Writers’ Awards.
• The Ford Foundation announced Martin Abregú as its new vice president for the Democracy, Rights, and Justice program, and Hilary Pennington as the vice president of Education, Creativity, and Free Expression. Pennington, who previously led education initiatives at the Gates Foundation, will oversee all of Ford’s arts funding beginning October 1.
• Nearly a year after its prior president, Jeremy Nowak, resigned after eighteen months on the job, the William Penn Foundation has announced a search to fill its top leadership position, newly reframed as a “managing director.”
• John Palfrey, an expert on technology and civic engagement, is succeeding Robert Briggs as the new chair of the board of the Knight Foundation.
• G. Wayne Clough, who has served as the director of the Smithsonian Institution since 2008, will step down in October 2014.
• So long, Technology in the Arts blog; hello, Arts Management and Technology Laboratory. The rebranded/reimagined service from Carnegie Mellon’s arts management program will serve as “a research outlet for those working and learning in the arts management and technology sector,” and features interviews, case studies, research summaries, and more.

IN THE FIELD

• Nathan Zebedeo reviews Sarah Durham’s Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications for the (ahem) brand-new Fractured Atlas Book Club.
• Last week, Americans for the Arts hosted a blog salon focusing on arts education and the “trifecta of education accountability—standards, assessment, and evaluation.” The salon included a perspective from Createquity’s own Talia Gibas and a nice summary from Kristen Engebretsen, and touched on testing, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and more.
• Speaking of accountability, Tennessee is rolling out an ambitious evaluation system for visual and performing arts teachers that relies on portfolios of student work. Teachers select samples they feel show evidence of growth over time, and submit them electronically for peer review. Time-consuming and complicated? Yep. Worth following? You bet.
• Udacity, a popular provider of online college-level courses known as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course), has announced the launch of Open Education Alliance, bringing together leading tech companies and educators to “bridge the gap between the skills employers need and what traditional universities teach.” Is there an Open Arts Education Alliance in the near future?
• The Detroit Free Press takes an in-depth look at the embattled Detroit Institute of Arts’s long and tangled relationship with its hometown, providing insight into the current threats of deaccessioning.
• Last Wednesday, September 18, #AskaCurator Day “connect[ed] experts in venues large and small directly to gallery and museum fans across the world, inviting both parties to take to their [Twitter] handles and ask each other anything they want.” You can catch up on the conversations here.

BIG IDEAS

• “Arts Dinnervention” participants Devon Smith and Laura Zabel each reflect on the recent WESTAF-supported discussion, which brought together twelve arts leaders to consider new solutions to old problems. While the convening did not result in a singular path forward, there was one notable consensus: “the arts are not in trouble, it’s the institutions that are failing.”
• The Dallas Morning News has taken a novel approach to hiring a new art critic to its staff, a position empty since 2006. The addition of Rick Brettell, an art history professor at the University of Texas, will strengthen the news org’s arts coverage and is the second time it has worked with UT to hire a local professor as a cultural critic.
• Is it ethical for arts funders to start what they cannot finish? Diane Ragsdale, one of the official bloggers at the upcoming Grantmakers in the Arts conference, has her doubts.
• How is an artist like a social entrepreneur? Laura Callanan explores the similarities at SOCAP13.
• If you’re looking for a dose of wisdom to go with your morning cup o’ joe, start here: an array of arts leaders including Roberto Bedoya, Janet Brown, Richard Kessler, Margot Knight, and Mara Walker reflect on what they have learned from their years in the field.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Break out the champagne – the arts have stagnated! Americans for the Arts’s new 2013 National Arts Index is practically identical to last year’s, following several years of steady decline. The study finds deeper reason for optimism in the wake of the Great Recession: over the last 10 years, total private giving to all charities and the total number of workers in all occupations have been strong predictors of the health of the arts sector, and both are up.
• Jon Silpayamanant digs into the WPA Federal Music Project with an annotated bibliographic timeline and argues the WPA, as well as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that preceded it, were crucial to classical music during the Great Depression.
• Data on the relationship between cities’ aesthetics and economic health may be soon within reach thanks to Place Pulse, a project out of MIT that asks users to rank  photos from cities as more or less “boring,” “safe,” “lively,” etc.
• A new survey conducted by the Center for Effective Philanthropy catalogs concerns about foundations from non-profits: nearly half of the respondents felt that foundations are not aware of the challenges the respondents face, and more than two-thirds believe foundations fail to use their various resources to help nonprofits with their challenges. Commentators blame power dynamics and the “inherently self-serving” structure of foundations.
• Connoisseurs of fine wines and classical music may be dismayed over recent studies examining the complexities involved in critical judgement. Turns out that experts and amateurs alike are susceptible to everything from presentation, environment, and even price (gasp!) when it comes to evaluating quality.
• When faith and evidence collide, sometimes it’s faith that wins – at least when it comes to politics. See also Margy Waller’s Uncomfortable Thoughts piece for Createquity from back in the day.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Who should be the next chair of the NEA? Barry Hessenius and Ray Mark Rinaldi trot out some possibilities.
• Penn Hill Group, which is working with Grantmakers in the Arts on federal arts education policy, has published a report that “provides an initial analysis of the people, process, politics, and policies that are crucial to the consideration of federal education and job training policies in the next Congress and Administration.”
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who’s had an uneasy relationship with the city’s arts community, has been kicked out of office by a judge for a minor corruption charge. The judge’s decision is pending appeal.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jeremy Nowak, the head of the William Penn Foundation who had joined from The Reinvestment Fund only a year and a half ago, has left due to “differences in approach” with the foundation’s board.
• Congratulations to Susie Surkamer, new executive director of South Arts.
• The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, which supports arts and culture in the Phoenix, AZ area, has named Clarin Collins research and evaluation officer.

IN THE FIELD

• Take that, Roger Ebert: video games are art! New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced recently that it is buying up 14 classic games for inclusion in its permanent collection, including Tetris, Pac-Man, and Myst. If it’s good enough for MoMA, it’s good enough for me. Too bad advances in technology are disrupting video game store economics.
• Probably the most thorough English-language overview of the music scene in China that you’re going to find.
• I’m scratching my head a bit wondering how a midlevel employee who didn’t work in the finance department of the Woodruff Arts Center was able to embezzle $1.5 million out of the organization over a five-year period without anyone noticing before now. That’s a lot of per diems to lose track of.
• Who earns nearly $1 million a year for an arts organization and is still a relative bargain? Hint: he’s Venezuelan and directs a major orchestra. Culture Monster’s Mike Boehm runs the numbers.

BIG IDEAS

• The new issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review has a look back on lessons learned from the early years of impact investing.
• A deeper look into Google’s super-high-speed broadband experiment in Kansas City. If you care about infrastructure (and I imagine most Createquity readers do), you should read this.
• This epic article by Emily Badger on the Miller brothers’ experiment in crowdfunding real estate development is well worth the time invested.
• More from the Americans for the Arts Scaling Impact blog salon: Victor Kuo reflects on a collective impact effort in Cincinnati involving my sometime partner in crime arts funding, ArtsWave; Joanna Chin offers a very good wrap-up.
• Are management consultants worth the money? A thoroughly entertaining Freakonomics podcast investigates.
• Kris Putnam-Walkerly considers the role and rise of design thinking in philanthropy.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Slightly old news, but here goes: The NEA is partnering with the Bureau of Economic Analysis to measure the contribution of the arts to the national GDP. The arts were already counted as part of GDP, but we didn’t have a good way of isolating their contribution – the relevant figures were only counted once every five years, and categories were unhelpfully broad (combining performing arts with sports and recreation, for example). The main short term significance of this, as I understand it, is that it will be a boon to researchers doing economic impact analyses of the arts and creative industries. Congrats to the NEA research team on making this happen – I know they’ve been working for a while on it. Meanwhile, more recently, the NEA updated its very helpful “How the United States Funds the Arts” publication for 2012.
• Does Generation Y have unrealistic expectations about how much money they’ll be inheriting from their parents?

On to the news:

YOU’RE FIRED

• The orchestra world has been shaken to the core this month. The largest institution yet to face such troubles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has filed for bankruptcy (the restructuring kind, not the “we’re throwing in the towel” kind). On the one hand, I am sure that the Fabulous Philadelphians’ financial troubles are very real. On the other, it does strike me as curious not only that (as others have noted) an organization with a $140 million endowment would file for bankruptcy, but that the move precedes the announcement of a $160 million fundraising campaign to save the orchestra. Andrew Taylor digs into the bankruptcy filing docs.
• The Syracuse (NY) Symphony Orchestra has filed for Chapter 7 (we’re throwing in the towel) bankruptcy, after canceling the rest of its season a week earlier. Looks like it’s lights out for this one, not to mention the SSO’s 95 musicians and staff.
• Albuquerque’s New Mexico Symphony has filed for Chapter 7 as well. 80 musicians and staffers will lose their jobs.
• On the plus side, the Detroit Symphony musicians are back to work, albeit six months later. The new three-year contract calls for 25% cuts in salaries (to $79,000 base pay, hardly slave wages) and additional funds available for optional community-service work. The orchestra’s size will be reduced from 96 to 85 musicians.
• The artistically successful but financially troubled Intiman Theatre  in Seattle has cancelled the rest of its season due to money problems. Its artistic director, Kate Whoriskey, has now left as well.
• The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival is kaput after 17 years in operation, making it the second major Baltimore arts organization to fold since the start of the Great Recession (after the Baltimore Opera). The article contains this quote that would make Tyler Cowen smile: “‘We started as a non-Equity company, and if we had dropped our contract, it would have cut our costs,’ Toran said. ‘But that’s exactly what we weren’t going to do. You want to pay your actors, just like you pay lawyers and doctors and teachers. Our goal wasn’t survival at any cost.'” So because they wanted to pay the actors so badly, they decided to give them fewer work opportunities?
• The New York City Opera, two years after spending the 2008-09 season inactive and raiding most of its endowment to stay alive, is facing a possible strike and the delay of its season announcement for next year.
• Pittsburgh arts groups are exploring increased collaboration as a survival strategy.
• Meant to write about this a while ago, but Pepsi Refresh has relaunched with a different process and set of rules after complaints of gaming the system last year.

I QUIT

• Ellen Rudolf is stepping down as longtime director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures Program, which she had initiated with the foundation 17 years ago.
• Jeremy Nowak, a noted advocate for the power of the arts in revitalizing communities, will no longer be the President and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund – for good reason: he’s about to become the new head of the William Penn Foundation. (via GIA News)
• Nina Simon, author, blogger, and museum design consultant extraordinaire, is quitting her consulting and speaking business to be the new Executive Director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA. Thankfully, she is not quitting her blog.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

• Whoa…a donor’s estate in Bermuda is withdrawing an £82 million donation to Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival for no reason at all, apparently.
• Chad Bauman riffs on the recent cuts to DC’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission from a marketer’s perspective.
• Michael Kaiser takes a dim view of the trends in corporate giving to the arts. Here are some numbers from the Foundation Center.
• Americans Gave a Lot Less in the Recession Than Experts Predicted, reads the Chronicle of Philanthropy headline. Among other things, this story is a pretty big black eye for Giving USA, the annual report on individual giving that had estimated that donor activity was holding steady or barely dropping during the same period.
• Meanwhile, foundations gave (slightly) less in 2010 than 2009, despite the fact that their assets increased by 5%.
• Why don’t more foundations publicly explain the rationale behind their gifts?
• It looks like the growth of new 501(c)(3)s has finally slowed (and the numbers will actually drop considerably once the IRS releases the names of the nonprofits whose status it has revoked as a result of nonfiling). Of course, this hasn’t stopped composer Philip Glass from founding a new festival in Carmel Valley, CA.

SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE

• My colleagues at Fractured Atlas have a new publication laying out what the health insurance reform law means for artists.
• A new publication from the Boekman Foundation in Amsterdam: Cultural Policy Update. And check out this fab cultural policy blog salon put together by my friends at Emerging Arts Professionals – San Francisco Bay Area, featuring an admirably diverse range of voices.
• Not surprisingly, the social media cognoscenti are all abuzz about the new report from the Knight Foundation, “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks.” Beth Kanter is all over it here.
• CEOs for Cities reports on the residential clustering patterns of the “young and the restless” – college educated 25-34-year-olds. Seems cities’ “close-in neighborhoods” are more important than ever.
• Partners for Livable Communities reports on strategies for arts organization outreach to senior and immigrant audiences.
• Shannon Litzenberger is back with a massive report on cultural policy in the Windy City.
• Won’t you help Devon with her epic Facebook experiment? (It begins tomorrow.)

SEE YOU IN COURT

• David Byrne has come to a settlement with former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who had used the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” without permission during Crist’s unsuccessful campaign for Senate last year. (Seems a rather auspicious choice, no?) The settlement terms apparently included Charlie recording this apology video, which actually almost makes me feel sorry for him.
• Matthew Guerrieri reports on a dispute between the Music Publishers Association (UK) and the International Music Score Library Project.

BEAUTY CONTESTS

• Bubble sort as demonstrated by Hungarian folk dance.
• Eric Whitacre is back with the Virtual Choir 2.0, this time performing his “Sleep” and featuring over 2000 performers. Sounds great, but fair warning: the video is even cheesier than in the last one.
• To draw in new audiences, an orchestra plays for cows.
• I find a lot of public art less than inspiring, but I have to admit, this is pretty awesome:
  

  After more than a decade of disagreement, Berliners have settled on a monument to celebrate German reunification and the 1989 peaceful revolution: a giant, rocking dish.

  The 55-metre, 330-tonne glittering steel wing can hold up to 1,400 people at any one time, but it needs at least 20 people to get it moving.

  The monument to unity is called Citizens in Motion, and is apparently all about people coming together. If you want to make it move, you have to get a group together and all go in a particular direction.