The big news last month was the campaign for and passage of a millage (property tax) in Detroit to support the beleaguered Detroit Institute of the Arts. Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer and ARTSBlog’s Kim Kober are celebrating the new legislation, which passed easily in Wayne and Oakland counties but only by a hair in suburban Macomb. The DIA took the campaign very seriously, spending an astonishing $2.5 million on raising awareness and getting out the vote, despite facing little organized opposition. It’s clearly a victory for hard-nosed arts advocacy, but I only wish that victory (and the resulting tax revenue) could have paid dividends for the entire arts community rather than a single institution, as it does in places like San Francisco, Denver and Cleveland. If other arts institutions follow suit, as Terry Teachout suggests, we could end up with an extremely unhelpful patchwork of government support for the arts whose lack of flexibility is written into the law. On the other hand, the voters in Detroit and environs have spoken, and it’s a meaningful testament to the DIA’s community relevance that this measure was able to pass. Indeed, attendance at the museum has jumped (at least temporarily) since the vote was taken. (Nina Simon, Diane Ragsdale, and Maria Vlachou have more.)

The first draft of the much-ballyhooed 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan has been unveiled. Conducted by Lord Cultural Resources for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the plan contains a mind-bogglingly ambitious raft of recommendations for the city’s next few decades, based on participation by about citizens in four town halls, about 20 “neighborhood cultural conversations,” meetings, interviews, and online. All in all, about 3,000 people have participated, according to the draft. This extensive process produced 36 recommendations and hundreds of potential initiatives, which, if collectively adopted, would add tens of millions of dollars to the city’s annual investment in the arts. The reaction so far has mostly focused on this level of ambition – as Chris Jones writes in the Chicago Tribune, “if half of the recommendations in the draft of the Chicago Cultural Plan — heck, even 5 percent of the recommendations — were implemented, Chicago would become an artistic nirvana without global peer.” It seems obvious that the initiatives are not intended to be implemented all together – but it seems like an effective plan would prioritize specific actions in a clear sequence, not just present a gigantic brain dump of options. There are other criticisms as well – most notably, the Chicago Reader points out that “nine of the ten priorities and 33 of the 36 recommendations are updates or restatements of items in the original Chicago Cultural Plan, commissioned in 1985.” The final version of the plan is due to be released this fall. There’s more reaction and commentary – not all of it negative – from Kelly Kleiman, Elysabeth Alfano, Tanveer Ali, and Philip Hartigan.

In other local news, the Fort Worth (TX) Arts Council has had its budget cut by 25% as a result of recent financial issues for the city.  By contrast, there’s not much going on at the state and federal level. But remember the Kansas Arts Foundation, the nonprofit that was supposed to replace the Kansas Arts Commission after the latter’s budget was zeroed out by Governor Sam Brownback? Well, it ended up raising $105,000, but surprise surprise, has not made any grants.

INTERNATIONAL

The real action these past few months has taken place outside of the United States, and unfortunately most of the news has been bad. Europe’s financial instability is not surprisingly having an effect on government support for culture in countries suffering from high debt, particularly Greece, Spain, and Italy. Greece’s spending has dropped 35% since 2009, and in Italy,

[T]he Uffizi Gallery in Florence is renting itself out for fashion shows, and Rome’s MAXXI Museum has been placed under state receivership. The building opened just two years ago and was feted internationally for its splashy design by architect Zaha Hadid, but after its €7-million ($8.7-million) subsidy shrank by 43 per cent, the museum could barely cover staff wages.

In Spain, the Fundación Caja Madrid has closed 48 cultural centers around the country, and analysts fear thousands of creative sector jobs are at stake. The arts are feeling the pinch in some of Europe’s richer countries as well. After suffering through a cut of 25% last year, the Netherlands culture budget is looking at potentially losing another up to another 16 million euros to meet EU debt targets, and even Finland of all places is tightening its belt (while increasing funding for sports clubs).

In the South Pacific, Australia is in the midst of a major upheaval to its arts funding system. Following a review by two “corporate advisors,” the Australia Council for the Arts is restructuring many of its programs and considering doing away with its discipline-based peer review system that mirrors in many respects that of the National Endowment for the Arts. And speaking of transition, the UK is changing culture ministers (who apparently won’t be missed) and chairmen of Arts Council England (the new guy’s claim to fame is bringing the TV show Big Brother to the Brits). Just two years after sustaining substantial cuts, Arts Council England is facing the prospect of having its administrative structure decimated, resulting in the loss of up to 150 staff members by next July. But hey, at least ACE is pioneering a new program to help encourage more paid internships in the arts!

Meanwhile, the past couple of months have featured more than their share of repression of artistic statements by conservative governments. The recent cause celebre of free speech advocates has been the all-female Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years in a forced labor camp for staging a 45-second guerrilla art performance at an Orthodox church. Coverage of the initial sentencing was extensive, but Jillian Steinhauer has been keeping a close eye on the aftermath of the decision. Meanwhile, officials in the island nation of the Maldives have banned mixed-gender dancing altogether and discouraged any singing and dancing at government-sponsored events, deeming such activities contrary to Islamic values. And the right-wing leadership of Hungary has actually gone the opposite route, co-opting the government-controlled Budapest New Theater so as to promote performances of an anti-Semitic play.

Finally, three very sad stories from Africa and the Middle East show how art can be grievously impacted by the absence of a functioning government. First, in Mali, a gang of Islamic fundamentalists has wreaked havoc on the historic treasures of Timbuktu. In Somalia, a comedian (yes, a comedian) was assassinated by members of an extremist group in retaliation for his biting satire of said group. And in war-torn Syria, many museums, monuments, and historical treasures are either at grave risk or are already lost, recalling the disaster that befell Iraq’s cultural heritage following the American invasion in 2003. These tragedies may seem far away, but referring to the upheaval in Timbuktu, Delali Ayivor puts it in starker terms: “Imagine a group of people who make no apologies for desecrating your history, who revel in the destruction of your identity. Envision then, the sense of helplessness, the horror as you watch them dismantle the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, The Alamo, Ground Zero, as they set fire to Yosemite, set off a blast that decimates the Grand Canyon.” Yikes.

Sorry to be depressing! I wish I could tell you that there was some good news for arts funding coming out of the international arts community during this period, but there seems to be precious little to celebrate. Just one of those accidents of history, I guess.

Today, a great victory has been won by everyone in the state of Kansas who loves the arts. The Governor this morning signed the budget, which includes $700,000 for the newly-created Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission.

Advocates from all corners of the state spoke – and spoke loudly. Our voices have been heard. A big thank you goes to all of you who have helped spread the word through your communities and to your elected officials about the importance of public arts funding in all of our lives.

Congratulations to all on a job well done.

Thank you for your support of the arts in Kansas.

That’s from Kansas Citizens for the Arts, which led what can only be termed a phenomenally successful advocacy campaign to bring arts funding back to Kansas. A campaign that forced a sitting governor to beat a very public retreat from the idea of removing the arts from government in one of the nation’s most conservative states.

The new Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission represents a merger with the state’s Film Services Commission, and the combined total for the new agency is essentially the same as what the arts commission alone was working with before all the controversy. But even so, arts advocates have occasion to celebrate this year, along with Sarah Fizell and the rest of the folks at KCA. In fact, if anything, this is an even bigger win for the rest of the US than it is for Kansas. For years, conservative ideologues have been trying to kill funding for the arts at the state level, but the threat of losing matching federal funds from the NEA had always held them in check. So finally, one governor follows through and eliminates funding entirely, and he gets lambasted mercilessly for it all year and has to reverse his stance in the very next budget. What does that say to the next governor who might be thinking about following Brownback’s lead?

It says you don’t want to mess with arts funding.

Breaking news: the government is cutting its funding to PBS! Wait – sorry – hold that. It turns out the NEA is cutting its funding to PBS – to the tune of more than $1 million, to be exact. Talk about irony! The money had been earmarked to support organizations that produce arts-oriented programming on public television through the NEA’s Art in Media program. The grants are large by NEA standards – one organization was receiving $400,000 – and the media program received more than twice as many applicants this past year in part by opening up the guidelines to include interactive forms.

Facing potentially deep cuts to defense spending should the parties fail to come to agreement during this winter’s “lame duck” session, the US Air Force is planning to shutter three of its 23 military bands and downsize two others, eliminating 103 positions in total. An attempt to reduce the Pentagon’s spending on bands by $120 million (note that this is only a little less than the entire budget of the NEA) failed in the House last year.

STATE

The Arizona Commission on the Arts has been reauthorized by Arizona’s state government for another 10 years. In another state that might have been a routine win, but Arizona’s arts commission has been cut to the bone by Republican legislatures and governor Jan Brewer since the start of the current recession, and had been threatened with de-authorization earlier in the process. The cynic in me wonders if conservatives are happy to keep the Commission around as a political punching bag as long as it doesn’t have any real power, but at least if the infrastructure is there the hope of growing it in the future is ever-present. Congratulations to Bob Booker and Arizona Citizens/Action for the Arts for shepherding this one through.

Meanwhile, it looks like much-maligned Kansas may be on track to restore funding to its state arts council this year. Rebranded as a creative industries commission, the agency is slated to receive $700,000 in the state’s yet-to-be-passed budget. Of course, it wasn’t until the budget got to Governor Brownback’s desk that the arts commission was vetoed last year, but after the political firestorm and that caused, one hopes that he will see things differently this time around.

Otherwise, things continue to be quiet on the state front. Is no news good news? I guess we’ll find out in a few months.

LOCAL

In the city of Portland, ME (yeah, the other Portland), two arts and creative economy agencies are merging, and the community is seeing the benefits. Creative Portland and the Portland Arts & Cultural Alliance will become the Creative Portland Corporation as of July 1, and will be the official arts agency of the region. Creative Portland has also successfully applied for a Community Development Block Grant to bring Blair Benjamin’s Assets for Artists program to the city.

INTERNATIONAL

The UK is considering a cap on the tax incentives offered for major charitable gifts, and some folks in the arts community there are not happy about it. Similar proposals for this country have been floated by the Obama administration for the past few years, but have gone nowhere to date. Meanwhile, Britain’s Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is implicated in the growing scandal concerning News Corporation’s cozy relationship with the British government. Hunt is accused of acting as a “back channel” to Rupert Murdoch’s news empire during its bid to take over full control of the broadcasting network BSkyB, which it was Hunt’s job to approve.

Hunt isn’t the only minister of culture in the news lately. We had Sweden’s Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, who found herself in the worst photo op of all time the other week. And now, Bahrain’s culture minister is in some serious hot water for calling her conservative critics “not real men” for opposing an arts festival that her office is organizing.

At least these countries have culture ministers. Bosnia and Herzegovnia’s most prominent museums, galleries and libraries may have to close indefinitely due to a dysfunctional, leaderless government that failed to appropriate any federal funds for their operation last year. At Sarajevo’s National Museum, employees haven’t been paid in seven months. Amazingly, it’s still open – for now.

Finally, this is a novel take on the “day without art” concept: an apparently insane museum director in Italy burned one of the paintings in his museum’s collection as a protest against debt-driven funding cuts, and is threatening to destroy three more each week until the Italian government stops to listen. (So far, there’s no indication that it gives a crap.)

FEDERAL

The House of Representatives passed a budget resolution based on Paul Ryan’s FY13 budget blueprint that hews closely to conservative thinking on a number of fronts. Included in the document is the following statement on arts funding:

Encourage Private Funding for Cultural Agencies.  Federal subsidies for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can no longer be justified.  The activities and content funded by these agencies go beyond the core mission of the Federal Government and they are generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.  These agencies can raise funds from private-sector patrons, which will also free them from any risk of political interference.

I find it completely amazing that conservatives actually have the chutzpah to make this argument. They are such valiant defenders of the poor that they actually deign to give a rat’s ass about the welfare of our nation’s downtrodden when there’s an opportunity to save them a couple of pennies by eliminating the National Endowment of the Arts. Oh wait, what’s that you say? The poor don’t pay income taxes? So they’re not subsidizing the NEA, or any other government agency for that matter? Which means your argument is full of shit? Got it.

STATE

Poor Kansas is still looking for ways to get back some of what it lost last year when Governor Sam Brownback vetoed the entire budget of the state’s arts commission. The House passed a bill that would add an option to Kansas tax forms that would allow taxpayers to voluntarily contribute to the Kansas Arts Commission. Given that a similar initiative in California raises only 0.4 cents per capita, I doubt that will prove an effective means of resurrecting the agency.

Utah has passed legislation that will put a question on the November ballot asking voters to consider a statewide sales tax to fund cultural agencies as well as zoos and botanical gardens. Dedicated tax streams have proven one of the most lucrative and stable sources of arts funding around, so good luck to arts advocates in moving this one forward.

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies keeps a detailed and regularly updated list of relevant legislation and machinations by state at this link.

LOCAL

Chicago Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Michelle T. Boone sat down for her first interview on the job, talking through the merger with the city’s Office of Special Events, the ongoing citywide cultural plan, and other topics. The Commission’s budget declined by about 10%

Mayor Vincent Gray of Washington, DC is proposing a modest increase in local funding for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which saw its budget decimated last year primarily by cuts from Congress.

INTERNATIONAL

Most of the news this past month relates to fallout from cuts European governments implemented last year. In the UK, The Stage reports that more than one in nine of the 206 arts groups who lost all of their Arts Council England funding intend to close up shop; another 22% are at risk of closing. Groups in Wales were hit hard by budget cuts last year too, with the burden falling disproportionately on companies serving youth and specific geographic areas. The Netherlands’ decision to slash its cultural budget by 25% last year had previously been reported on Createquity, but I was surprised to learn via the New York Times that Portugal has completely dropped its Ministry of Culture. The same article names Italy, Greece (not surprisingly), Hungary, Spain, and Ireland as other countries that have recently ripped their culture budgets a new one.

All of this is leading to some potentially nightmarish unintended consequences for U.S. arts organizations. Because European governments are so much more active in cultural life than that of the United States, arts institutions in those countries have never had the need or the desire to build up a strong base of private contributions. So now that new funds are needed, rather than start down the long path of cultivating that presently nonexistent generosity, organizations are looking for a quicker fix: American donors.

Europe isn’t the only one feeling the pinch; Ontario, in Canada, is too. But one government arts agency that’s doing well is Brazil’s SESC, which is financed by a unique model involving a 1.5% payroll tax that has helped the entity’s budget double approximately every six years. SESC’s budget is $600 million, rivaling some of the wealthiest European nations, but its broad mandate includes recreational activities and even health clinics in addition to arts organizations.

FEDERAL

The President’s FY13 budget request is out, and (as has been widely reported) it includes a modest increase for the National Endowment for the Arts to about $154 million. This is a welcome turnaround from last year, when he kicked arts advocates in the nether regions by proposing (and thus setting up as the best-case scenario) a 13% cut to the agency’s budget, but color me unimpressed nevertheless. The arts community had big hopes upon President Obama’s inauguration that he was finally going to make cultural funding a priority, but at the end of his first term things are pretty much the same as when he came in. We had the best opportunity in decades for a game-changer at the beginning of 2009, and BHO passed it up.

But that’s yesterday’s news, and our cultural policy is what it is. AFTA’s Narric Rome points out some of the easily-overlooked details in the NEA budget request, including the fact that (if funded) the Our Town creative placemaking program’s budget will nearly double to $10 million; the travel budget is being cut by 25%; and Donald Trump (of all people!) is buying out the NEA’s current office building to convert it into a hotel, necessitating a search for new digs.

As we all know, the NEA isn’t the only recipient of federal arts funds. Mike Boehm of the LA Times rounds up the other figures: the Smithsonian gets a 5.6% increase including both its operating and capital budget; the National Gallery of Art gets an 11.2% increase; the Kennedy Center is cut by 2.4%, the Institute for Museum and Library Services essentially gets level funding. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ budget is once again tied to that of the NEA, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stays flat.

STATE

Finally, some good news from the state arts council front! After three years of financial carnage, from which Michigan did not escape, ArtServe Michigan scored a threefold increase in the governor’s budget request for the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and from a Republican no less! Granted, a threefold increase is a lot easier to achieve after your budget has been cut by 81% as Michigan’s was three years ago, but every little bit helps. This also is a success story for the power of data visualization and storytelling, as I’d be willing to bet that the very effective infographic on the promise of the creative economy that ArtServe put out in December had something to do with the victory. Florida is also looking at a welcome potential boost after several tough years in a row.

Unfortunately, some states still can’t seem to catch a break. South Carolina’s governor Nikki Haley has once again called for the South Carolina Arts Council to be eliminated, despite failing to kill it last year; there is now a proposal in the legislature to direct a portion of the state admissions tax to the arts council. And New Hampshire conservatives continue to apply pressure to the state’s Department of Cultural Resources, whose budget is practically nonexistent at this point.

Finally, we have an interesting situation in Kansas, which as you may remember was the first state to have funding for its arts council completely eliminated last year. Governor Sam Brownback is now proposing the restoration of a $200,000 pittance in state subsidy, with the caveat that it will go to a Creative Industries Commission under the Department of Commerce.

Barry Hessenius (former director of the California Arts Council) has an extensive interview with Craig Watson, current director of the California Arts Council. Because of the dire state of California’s finances, Watson reports that more general funds for the agency are unlikely this year, even though governor Jerry Brown is a huge supporter of the arts. For that reason, the CAC is pressing ahead with its campaign to sell one million arts license plates, a strategy that (if successful) would increase the Arts Council’s budget to over $40 million.

Americans for the Arts’s Justin Knabb has a helpful roundup of what’s going on with other states over at ARTSBlog. And if you’re curious about where everybody ended up last year, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies just put out its annual summary (membership or purchase required).

INTERNATIONAL

We close with a few cautionary tales about the public arts funding. As I wrote earlier this year, it’s entirely possible for governments to have a pernicious influence on an arts ecosystem. Western Europe has managed to sustain cultural norms by which governments generously fund the arts while maintaining a largely hands-off orientation towards content (case in point: Arts Council England’s new £37 million “Creative Places and People” fund), but that doesn’t mean we can count on that always being so. Hungary’s recently elected national conservative government, for example, is making waves for “systematically replacing key figures in cultural institutions, staging pro-government exhibitions, rethinking permanent museum displays and replacing historic statues to fit its political agenda.” On the other side of the political spectrum, Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chávez has received criticism for trying to appropriate the legendary El Sistema youth symphony program that preceded his presidency by 24 years. (Doug Borwick rightly points out the amazing fact that an arts program would be popular enough to be seen as propping up the political fortunes of a sitting president.)

Don’t get me wrong. I do think there is a role for government arts funding in the United States, especially at the state and local level, and I think that role could and should be expanded substantially in this country. (Hence my frustration that the opportunities to do just that three years ago were not taken by the current administration.) In a way, though, I think the fact that we’ve had to get by without much help from the government has been good for the long-term development of the field. It’s forced us to be much more creative and resourceful about finding allies, building partnerships, and cultivating earned revenue than we might otherwise have been. And in a political environment in which the “culture wars” are expanding beyond cultural organizations, perhaps it’s to our advantage that arts groups simply don’t have that much left to lose from government. That said, with diversified revenue streams in place, increased government support can only make us even stronger – and, more importantly, help to even out the inequities in arts production and access that market-driven alternatives tend to exacerbate.

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.

• AFTA’s Narric Rome shares the latest on how arts education has fared in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka No Child Left Behind) reauthorization, which Jennifer Kessler reported on earlier this year. Mostly good news, from what it sounds like.
• Looks like net neutrality advocates dodged a bullet when the Senate rejected an effort by Republicans to turn back regulations that were put in place last year.
• It’s official: the zero-budget Kansas Arts Commission will be receiving zero dollars in matching funds from the NEA. Kansas is now contemplating selling arts license plates a la the California Arts Council.
• Jonathan Arbabanel gives the insider scoop on what’s happening with the newly-merged Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
• Did you know that, by law, artists in California earn royalties from future sales of their work? It sounds like a great idea, but Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman make a compelling argument at the Freakonomics blog that it’s actually not good policy for most artists.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT: INTERNATIONAL

• Christopher Madden finds a strong relationship between cultural expenditures and cultural employment in Australia and New Zealand.
• Did you know that UNESCO has a Creative Cities Network? Or that the network has a conference coming up in Seoul, South Korea? I didn’t.

PRIVATE DOLLARS

• You’ve no doubt heard of the ArtPlace grant opportunity (letter of inquiry due today!), but the initiative offers just as much money in loan financing via the Nonprofit Finance Fund. There is a separate process to get in on that action, and the deadline is December 1.
• Mitch Nauffts reports on Bloomberg Philanthropies’s emergence as one of the nation’s top foundations.
• The Richard and Rhonda Goldman Foundation, a significant supporter of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, is spending down and has distributed its last set of grants.
• More on the Irvine Foundation’s new arts strategy, from arts program director Josephine Ramirez and foundation president Jim Canales.
• Whoa, I’d heard of composer Ann Southam via Kalvos & Damian’s New Music Bazaar, but I had no idea she was loaded.

IN THE FIELD

• Two Austin art museums, the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse, have merged.
• Yet another orchestra is facing significant financial troubles: this time, the Dallas Symphony. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, by contrast, is doing great under the strong leadership of Deborah Borda, with Walt Disney Concert Hall averaging 95% of capacity.
• Well, this is a novel negotiating tactic: the NYC Opera’s unions have offered to perform for free this season in exchange for health care and power over future venues. City Opera rejected the offer.
• Americans for the Arts’s Amanda Alef scored an interview with the collective voice that is the Occupy Wall Street Arts and Culture Committee.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Mandee Roberts takes issue with the fact that architects are included in the NEA’s recent report on artist professions and income.
• The NEA’s Sunil Iyengar takes on Holly Sidford’s report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” So does the League of American Orchestras’s Jesse Rosen, and Andrew Taylor.

THIS ECONOMY WE LIVE IN

• Applications for art and design college degrees in the UK are down 27% from last year, and officials worry that the rising cost of higher education is squeezing out lower-income students.
• As the cost of postsecondary education ratchets up ever higher, Cooper Union is considering charging tuition to undergraduates for the first time since 1902. (h/t Xenia via the Createquity Tipster)
• The value of the worldwide underground economy (broadly speaking, enterprises that are not registered or licensed and don’t pay taxes to the government) is approximately $10 trillion, according to an economist at Johannes Kepler University in Austria. If it were a country, it would be the second-largest economy in the world after the United States.

IN THE BLOGOSPHERE

• Farewell for now to Sean Stannard-Stockton, who is taking a sabbatical from his excellent blog Tactical Philanthropy. Hope we’ll see him back again soon.
• Chicago Artists Resource has a great behind-the-scenes interview with Thomas Cott of the celebrated email newsletter You’ve Cott Mail.

THOUGHT BUBBLES

• Congratulations to the folks at Animating Democracy for a fabulous blog salon at ARTSBlog, which took place over the past week. Doug Borwick makes a good point in noting the creeping influence of creative placemaking on the discussion there.
• Arlene Goldbard was also at the Beyond Dynamic Adaptability conference, and she had some things to say about the WolfBrown white paper on participatory arts that was presented there.
• Speaking of conferences, the Independent Sector Conference (about which I’ll have a report here shortly) wasn’t the only social sector gathering that met recently. Bunmi Akinnusotu offers a brief but informative dispatch about the 2011 Net Impact Conference in Portland, OR.
• Imagine my surprise to find this article on the Fast Company website (h/t Mission Paradox) by a former classmate of mine from undergrad, Adrian Slywotzky. Adrian recounts a fascinating pro-bono study by consulting firm Oliver Wyman (in which he is a partner) called the Audience Growth Initiative that looked at audience churn at nine major symphony orchestras.
• Fantastic advice from Seth Godin on how to get hired at a small company (a term that describes virtually all arts organizations).
• Bad Culture has posted Part II of its interview with longtime Bay Area cultural policy wonk John Kreidler. (Part I is available here.)
• Is Wikipedia, arguably the most successful crowdsourcing experiment in history, running out of steam? I sure hope not, but the encyclopedia has a huge backlog of editorial work (adding sources to articles, etc.) that is apparently stretching the capacity of the site’s volunteer contributors.
• Thank you, Beth Kanter, for highlighting the fact that curation (of content or otherwise) is an art form all its own.
• Coolness: Life in a Day, the YouTube project showcasing user-uploaded video all recorded on July 24, 2010, is now available in its 90-minute entirety – on YouTube, of course.

This all started with a throwaway comment I made to Ian when I was dropping him off at the airport. Sharing an idea that you’ve been mulling over for awhile, but never said aloud and aren’t sure you’re ready to discuss, is best done when the sharee is dashing for a flight and won’t really engage. Or so I thought.

Ian said: 1) Now that’s worth discussing. 2) I’m not sure whether I agree with you. 3) Maybe you should write a blog post about it.

Ha.

So – now you know how I ended up here.

The Theory: Shhhhhhh 

Shhhhhhhh

Here’s the theory I pitched at Createquity that day: Advocates for the arts might be better off doing their work under the radar than trying so hard to get a lot of media and public attention when fighting for public funding of the arts. 

Createquity readers get regular updates on public funding of the arts. So we all know this was an especially rough year for many state arts councils.

But is this unique? Nope. We all have examples in our catalogue of “can-you-top-this” horror stories about arts advocacy experiences from over the years.

Like this.

When President Obama proposed including funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in the stimulus legislation, the media covered the topic in typical he-said-she-said style with headlines like “Stimulus funding for arts hits nerve: Some doubt it would create jobs.”

The arts are often used as a way to politicize and undermine bigger issues (like the stimulus bill), because the public tends to erupt with charges of elitism like this one:

“Why should the working class pay for the leisure of the elite when in fact one of the things the working class likes to do for leisure is go to professional wrestling? And if I suggested we should have federal funds for professional wrestling to lower the cost of the ticket, people would think I’m insane….” — Catholic League President Bill Donohue speaking of an exhibit at the Smithsonian in 2010.

Media coverage like this encourages a debate over the “facts.” Unfortunately, rebutting the doubts with our research findings means that arts supporters have to stay in our opponents’ frame.

They Aren’t Listening Anyway

A debate that lives within the position of a critic (like arts jobs aren’t really jobs or the arts should be supported by the rich) does little to shift the public landscape of a widely-shared belief, such as: the arts are a low priority for public funding.

Unfortunately, facts and research we’ve accumulated to prove the value of the arts as a public matter of concern, and then worked hard to get reporters to cover, are too often dismissed or ignored when seen through the lens of an idea that’s not new and about which people have already made up their minds.

Most people will simply ignore the rest of the story (where all our snappy facts live) once they’ve seen the headline. We all filter the barrage of information in today’s info-heavy world, paying little attention to all but those matters of deepest interest to us. A headline that presents an issue we’ve already decided for ourselves is likely to be read as: “Oh, that again. I know what I know about that. And I don’t need to know anymore.”

Worse Even: The Backfire Effect

But even worse is the possibility that a public debate makes things harder for arts advocates in the long run because, as Chris Mooney explains, “…head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect” where people react by defending their position and holding onto their views “more tenaciously than ever.”

In other words, when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers (PDF). Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

It’s true that in the end, Congress included some funding for the NEA in the stimulus bill. But it took a very heavy lift — well executed by Americans for the Arts — to set up hundreds of conversations between constituents with influence and members of Congress. It’s certainly sometimes possible to overcome bad press and the fear felt by elected officials that they might doom their own careers supporting an unpopular cause. But it’s seriously labor intensive and asks a lot of our supporters — not an ideal way to ensure success year after year. And it forced us to revive an old debate – possibly making things harder for arts supporters next time around.

An Alternative: Don’t Try to Change Minds, Change Perspective

One solution to this dilemma is to craft a new communications strategy —one built on a deeper understanding of the best ways to communicate with the public about the arts—that would increase a sense of shared responsibility and motivate public action in support of the arts. That’s what we’ve done at ArtsWave.

Instead of reviving an old debate, we sought a new way to start the conversation – based on something we can all be for, instead of something we’re defending against an attack. And importantly, we aren’t trying to change people’s minds, but present the arts in a way that changes perspective. Therefore, we held the message accountable to factors such as whether it prompts people to focus on certain aspects of the topic (such as broad benefits) rather than others (such as personal tastes); whether a message is coherent and memorable; whether it promotes the idea of public/collective action; and so on.

After a year of investigation and interviews with hundreds of people in the our region and surrounding states, this research—conducted by the Topos Partnership for ArtsWave (happy disclosure, the writer is affiliated with both) —found that public responsibility for the arts is undermined by deeply entrenched perceptions. Members of the public typically have positive feelings toward the arts, some quite strong. But how they think about the arts is shaped by a number of common default patterns that ultimately obscure a sense of shared responsibility in this area.

For example, it is natural and common for people who are not insiders to think of the arts in terms of entertainment.  In fact, it’s how we want people to think when we are selling tickets or memberships. But, in this view, entertainment is a “luxury,” and the “market” will determine which arts offerings survive, based on people’s tastes as consumers of entertainment. Consequently, public support for the arts makes little sense, particularly when public funds are scarce.

Perceptions like these lead to conclusions that government funding, for instance, is frivolous or inappropriate. Even charitable giving can be undermined by these default perceptions. People who target arts funding, as they did in the stimulus bill, know that these dominant ways of thinking about the arts will work in their favor. Our investigation identified a different approach, one that moves people to a new, more resonant way of thinking about the arts.

What is it? The arts create ripple effects of benefits, such as vibrant, thriving neighborhoods where we all want to live and work.  This is not only compelling, but it also sets an expectation of public responsibility for the arts.

However, even though most people agree with this view already (so we don’t have to change their minds), we know that it will take time, repetition, and many partners across the nation to bring this way of thinking to the forefront of people’s minds.

Stay Off the “Front Page”

So — back to my theory about arts advocacy – until we effect that change, the better strategy, when possible, may be to keep stories about public funding for the arts off the front pages and out of the media.

To some this may seem counter-intuitive. Or at least uncomfortable. If we care about the arts, shouldn’t we be shouting about it? Getting people to pay attention to our facts and our data.

Well – it depends. Is our advocacy goal a widely seen news piece outlining all sides of the issue? Or, do we want a successful budget outcome?

I think it’s the latter. And when it can be achieved with a quiet effort, making sure to begin modeling this new way of thinking about the arts in our meetings with decision-makers, that is preferable to another big public debate. Because the big fight in the default way of viewing the arts is very losable. And in our efforts, we’re forced to expand a precious resource: the time and energy of staff and key supporters who have to work so hard to convince public officials that they won’t suffer consequences in the next election.

Moreover, every time the fight is public, we’re likely to be reinforcing the dominant ways of thinking about the arts that are getting in our way now. When attacked, we rebut with facts, and the media covers the issue as a political fight with two equal sides – both seen through a lens that sets up the arts as a low priority on the public agenda. And as we know, this can have the effect of making people defensive and hardening existing positions. Of course, it should be no surprise that even officials who are friendly to arts funding are reluctant to be in the middle of that kind of coverage.

The Ohio Success Story

This past year, I watched closely as our state arts advocates at Ohio Citizens for the Arts carefully managed what seemed to be a stealth campaign to retain funding for arts and culture through the Ohio Arts Council. Despite an initial proposed cut by the newly elected Governor, the final outcome was an increase in funding over $4 million more than the previous budget.  Each step of the process brought an increase in the proposed funding level — the House vote, the Senate vote, and the reconciled proposal sent to the Governor, resulting in $6.6 million more than the proposed executive budget. And it went forward without fanfare or comment when signed into law.

Compare this scenario with the nightmare that was Kansas.  Of course, the Governor started a fight there — and there’s some evidence that this battle to the death did bring out supporters. But it clearly brought out opponents too.

As a little test, I tried two Google searches: One for blogs mentioning ‘“Ohio Arts Council” budget’ and the other for ‘“Kansas Arts Commission” budget’. In both cases, I limited findings to the first six months in 2011. The Kansas search revealed over 1000 posts, compared to only 42 in Ohio. An even greater disparity than I had imagined.

It appears that the Ohio advocates strategically sought to keep the campaign under the radar. And it worked.

To be sure, I called Donna Collins – the executive director of the Ohio arts advocacy organization. And she confirmed my theory.

“We didn’t want to be in the headlines,” she said. “We didn’t want to see masses of people on the statehouse lawn with signs about funding the arts. We wanted people on message, talking with their own elected officials at home, as well as in Columbus.  Our advocates, from the smallest rural community to the large urban centers, all had compelling stories about the positive impact of the arts.”

Collins credits long-term investment in relationship building with state decision-makers and encouraging a consistent message: the value citizens place on the way arts make places great. She organized a meeting about this message for partners on the morning of a well-attended statewide Arts Advocacy Day in the capitol. There was no big public fight, no need to defend a position in the media, no risk of the opposition hardening in place – and therefore little reason for politicians to fear supporting the increase in funding for the arts.

So…this is a theory, and one deserving of more study. But until we have a new landscape of public understanding, it seems a theory worth testing again.

CLOSURES, OPENINGS, MERGERS, AND PAY CUTS

• Gentrification claims another arts space in Williamsburg.
• The Sacramento Opera and Philharmonic are in active merger talks.
• I would like to see more of this kind of story: after Pittsburgh Symphony musicians agreed to a new contract that forced them to take a 9.7% pay cut, their music director, Manfred Honeck, announced that he would take a 10% cut too. Of course, Manfred can afford to lose a bit of income, as he made $546,700 last year. But still, it’s surprisingly rare that we see even this much of a gesture from the leaders of organizations under financial duress. Meanwhile, the Wichita Symphony players recently accepted a further 20% pay reduction, on top of a voluntary wage cut of nearly 14% over the past two years. No word on any concessions made by the music director there.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Paul Brest, who has been president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a little over a decade, is retiring next year.
• Antony Bugg-Levine will be the new CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund. Bugg-Levine was formerly Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, and is an expert in impact investing.
• Mario Garcia Durham, the former NEA Director of Artist Communities and Presenting, will be the new President and CEO of the Association of Arts Presenters, replacing Sandra Gibson.

PHILANTHROPY TALK

• The philanthropy/nonprofit blogspace is all abuzz over the fact that GOOD, a for-profit media company focused on social causes, has bought Jumo, the social media and crowdfunding platform for nonprofits started by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. The fact that Jumo is itself a nonprofit that was started with the help of $3.5 million in grants from the Ford and Knight Foundations and Omidyar Network seems to be the source of the intrigue.
• Good news for cultural diplomacy enthusiasts: New York’s Robert Sterling Clark Foundation has dramatically increased the resources it is pumping into international cultural exchange programs. A list of grants made so far is available here.
• The Save America’s Treasures grant program, administered through the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is shutting down.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Emerging arts leaders: do the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Council and your fellow citizens a solid, and fill out this survey to share tips, tools, and resources that you find useful with your peers.
• Musicians: do the Future of Music Coalition and your fellow citizens a solid, and fill out this survey about the ways in which you make your money (or don’t). I hear there are iPads to be won!
• I think it’s pretty awesome that the American Planning Association would publish a report called “Community Character: How Arts and Culture Strategies Create, Reinforce, and Enhance Sense of Place.”
• The Aspen Institute is studying artist-endowed foundations.
• Ways in which cities are using data and research to improve citywide out-of-school-time (OST) systems.
• Freakonomics contributor Daniel Hamermesh is out with a new book called Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. I’ve been interested in this topic for at least a decade, ever since I first became aware of psychology and economics studies showing the substantial life benefits reaped by attractive people, and am glad to see it starting to enter the mainstream conversation. Curiously, the data suggests that there is more downside than upside to the attractiveness game for men as compared with women. Hamermesh goes so far as to make a (fairly cogent) argument for fashioning a legally protected class out of the ugly. Fascinating stuff!
• Sage advice for young cultural researchers from Canada’s Lidia Varbanova: “Cultural policy research field is rewarding but not an easy one: it requires a good portion of diplomacy and negotiation skills as it reflect diverse stakeholders because research without policy actions stays only in the libraries without real impact on improving the creative life of cultural professionals and the communities. It also needs patience, as in many cases undertaking practical policy actions as a result of research findings requires time, lobbying and joined advocacy efforts.”

ART AND THE LAW

• The previously-blogged New Jersey plan to require nonprofits in the state to allow program-restricted donations has been thankfully dropped.
• A little-known provision in current copyright law allows artists to apply for reinstatement of the ownership rights to their work after 35 years. That deadline is coming up and record labels, publishers, and others that rely on the assignment of copyright (and milking cash cow artists) for their business model are understandably freaking out about it and trying to challenge the law. The conflict centers on whether (for example) albums made under a recording contract can be considered “work for hire” and thus belong to the record company by default. With the legal ramifications unclear, Representative John Conyers has come out on the side of the artists.
• I never thought I’d be writing these words, but there is going to be an arts policy storyline on a major network television show.

ART AND GOVERNMENT

• Sam Brownback just doesn’t know when to quit. Not satisfied with being the first governor in history to completely defund his own state’s arts commission, now he’s having his chief of staff show up at ribbon-cutting events to mouth off about how wonderful the arts are. Meanwhile, he refuses to reconsider his decision – despite the fact that the state now has a $180 million surplus.
• Jay Dick from Americans for the Arts explains the complex web of societies for elected officials and why AFTA tries to have a presence at their convenings. In my (still developing) observation, this type of advocacy seems to be what AFTA is best at: the behind-the-scenes relationship building that takes place in different corners of the country and among policy insider circles. I sometimes think AFTA doesn’t get enough credit for its work in this area, which to my mind would be very difficult for others in the arts field to replicate. It’s definitely soft power rather than the hard power represented by massive lobbying dollars or enormous mobs with pitchforks, but soft power is better than nothing.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

• Diane Ragsdale considers the shape of arts cuts and new funding models in the Netherlands and Australia. Meanwhile, severalEuropean impresarios talk about the effect of recent budget cuts on their plans and speculate about the future.
• Sad news: a British cultural council in Afghanistan has been the focus of a terrorist attack. At least twelve people died in the fighting, mostly Afghani police and security guards.

AND SO ON…

• If you’re hankering for some great live jazz streamed direct to your computer, Tara George has your fix.
• I enjoyed this neat idea from Andrew Taylor on “job function trading cards.” He’s definitely right that small organizations risk making suboptimal use of their employees’ unique talents because they are too beholden to job descriptions.
• It sounds a little ridiculous, but I actually think these “gofer” services popping up are pretty brilliant. Besides providing value to buyers and sellers, it could help the long-term unemployed stay productive and earn a little on the side.

• EMCArts’s Director: Activating Innovation position, which we first posted about in March, is open again. Details here.

Cool Projects

• You simply MUST watch the entirety of this video produced by the fine citizens of Grand Rapids. Organized after an article published on Newsweek’s website named Grand Rapids one of “America’s Top 10 Dying Cities,” the world-record-setting “LipDub” – lip sync video – proves GR’s vitality in inspiring fashion. Theresa Cameron has more of the story over at ARTSBlog.
• Hartford’s iQuilt creative placemaking initiative has received a whopping $400,000 grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
• Andrew Taylor reports on the progress of Panera Bread’s experiment in pay-what-you-can pricing. Most customers are paying the retail price for the food, and only about 20% are taking advantage of the opportunity to pay less than what they would pay for the exact same food elsewhere. It’s an interesting lesson for economists on how social norms or pressures may influence behavior towards arbitrage opportunities. I also can’t help but wonder how much the apparent success of the experiment is made possible by the locations of the stores, which are in Clayton, MO; Dearborn, MI; and the Hollywood district of Portland, OR. None of those cities are poor, they have similar overall demographics (with the exception of the large Arab-American population in Dearborn), and Clayton is a wealthy suburb of St. Louis.
• TCG’s “What If?” series of posts has been well worth reading. Here’s one recent example, an excellent think piece on an organizational model for a group of small artist collectives. Of course, as Michael Kaiser points out, mergers are never easy.

In the Tank

• The same weekend that the Kansas Arts Commission went under, Florida’s governor vetoed state funding for public broadcasting. Meanwhile, Mid-America Arts Alliance director Mary Kennedy McCabe weighs in on Kansas.
• The IRS has announced that 275,000 nonprofits have officially lost their tax-exempt status today, due to a failure to file required forms for three years in a row. This officially reduces the number of nonprofits in this country by 17%. View the full list here, and check to see if any arts organizations in your community have been affected.
• Under continued financial pressure, including a $5 million current-year deficit, NYC Opera is leaving Lincoln Center for a new home – what home that is, no one knows. It’s also laying off 11 employees, and rumor has it that the budget will be reduced next year to $11 million.
• NYCO is leaving Lincoln Center just two years after a $107 million renovation to the theater in which it performs – a renovation that resulted in its being renamed the David H. Koch Theater. Yes, this is the same David H. Koch whose conservative advocacy group supported Governor Sam Brownback’s vendetta against the Kansas Arts Commission.
• This quote from one of the many stories about the NYCO’s recent challenges well illustrates the depressing conflict between commercial and aesthetic incentives at major institutions (emphasis mine):
  

  The [performers’ and stage managers’ union] delegates said they were proud to be part of the company. “Yet we are confused and troubled by the way management is programming the seasons,” they added, calling for productions of more familiar operas, like “Carmen,” “Madama Butterfly,” “La Bohème” and “La Traviata.” “George Steel’s artistic vision may be brilliant,” the union officials said, referring to the current general manager and artistic director, “but it doesn’t fill the seats.”

• NYCO is not the only company in New York suddenly looking for a home. After losing its bid to take over the Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Arts at St. Ann’s is desperately seeking shelter.
• The Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas is going on hiatus.
• Bye bye Florida Stage.
• Tony Kushner, of all people, reports that he doesn’t make his living as a playwright.

Orchestra R/Evolution Revisited

• Sarah Lutman reports from the League of American Orchestras conference.
• A new business model: investing in musical instruments.
• The Detroit Symphony visits the suburbs. And its President fails to take a pay cut.
• Very good thoughts on new music programming from Sam Bergman.

Overseas/North Country Report

• As much as we like to complain about our arts advocacy in the US, other countries haven’t figured it out either. You’ll notice some strikingly familiar language in this rant from England.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber has established a new arts funding program through his foundation. Good thing, since it looks like the city of London is cutting back on its culture funding.
• The Dutch government might make the renowned Netherlands Dans Theater perform in the Dutch suburbs rather than overseas.
• Rio de Janeiro doubles its culture budget.
• Ben Eltham reports on support for the arts in the 2011 federal budget in Australia.
• Shannon Litzenberger reports on capitalization discussions from a Canadian perspective.

Data Tells a Story

• Richard Florida investigates the relationship between corporate business taxes and economic competitiveness at the state level, and finds that there isn’t one. Remember, one of Florida’s main arguments in The Rise of the Creative Class was that economic development strategies aimed at drawing companies through lower taxes don’t work anymore. This analysis provides pretty compelling evidence that he’s right. [A note: I’ve criticized these kinds of cross-sectional comparisons in the past because they are not very good at proving causal relationships. But the topic at hand is a better fit for this method, since what’s being found is actually a lack of a relationship.]
• The UK is embarking on a national effort to measure happiness.
• Analyzing Google’s vast storehouse of published data.
• Amanda Alef looks at how arts majors fare financially relative to others.
• Looking at a barter economy experiment in the arts.

Give it Away, Give it Away Now

• On the heels of the Giving Pledge, Gates, Buffet & company are now spearheading a Hollywood Pledge. And the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has signed up 60 foundations for the “Foundation Pledge” (giving focused on underserved communities).
• These five simple questions represent a really great rubric for self-evaluation on the cheap.
• Adam Huttler offers a two–part analysis of what the L3C means for the arts.

Etc.

• The Future of Music Coalition joins a petition to stop the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
• Cool story featuring interviews of NYC buskers trying out for the great Music Under New York program.