• In a reversal, the FCC has drafted new net neutrality rules that critics claim are unworthy of the name: they would allow broadband companies to provide a “fast lane” for content providers willing to pay a “commercially reasonable” fee. The FCC’s public comment period opens on May 15. Related: if the Comcast-Time Warner merger is approved, “the combined company’s footprint will pass over 60% of US broadband households.”
• A belated tax tip for artists: emigrate to Mexico. Or, for those committed to staying in the US of A, consider launching a worker cooperative as a means of upping income while maintaining time for artistic pursuits. For those on the collector side, there’s always lending your new purchases to a museum in Oregon, Delaware or New Hampshire first.
• Several record companies have filed suit in New York against Pandora to secure royalties under state law for the use of recordings made before 1972, which are not protected by federal copyright. Sirius was targeted by a similar lawsuit last fall.
• Classical musicians may now have a harder time leaving and re-entering the United States thanks to a ban on ivory meant to protect African elephants.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Grant Oliphant, former Pittsburgh Foundation leader, will begin a new role as president at Heinz Endowments this June.
• Also in June, the Canada Council for the Arts will welcome its new CEO and president Simon Brault. Brault was previously vice-chair of Canada Council’s board before moving to the National Theatre School Montreal, and will serve in his new position for a five-year term.
• Michael Kaiser, a man who wears many hats, will add another one in co-chairman of IMG Artists, which will also involve managing a new cooperation between IMG Artists and DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.
• Jonathan Fanton, former president of the MacArthur Foundation and of the New School, has been named President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Former president Leslie Cohen Berlowitz resigned last July in the wake of a scandal over her compensation and qualifications.
• Lorin Dunlop will join the M. J. Murdoch Charitable trust this June as Program Director. Most recently, Dunlop was responsible for public safety grant programs of the Oregon Criminal Justice System.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• PonoMusic, a new high-def digital audio business, raised $6.2 million on Kickstarter to become the third-best-funded project in the site’s history. Neil Young, who started Pono to provide a higher-quality alternative to current digital formats, set the initial goal at $800,000.
• Yet another contender is trying to elbow its way into the crowdfunding game: Crowdrise, a new(ish) platform dedicated exclusively to nonprofits, just received an additional $23 million in financing.
• The Walter & Elise Haas Fund, working together with the Foundation Center and Mission Minded, has developed an open-source, free solution that any grantmaking entity can use to make its grantmaking data searchable, publishable, sharable, and fully accessible. You can see “Open hGrant for WordPress” in action on the Haas site.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera has outlined a new fundraising strategy to avert closure and announced a meeting on Monday of its 850-person membership. It’s been a bumpy ride: half of the 58-member board has resigned; a new chair, Carol Lazier, has taken over and personally pledged $1m to save the organization; general and artistic director Ian Campbell has been placed on indefinite leave; and protests by unions and members have added financial and legal complications. The opera’s plan includes a new $1m crowdfunding campaign with a deadline of May 19; it is actually only one of several San Diego cultural institutions that have been shuttered or are imperiled.
• A closer look at the end of the Trey McIntyre Project.
• A bid by a group of philanthropic organizations to buy out Pittsburgh’s failed August Wilson Center for African American Culture was dropped, with the foundations claiming a preference on the part of the Center’s court-appointed receiver for a commercial developer.
• New York City is facing a sudden rash of failing institutions. The Incubator Arts Project is closing, citing — you guessed it — difficulties raising revenue. The Brecht Forum, a Marxist educational and cultural space, is buckling under the weight of a lawsuit for back rent. And Manhattan’s legendary Canal Street art supply store Pearl Paint has shut its doors and is mourned.
• Is an arts-centric Coursera in our future? Barry Hessenius decries the state of professional development in arts administration and calls for a virtual “one stop shop” of on-demand courses, articles, and networking/mentoring opportunities.
• A handful of arts organizations have been experimenting with a lesser-known organizational structure called the “disregarded entity,” which may offer non-profits a more flexible alternative to independence on the one hand and fiscal sponsorship on the other.
• In The Foundation Review, authors Gary Cunningham, Marcia Avner, and Romilda Justilian of the Northwest Area Foundation note declining philanthropic investment in communities of color and make a pointed call for foundation leaders to commit to reducing racial inequality. And across the pond, British comedian Lenny Henry is leading an effort to secure better representation for minorities on the BBC.

BIG IDEAS

• National Arts Strategies’s Sunny Widmann suggests arts organizations create their own Skunk Works® divisions — originally conceived by Lockheed Martin and not as stinky as the name suggests — to nurture innovate programs and practices.
• We hear a lot about the intersection between creative placemaking and gentrification, but is dealing with it just a matter of saying hi to your neighbor and identifying your privileges? At The Atlantic Cities, Daniel Hertz suggests that if we really care about gentrification, we should be paying a lot more attention to housing policy.
• Global inequality of wealth is at a 100-year high, with the infamous 1% owning half of the planet’s wealth, according to a hot new book by French economist Thomas Piketty. One consequence: “professionals have now been priced out of the [art] market and it’s shifted more toward investment bankers.”
• Barry Hessenius is looking for the next set of big ideas – and the people behind them – with another edition of the Arts Dinner-vention. Nominations are due May 15.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A music psychologist found that introducing random repetition into a piece of music makes it more appealing – and makes people think it was more likely to have been composed by a human being.
• Research suggests literary fiction can help short-circuit ethnic stereotypes.
• A new paper examines the intersections of the arts and health via case studies from Cleveland on interventions including art therapy and the artistic design of healthcare facilities.
• The NEA is out with a new report on the Education Leaders Institute Alumni Summit, a five-year effort on the part of the NEA to strengthen arts education policies at the state level. The Endowment’s Arts Education director Ayanna Hudson discusses the report in the context of the agency’s new strategy.
• A new center at Stanford will focus on meta-research in the medical sciences and examine how much publication bias — which raises questions about all research fields, including the arts — really is a problem.
• The Pew Research Center has published a new report on demographic and generational trends in America. The findings themselves are what you might expect – our population is aging, becoming more diverse, and moving away from religion; immigration and interracial marriage are on the rise; and Democrats and Republicans are at odds – but the presentation brings these and other trends to life.
• Seen any good movies at the theater lately? Probably not, according to new data on film reception by month of release as aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The numbers show that the summer and holiday seasons have the best pickings. Don’t believe it? You can play around with the data yourself.

• Glenn Beck is at it again: the right-wing broadcaster recently attacked the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture along with the Imagining America initiative on his Internet show, The Blaze. Far from a government agency, the USDAC is a “citizen-powered” art project that hasn’t received any public funding to date. Not one to be deterred by facts, Beck claims the two groups are “America’s newest propaganda machine” attempting to “rewrite our history.”
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has signed a new lease with the city of New York that clarifies the museum is allowed to charge a suggested admissions fee, and added fees for special exhibitions. A lawsuit filed earlier this year alleged that the Met’s previous lease with the city required the museum to be free to the public five days a week.
• Cultural policy researchers in England are crying foul over Arts Council England’s “long-standing bias” toward organizations based in London, which receive a whopping 82% of funding, and asking it be redistributed proportionally to the population across the country.
• A number of theaters in upstate New York are concerned about the possible opening of several casinos in the area and the potential impact on booking major performers and retaining audiences. The advocacy group Upstate Theaters for a Fair Game is seeking protections from the state to “‘establish a fair and reasonable partnership” between the casinos and the local market.

IN THE FIELD

• The Museum of Modern Art sure is committed to staying on top of digital trends in education: it jumped on the MOOC train early, and now has a new partnership with Khan Academy.
• Two Latino theater companies in New York, Pregones Theater and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, are getting set to merge with the help of Time Warner and the Ford Foundation. The two performing ensembles will retain their original names under the new organization, but will share resources.
• The Theater for a New Audience has moved into its first permanent home after spending the last 34 years producing shows in a variety of rented spaces around Manhattan. City planners view the completion of the newly constructed theater as “the capstone” to a downtown Brooklyn cultural district long in the making.
• What’s going on with the Brooklyn Philharmonic? The NYC-area orchestra made a splash back in 2011 with a daring programming strategy focused on marrying classical music with other more widely popular genres as well as local composers and artists. But all the positive press and attention the new direction received apparently wasn’t enough to stanch the organization’s financial bleeding.
• While the debate rages on over whether Spotify is good or bad for musicians, YouTube muscles in on its territory by planning a subscription service that would give users on-demand, ad-free access to music videos on their mobile phones.
• Musicians of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra recently voted to break from their local union chapter of the American Federation of Musicians in an unprecedented industry move. The decision was reportedly motivated in part by the “understanding that to be successful as an orchestra in the future, [they] need more flexibility, they need to be nimble, and…unions sometimes get in the way of that.”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• With 71 percent of projects getting funded (compared to the 43 percent average), the dance community boasts the highest proportion of successful Kickstarter campaigns. Theater clocks in at second place with a 64 percent success rate.  Is this evidence that arts orgs are reaching new supporters – or just swapping money back and forth between their friends?
• Pop quiz: which nonprofit group has successfully  “reduc[ed] its reliance on foundation funding, buil[t] new revenue sources” and is “constantly experimenting and challenging assumptions around who their audience is and what they care about”? Nope, not the arts — nonprofit news outlets.

BIG IDEAS

• Barry Hessenius’s Arts Dinner-vention has wrapped, and the edited video has been posted in seven installments; GIA collects them all on one convenient page. The conversation among some of the leading lights of arts administration explores ideas for the future across three areas: the role of the community, new format and delivery mechanisms, and the artist’s role and artist ecosystems.
• Say you didn’t require a project budget as part of that RFP. What’s the worst that could happen? Michelle Williams calls for grantmakers to trust the artists we work with, and she catalogues some innovative ideas from the GIA 2013 conference.
• Scott Walters has a new blog series examining the history of the regional theater movement by riffing on Todd London’s An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions of a New American Art. London, incidentally, delivered what reads like a doozy of a talk on innovation at the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture.
• Michael Kaiser’s latest book, The Cycle: A Practical Approach to Managing Arts Organizations takes an optimistic look at the difficult and delicate task of building an arts organization that is effective and strong enough to last.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is offering a $30,000 prize for an interactive application that will “make the rich content of the 2012 [Survey of Public Participation in the Arts] more accessible to the public through a series of interactive, visually appealing, and easy-to-use data visualization tools.” Submissions are due February 3.
• A new study by On the Move examines how European cities support “cultural mobility” – the ease with which artists and cultural professionals engage outside their home region.
• In an effort to increase both convenience and access to data on the nonprofit sector, major players Guidestar and the Foundation Center have entered into a strategic partnership meant to “support the field in new and innovative ways.”
• The Whole Schools Initiative in Mississippi reports that 5,000+ students participating in an arts integration program performed significantly better on fourth and fifth grade state assessments than their peers.
• For its Arts, Culture and Audiences week, the American Evaluation Association highlighted assessment practices in arts education with a series of blog posts stressing that assessments can be “hands-on, active learning experiences for students.”
• York University and the National Ballet School in Toronto are partnering to conduct a pilot study with the hopes of providing scientific evidence of the positive mental and physical effects of dance on people with Parkinson’s disease.
• Grantmakers in the Arts’s ongoing research into support for individual artists has generated a crop of admirably detailed case studies of how a nonprofit grantmaker, state agency, private foundation, and family foundation select recipients for their awards to individuals.

More than nine months after former chair Rocco Landesman announced he was stepping down, the search for a new National Endowment for the Arts chairperson has stalled – just in time for the fall budget debates to ramp up in earnest. Sphinx Organization founder and president Aaron Dworkin confirms in the article that he was one of the candidates considered for the position earlier this year. Former NEA Senior Research Officer Joanna Woronkowicz tells us not to worry about the delay. Meanwhile, remember that kerfuffle last year about how Kickstarter was on track to provide more funding for the arts than the NEA? Well, not that this is a surprise, but by now it’s actually happened.

The United States cut off its support of Unesco in 2011 after the international cultural agency recognized the Palestinian Authority as a member nation. The measure was required by U.S. law, but was never supported by the Obama administration, which is now trying its darndest to be supportive of Unesco anyway.

STATE AND LOCAL

At long last, we have had a good year for state arts agency funding. With the economy rebounding and the pall of uncertainty lifting over state budgets, a number of arts councils have managed to claw back a measure of compensation for the dramatic cuts endured over the last four years, though there is still a long way to go. State arts budgets in the aggregate are up nearly 11% or $30 million, the largest nominal dollar increase in over 13 years. Notable success stories from this fiscal cycle include:

• Texas, whose Commission on the Arts got nearly double its appropriation from last year;
• Delaware, which received $1.6 million for a new Arts Trust Fund to provide general operating support for large institutions;
• Arizona, which eked out $1 million in general fund appropriations for its Commission on the Arts for the first time in three years;
• Florida, continuing its climb back to relevance with $5.7 million in new funding, mostly from line items;
• Michigan, also continuing a remarkable climb back from near-death with the second year in a row of multi-million-dollar increases;
• and South Carolina, whose arts commission defeated a gubernatorial veto for the fourth time in four years and on top of that got a hefty 52.4% increase.

California arts advocates did not succeed in dramatically changing the landscape for the California Arts Council, but at the last moment Assembly Speaker John Perez ensured a nearly $2 million increase to the agency’s coffers, bringing California out of the cellar as the cheapest state supporter of the arts on a per-capita basis. Other states with notable increases included Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Utah, and Vermont.

Not all the news was good for state arts advocates, though. The Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, only a year after coming back from being the first state art agency to be vetoed out of existence, has now been slashed almost entirely to the bone again with a paltry appropriation of $200,000, the lowest in the country. Arts councils in Tennessee, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Connecticut, West Virginia, and Wyoming also endured double-digit cuts.

In other state news, a tale of two tax policies: Rhode Island is eliminating taxes on the sale and purchase of artwork, while North Carolina is introducing a new 4.75% “privilege tax” for “admission charges to any live performance or event, any movie screening, any museum, cultural site, garden, exhibit, art show or guided tour.” The North Carolina tax applies to both nonprofit and commercial groups but carves out a number of confusing exemptions for certain festivals, state-supported museums, etc.; basically it sounds like terrible legislation. With that kind of environment, it will be interesting to see if the state extends its sunsetting film tax credit beyond 2014.

INTERNATIONAL

My goodness, the blows just keep coming for arts funding in England. The cuts to Arts Council England over the past few years were bad enough, but it turns out that local funding for the arts will fall another £124 million next year, even though local government budgets in general are up!  Better to be an artist in Britain than Portugal, however, which eliminated its ministry of culture two years ago and shows what happens when you pull the rug of government funding out from under a society that has no tradition of private philanthropy.

The giganta-budget West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong is running into trouble, with construction costs (surprise!) almost double the amount originally planned. The authority has decided to postpone seeking an additional $3.2 billion (I told you it was giganta-budget) payment from Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, presumably until things are in better shape.

Three profiles of new/new-ish culture heads: in Canada, Shelly Glover is settling into her new role as Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages; in France, embattled French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti presides over $3.2b in government spending on culture, which is down 2.8% from last year. France also has gone ahead and ended the “three strikes” provision of its copyright enforcement policy. Finally, Ines Abdul-Dayem is the new culture minister for Egypt. She has quite a story: earlier this year, she was dismissed from her post as head of the Cairo Opera House along with many other cultural officials by Alaa Abdel-Aziz, the man she is now replacing. In June, though, “artists stormed the Ministry of Culture and began an open-ended sit-in to demand the removal of the [now former] minister and the revocation of his decisions.” Shortly thereafter, following the ouster of president Mohamed Morsi, Abdel-Aziz resigned his position.

Government Policy and the Arts

• Gladstone Payton details the sequester’s effects on the governmental agencies that provide funding for the arts.
  
• Will New Jersey pass legislation requiring cultural and sporting events to only issue e-tickets? Many of the state’s smaller arts institutions hope not.
• There is a movement brewing to get arts education included in the federal education budget, headed by two Congressmen from Illinois and Oregon, respectively. Oregon has already pioneered this work by proposing funding in the state budget to “to support partnerships between schools, arts organizations and businesses to increase opportunities for students in grades 6–12 to connect with creative industries.”
• The City of New York is refusing to pay into the pension funds of a number of cultural institutions based in the city due to suspicion of fraud.

Market Research, Data Analysis, and Cultural Organizations

• Chad Bauman details his experience with data analysis and market research during a transitional period at the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. The specific recommendations provided by detailed market research and analysis helped the theater through a risky period of transition.
• There have been a few articles recently about how much personal data is collected and put up for sale, often without our knowledge.
  
• Again, market research demonstrates that museums and cultural institutions should be careful about making assumptions about their audience, especially in the context of the major demographic changes in the United States.
  
• Adam Thurman’s TedXBroadway talk offers an interesting look at how to think about marketing in a more innovative way that can yield effective results.
• Western social science researchers are becoming more attuned to the fact that their cultural bias greatly skews the outcomes of their research.

Culture and Economic Development

• Measuring the impact of the arts or the contribution of the cultural sector to local and national economies has grown in popularity lately. UNESCO recently released a study which reviews the different methodologies various countries use to determine how much culture contributes to economic development.

Changes in New Models of Arts Funding

• The number of Kickstarter projects being started has slowed down, according to a report from NextMarket Insights. Is this a sign that artists and practitioners feel that the risk of crowdsourced funding is not as reliable as previously thought? Or are entrepreneurs being more selective about which projects they choose to fund in this manner? This week’s massive response to the Veronica Mars movie would suggest the latter. Conversely, in an interview with the NEA Arts magazine, the creators of Kickstarter discuss how the internet and start-ups like Kickstarter have changed the idea of audience and creative place.
• For some musicians, the dream of sustaining themselves by allowing fans to pay what they want for music has proved to be exactly that–a dream. The reason why may be not be that surprising (hint: it involves streaming services like Spotify).

Shake-ups in Philanthropy, Media

• The past month had some changes in management across the philanthropic and arts sectors: the Grey Lady has a new Arts & Culture editor with a long history of music journalism experience;  the president of the Ford Foundation, Luis Ubiñas, has announced he will step down in September; and the McKnight Foundation’s arts program officer Laura Zimmermann has also resigned.
• Pittsburgh, PA’s McCune Foundation plans to spend down approximately $343 million by 2029. The Foundation plans to do so in part by making “transformative multimillion-dollar grants that strengthen the broader community.”
  

Food for Thought

• The argument that music education can lead to other academic benefits for students is strongly challenged by journalist Lydia Denworth.
  
• The Wall Street Journal takes a long look at the burgeoning relationship between Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and the art world. Previously separated by geography and ideology, it appears that the new tech elite are following the example of their Wall Street colleagues and are getting more involved in the art world by establishing connections to galleries and museums. Have readers in the San Francisco-area noticed a shift in the culture of your local cultural institutions due to the tech boom?
  

• The dreaded sequester began Friday, affecting all federal accounts including that of the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA will lose 5% of its budget, which works out to about $7.3 million. Grants and administration will be reduced by the same percentage. The reductions only apply through March 27, however, which is the date through which the federal government is currently funded. Congress has yet to pass a budget for Fiscal Year 2013, which we’re already almost halfway through. Let’s hear it for democracy!
• John Paul Titlow predicts that 3D printing will be the next big copyright battlefield – and the lines aren’t necessarily drawn where you think. (Here’s more from Public Knowledge.)
  
• “It’s true that without exposure to the arts, it’s difficult to develop an interest in them. But it’s also true that many of the people who had, say, music education back in the 1960s and 1970s are the same people who are not going to orchestra concerts today. Some arts organizations will have to confront the fact that their audiences are declining because of an irrevocable shift in the culture, rather than simply a lack of education.” Anne Midgette explores the recent resurgence of arts education in our nation’s schools. Here is more.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Kresge Foundation has named Ariel Simon to the new position of chief strategy officer and deputy to the president. Simon formerly worked as a senior consultant in McKinsey’s social sector practice.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Poncho, a Seattle public charity that raised money for the arts through galas and other special events, is closing its doors and donating its remaining assets to the Seattle Foundation.
  
• Interesting: in recent years, needy communities in the United States are receiving millions of dollars in aid from an unlikely source – the United Arab Emirates.

IN THE FIELD

• Should museums be looking outside the traditional pipeline for their management talent?
  
• Congratulations to Inocente, the first Kickstarter-funded movie to win an Oscar (for Best Documentary Short).
• Howard Sherman draws very appropriate attention to the lack of consistency in labeling the arts and culture in newspaper listings.
• The Met Opera, long criticized for astronomical ticket prices, is actually lowering them for next year – and not as an “accessibility” measure. Attendance is down, and leadership wonders if the opera’s much-ballyhooed cinema simulcasts are partly to blame.

BIG IDEAS

• I think local programming is one of the more underexplored areas of community engagement for establishment arts institutions – especially outside of major artist meccas like New York and LA. Oregon Arts Watch’s Brett Campbell considers.
• William Deresiewicz reconsiders the is-food-art debate – he had originally come out strongly in the “no” camp, and got, uh, creamed for it.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• The NEA’s Jen Hughes reports on a new white paper and symposium covering the emerging field of design for social impact.
• Keith Sawyer shares notes from a small conference on copyright and patent reform to which he was invited to contribute perspectives on creativity.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Wall Street Journal performs an analysis of US Department of Education data, finds that “median debt loads at schools specializing in art, music and design average $21,576.” This compares to $19,445 for liberal arts colleges and $18,100 for research universities.
• Americans for the Arts is putting out a new ebook series on arts education.
• The IRS will more frequently publish data on which nonprofits have lost tax-exempt status.
• Now that everyone’s talking about walkability, more and more competitors to Walk Score are popping up. We already heard about Walk Appeal, a mostly theoretical innovation by urbanist Steve Mouzon. Now comes Walkonomics, created by Adam Davies, which uses an eight-factor index to judge walkability. The Atlantic Cities’s Sarah Goodyear has a review.
• Keith Sawyer reviews Bruce Nussbaum’s new book, Creative Intelligence.
• Can’t wait for this Barry’s Blogathon on arts research and data featuring some of the leading establishment names in the field.
• Nesta’s Hasan Bakshi explains the UK creative industry classification scheme and a fascinating critique that his organizations developed of the existing classifications. This is a dense read as blog posts go, but Sunil Iyengar helpfully puts it into simpler terms. The whole thing is essential if you do any kind of creative economy or creative industry work, but here are a couple of key quotes:
  

  “The annual DCMS Creative Industries Economic Estimates have shown that Gross Value Added (GVA) in [advertising, architecture, art and antiques, computer games, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, software, and television and radio] has in recent years grown at twice the rate of other sectors, helping to raise their profile with policymakers.”

  After conducting sensitivity analyses and other validity checks, Nesta not only can locate those industries which employ creative workers at disproportionately high rates, it can also show how most creative workers are employed in non-creative industries.

  Importantly, our analysis also shows that there are serious misallocations in the DCMS classifications; this includes a definite group of industries, which DCMS does not currently treat as creative, but which have exceptionally high creative intensities, including ‘Computer programming activities’ (62.01) and ‘Computer consultancy activities’ (62.02), which between them account for over 400,000 people.

• The Los Angeles Times, via music critic Mark Swed, revives the Secretary of Culture talk, this time nominating Peter Sellars and Leon Botstein for the job. It’s an earnest appeal for an idea worthy of consideration, but if it was a political nonstarter four years ago, it’s hard to see how it has more legs now.
• Video game makers are finding themselves in the regulatory crosshairs after the Newtown shooting massacre, despite limited evidence that games played a role in motivating recent shootings. (Certainly a lesser role than…guns.)
• Margy Waller continues the charitable deduction discussion in a guest post over at New Beans.
• The NEA has relaunched the “Your Town” program as the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, which invites proposals for community-led workshops to improve quality of life in rural areas with the help of creative placemaking experts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Well, that didn’t take long: Richard Dare, who just left the Brooklyn Philharmonic to take the top job at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, abruptly stepped down after a New York Times investigation into his past.
• Clayton Lord is leaving Theatre Bay Area, where he pioneered a number of research initiatives, to take the position of Vice President of Local Arts Advancement at Americans for the Arts. Lord replaces Mitch Menchaca, who left to become COO of Chorus America.

IN THE FIELD

• Joe Patti makes some astute observations about convergences between the arts and religion, including ways in which churches are getting into the placemaking game and the tidbit that newly minted pastors are more interested in starting their own flock than in joining established institutions. Fascinating stuff!

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Kickstarter juggernaut continues on, raising an astonishing $274 million for projects in 2012. Yancey Strickler’s prediction that the company would outpace the budget of the NEA proved more than prescient. The Economist has more.
• Artspace, the nonprofit artist housing developer, is the recipient of a new $2.7 million grant from the Ford Foundation. Createquity previously reported on a $3 million program-related investment Artspace received from Ford in 2011.
• “Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone” – the New York Times on what it means to be “middle class” on the country’s most expensive island.
• Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill wonder why we haven’t yet given up on GDP.
• Need lots of money for a wacky, wildly ambitious and possibly ill-advised art project? Britain’s Artangel might just be your ticket.

BIG IDEAS

• I think Diane Ragsdale has become the arts sector’s “questioner-in-chief.” She’s back after a monthlong hiatus with a doozy of a question.
• Michael Hickey ruminates on scale, efficiency, and what size grants would encourage the most art created per dollar. (But is it about the most, or the best?)
• A year in the life of Collective Impact.
• Phil Buchanan, writing at the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog: “I think this whole aversion to dependency may be yet another example of where analogies to the for-profit world have created confusion in our sector. We’re so enamored with market analogies that we can’t get our heads around the fact that certain work simply requires ongoing philanthropic support. Other than large-scale government support, there is no ‘exit’ event on the horizon for nonprofits, no analog to the IPOs that allow early private sector investors to cash in and get rich.”
• I wholeheartedly endorse this pledge on Andrew Taylor’s part not to discuss “generic topics” in 2013. Taylor identifies three in particular that provoke discussions with “lots of heat, but not much light”: business models, advocacy, and value.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new research study from Germany appears to show a causal relationship between music training and “verbal memory” (and by extension, speech and language processing). The study seems well-designed although the sample is on the small side.
• The New York Public Library system appears to be more vital and in demand than ever despite budget  cuts over the past decade, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future.
• A woman named Amy Webb found her life partner online…data scientist style. She conducted a detailed study of popular women’s behavior on JDate by creating 10 fake male profiles and interacting with 96 women over the course of a month, taking notes all along. It’s all ever so slightly unethical, but it does make for some, ah, engaging reading.
• This is a great example of how a theory of change can illuminate assumptions needing testing. Do more entrepreneurs and more companies = more innovation?

ETC.

• In 2011, Createquity shared the story of Aaron Swartz, who had been indicted by federal authorities for “liberating” some 4.8 million academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR in an act of protest against restrictive copyright policies. In a sad coda, the 26-year-old Swartz, who suffered from depression, committed suicide this month in the face of a potential 35-year prison sentence (although the prosecutor in the case claims that she was only seeking six months). Among the other tributes making their way around the web, it turns out that GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky (of course) had developed a personal friendship with the kid supergenius.

The leader of the Local Arts Advancement area is a strong leader who designs and executes programs that provide support and resources to those working throughout the country to advance the arts in their communities. To do so, the position designs, implements and oversees a series of programs and services to increase the knowledge, visibility, and engagement of professionals in the field of arts and culture.  The leader is a knowledge expert on the full diversity of Local Arts Agencies and the organizations and individuals engaged in local arts development—their budget trends, programs, innovations, and their diversity of structures and organizational and leadership needs.  S/he leads a team that implements innovative professional and leadership development programming, convenings, on-line resources, peer networking opportunities, strategic partnerships and other essential tools and services.

Deadline: October 8.

Kickstarter Analyst, Kickstarter

When you’re browsing Kickstarter, do you wonder what makes a project succeed? Question how one project affects the others? Feel a need to analyze the effects of social networks on projects? If those or other data-related questions run through your mind, and you’re ready to answer them, come lead those efforts as our Kickstarter Analyst.

No deadline. Thanks to Sarah Collins for the tip!

Research and Evaluation Officer, Wallace Foundation

The Research and Evaluation Officer has an integral role in fulfilling The Wallace Foundation’s commitment to using an evidence-based approach in our initiative strategies, designing and managing major research projects, and broadly sharing knowledge. The officer contributes to identifying high leverage knowledge gaps; manages important research projects to fill knowledge gaps and help shape policy in the Foundation’s fields of interest; and contributes to the development of strategy for initiatives. The officer reports to the Director of Research and Evaluation.

No deadline.

Policy Associate, Community Solutions

The Brownsville Partnership is a comprehensive community development initiative in Brownsville, Brooklyn sponsored by Community Solutions that involves government and not for profit organizations and local residents. Through this collective approach we are building a safer, healthier, and more prosperous community. Our approach combines innovations in physical and social development and a strong reliance on data to guide investments and measure progress in a neighborhood of concentrated poverty.

The Policy Associate, under the supervision of the Director of Research and Evaluation, will analyze the impact of internal CS programs in Brownsville and community-wide efforts to increase the safety, health and prosperity of Brownsville residents. The Policy Associate will also provide research and analytic support for the combined group of stakeholders working together in the Partnership and will assist in gathering and visualizing data consistently from partner organizations and other local and public sources.

No deadline.

Every once in a blue moon, an arts policy story breaks into the mainstream media—and as with most poorly understood subjects, it’s usually for some profoundly stupid reason. The news that the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter anticipates distributing more money this year than the National Endowment for the Arts was no exception.[1] The story, prompted by a February 24 interview of Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler by Talking Points Memo’s Carl Franzen, led to a flurry of content-free online chatter on well-trafficked channels with frothy headlines like “Could Kickstarter Replace the NEA?” and “Kickstarter Kicks the NEA’s Butt in Arts Funding.”

It’s worth noting that neither Strickler himself nor Franzen’s analysis suggested that Kickstarter was somehow in opposition to the NEA—indeed, Strickler went out of his way to emphasize that he has mixed feelings about the growth of his startup relative to the nation’s second-largest arts funder.[2] But not surprisingly, that was the direction the conversation immediately went. In a way, I can sympathize with the enthusiasm for this easy, attention-grabbing narrative: Kickstarter, after all, has been extraordinarily successful in positioning itself as the hot new tech tool that everyone’s talking about, the creative entrepreneur’s best friend, in more or less direct contrast to the NEA’s comparatively stodgy, bureaucratic image. The comparison, furthermore, is like catnip to conservative and libertarian opponents of federal arts funding, who see the numbers as justification for the argument that their taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to support art that they don’t directly endorse. Just as inexperienced artists sometimes mistakenly believe that Kickstarter is going to solve all of their fundraising problems with nary a lifted finger in sight, commentators who have more interest than background in the arts can easily fall into the trap of seeing Kickstarter as “the answer” to United States arts policy.

Seductive as it is, that narrative ignores a number of pertinent facts about the nature of both Kickstarter itself and the arts funding ecosystem in our country. Crucially, it misses the forest for the trees by incorrectly assuming that the NEA is one of the primary means by which our country funds the nonprofit arts sector, following the model embraced by governments in Europe and elsewhere. In reality, Kickstarter and the NEA combined comprise less than 0.5% of the total dollars arts organizations raise and spend annually. The NEA isn’t even the largest line item in the federal budget devoted to arts and culture—that honor goes to the Smithsonian Institution, with an appropriation from Uncle Sam exceeding that of the NEA’s by a factor of five. Instead, nonprofit arts organizations raise nearly half of their revenue from earned sources such as ticket sales and tuition fees, with the bulk of the remainder coming from individual donations (yes, people gave money to the arts before Kickstarter) and foundation grants.

from National Endowment for the Arts, “How the United States Funds the Arts”: http://www.nea.gov/pub/how.pdf

Moreover, as author and technologist Clay Johnson points out, the NEA and Kickstarter are fundamentally different beasts: the NEA is a mission-centric public agency intentionally focusing its resources in certain directions to attain specific goals, whereas the strings-attached donations that take place on Kickstarter arguably have more in common with purchases of goods and services than with grants. A solid quarter of Kickstarter’s distributions to date have gone toward projects that fall outside of the scope of what the NEA has traditionally supported, such as new product design and commercial entertainment (high-profile projects have included an iPhone dock, an iPod Nano watch, and a movie by Tom Hanks’s son). Indeed, to say that Kickstarter “funds” the arts at all seems an exaggeration; Kickstarter is a for-profit technology platform that takes a 8-10% cut (counting credit card and transaction fees) from the donations that come through its system, money that is currently being used to grow the company and will one day undoubtedly make its founders very, very rich. Saying that Kickstarter should replace the NEA is rather like saying we don’t need libraries anymore because we have Amazon.com.

*

It’s interesting to me that, in contrast to the apparently exciting (for some) notion of Kickstarter supplanting the NEA, no one has called for the reverse—that is, for the NEA to replace Kickstarter, or at least for Kickstarter to become more like the NEA. That suggests the NEA has a bit of an image problem relative to the darlings of the crowdfunding world. Why might that be? I suspect a big reason is the complex role the NEA plays in United States arts policy, one that is frequently at odds with the expectations placed upon it by liberals and conservatives alike.

Following the first meeting of the National Council on the Arts (the body that oversees the National Endowment for the Arts) in 1965, the Council released a statement that read, in part, “…The Council cannot create artists, but it is passionately dedicated to creating a climate in which art and the artist shall flourish.” That sentence neatly encapsulates the indirect role that the NEA must play in our cultural ecosystem due to its small size. United States citizens can be forgiven, I suppose, for thinking that the role of a federal agency called the “National Endowment for the Arts” is to support artists directly in the creation and production of art. But these days, aside from a handful of literature fellowships, it’s not—any more than the role of the Federal Highway Administration is to make and drive cars. Rather, the function of both agencies is to create and maintain a strong infrastructure to serve their respective constituencies.

One could make an argument that the NEA isn’t so different from Kickstarter in one key respect: neither entity really gives away its own money. In the NEA’s case, that money is ours, the taxpayers’, and just like Kickstarter it takes a cut of the pie for itself: more than 20% of the budget goes toward operating expenses or program support efforts rather than grants. But taxpayers get at least two things for their overhead dollars that their Kickstarter patron and customer counterparts don’t: curation[3] and leadership. The first is becoming increasingly central for the arts field as a whole, as the number of new and growing creative enterprises threatens to overwhelm an already crowded market. Rather than allocate its dollars to grant applicants via some automated process, the NEA invests considerable time in assembling peer review panels to assess each project’s merits and goals in relation to its strategic objectives (creating excellent art, engaging the public, and promoting public knowledge and understanding about the arts). Importantly, as a government entity with no obligation to consider the commercial potential of the projects it supports, the NEA is free to prioritize art that would otherwise fall through the cracks—either because of what it is, who’s making it, or where it’s happening. This freedom is what allows the NEA and other mission-oriented funders to create a subsidy-driven artistic marketplace to serve alongside the profit-driven commercial marketplace.

In short, by making strong, centralized, and values-based curatorial choices, the NEA has the capacity to exercise leadership. And leadership is the means by which the NEA can be relevant despite its modest budget as the most visible national government body supporting the arts. The Endowment has focused a singular attention during Chairman Rocco Landesman’s tenure on setting national priorities and forming partnerships and coalitions around them, resulting most obviously in a raft of new creative placemaking initiatives casting the arts as engines of economic redevelopment in urban and rural centers across the United States. The NEA has also put new energy and resources into its research activities, using its power as a convener to standardize and update methodologies and form liaisons with other branches of government.

Finally, there is one important respect in which the NEA leads by…well…following. Forty percent of the Endowment’s grant dollars go not to organizations or artists directly, but to arts councils via state and local partnerships. This arrangement is part of a decentralization strategy that is aimed at getting national dollars for arts access to every corner of the country. While some commentators feel that the NEA could do more to support arts access in rural areas and away from the coasts, the Endowment is without question a bigger boon to these regions than Kickstarter, whose marketplace-based model (mirroring the economy more generally) inherently privileges geographic clusters.

*

Right now, it’s not clear that Kickstarter is doing much more than offering a streamlined process for donations that would probably have happened anyway. Aside from a handful of lucky campaigns that “go viral,” anecdotal reports suggest that the vast majority of donors to a typical project are previously known to the recipient. That means that whatever biases and privileges exist in the real world also exist on Kickstarter. Artist-entrepreneurs who have either ready access to networks of family and friends with money or an already-existing fan base will have a noticeable leg up on those who are just starting out or paid their own way in college. In fact, Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing campaign model may exacerbate these inequities, by increasing the risk that those who begin with less will lose the benefits of all their hard work—a fate that befell more than half of all campaigns launched on the site last year.

Given all the above, it may seem ironic that it is Kickstarter that has seized the mantle of democratizing access to the arts in the public imagination, rather than the NEA. A closer examination, however, quickly reveals why. In recent years, the NEA has focused on arts access from the perspective of the audience, particularly through geographic reach. The Endowment publishes national studies on arts participation twice a decade, supports touring programs through its network of regional partners, and frequently supports established organizations that are capable of bringing in large crowds consistently. But these measures are often not so friendly to the creator. The NEA’s focus on pre-existing institutions, its requirement that applicants hold tax-exempt status, and its extensive application requirements and lengthy review process all erect barriers to participation no less formidable than those that face artist-entrepreneurs who come to Kickstarter without access to a video camera. The NEA is simply not set up to provide seed funding of any kind, relying on partners, grantees, and the private sector to fulfill that function instead. By contrast, Kickstarter allows pretty much anyone to sign up and start soliciting in a jiffy, and campaign timelines are purposefully kept short to allow for nearly immediate results. In short, if one fits the profile of an ideal Kickstarter project, that platform offers an infinitely more attractive vehicle for obtaining funding than the NEA.

*

Precisely because the marketplace for individual giving is so much larger than the capacity for government support, Kickstarter has the potential to deliver a transformative impact on the arts sector by cultivating more and better donors to the arts. (Kickstarter isn’t the only platform of its kind, of course, nor is it even the first. My employer, Fractured Atlas, partners with two of Kickstarter’s competitors, IndieGoGo and RocketHub, and many other online fundraising platforms cover the arts and beyond, including USA Projects, Power2Give, and ArtSpire. But Kickstarter’s large customer base and obvious cachet with the technology community currently put it in the best position to achieve what I suggest here.) Kickstarter has already taken a number of steps to encourage “browsers”—people who donate to projects to which they have no personal connection. The company offers a weekly newsletter featuring projects that catch the program team’s eye, and regularly highlights selected campaigns on its blog and other social media. A “Discover Great Projects” section of the website offers staff picks, and curated pages increase the number of voices in the mix. Strickler’s comments on a year-in-review thread from earlier this year also indicate that Kickstarter is working on ways to make it easier to find projects in close geographic proximity to you.

But Kickstarter could do more. For as much time as it puts into selecting projects to highlight, many, many more will pass unnoticed, a trend that will only worsen as the platform becomes more popular. By engaging its audience directly in the curation of its projects, perhaps through some kind of guided crowdsourcing process, Kickstarter would expose more of the “long tail” of its project pool to potential review by strangers. That would allow projects that originate from underserved communities and don’t already come in with strong connections to donors a more realistic shot at reaching their campaign goals. Kickstarter’s broad conception of creativity, one that reaches beyond the arts to video games, product design, and even social innovation, holds enormous promise for encouraging the cross-pollination of donors across various fields, perhaps even training a new generation of tech-savvy arts patrons and board members. A robust recommendation engine and more project discovery tools will likely be needed, however, to turn all of those one-time supporters doing a friend a favor into ongoing mini-Medicis (or should we say Bloombergs?) providing a regular stream of dollars to projects and artists they discover for the first time through Kickstarter. Were that vision realized, the notion of Kickstarter as a “funder” of the arts would not seem nearly so far-fetched.

*

I’ve been pretty harsh on the “could Kickstarter replace the NEA” meme, on the logic that (a) it’s not going to happen and (b) even if it did, it would have little practical impact because of the relatively small dollar amounts involved. Yet the NEA/Kickstarter cage-match narrative compels because it gets at a central debate in American society: the value of shaping markets through planning and policy versus letting them run free. While Kickstarter does not prioritize, and therefore is less successful at, distributing its funds in a way that acknowledges historical inequities and the biases of capitalism, in other respects it does represent a more accessible vision of the arts in America consistent with the Pro-Am Revolution. It is this commitment to lowering the barriers to entry that has made Kickstarter so popular with the media and, in particular, with the innovation-obsessed technology community. And though the NEA theoretically should be able to democratize access to the arts more effectively than a for-profit entity like Kickstarter, for creators, accessing the Endowment—with all of its rules and structure—simply requires a different kind of privilege.

For these reasons, it’s not that hard to imagine Kickstarter and the NEA learning from each other. Though Kickstarter’s mission is not to serve the arts community per se, it would be a shame to see it pass up the huge opportunity in front of it to do just that by flexing more curatorial leadership and empowering its audience to do the same. Meanwhile, crowdfunding’s open-access, instant-gratification model offers an important challenge to the Endowment as it continues to wrestle with how it can best do its job on pennies per capita. If democratizing access to the arts means anything at all, it must include not just who gets to see the artist but also who gets to be the artist. And on that last score, both institutions have a ways yet to go.

**

1. I’m not going to waste time crafting the world’s seven gazillionth article describing Kickstarter here. If you’re not familiar with it, Anastasia Tsioulcas’s blog post offers a good introduction from a classical music perspective.

2. Depending on the definition used, the NEA is either neck-and-neck with or far behind the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in money provided to the arts annually.

3. Kickstarter does “curate” its projects in the sense that they must meet basic eligibility requirements in order to get listed, but the review and due diligence process is far less extensive than the NEA’s.

• A professor’s quest to overturn a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that placed certain foreign works back under copyright after they had already entered the public domain appears to have reached an end.
• The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is thinking about trying out social impact bonds.
• Looks like there were some shenanigans behind the construction of the High Line, NYC’s well-known elevated park. Reminiscent of James Gray’s The Yards, if anyone saw that movie.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The three museums of Abu Dhabi’s $27 billion cultural district have had their openings pushed back to 2015-17.
• The Danish government has merged three national agencies – the Danish Arts Agency, the Heritage Agency of Denmark, and the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media – into one Danish Agency for Culture.
• Good news: cultural funding survives intact in Toronto.

ALL ABOUT PHILANTHROPY

• GiveWell details how charity regulations in various countries make donating to top-rated international charities more difficult than it should be.
• The Craigslist Foundation is shutting down.
• Most foundation leaders have trouble converting evaluation results into “meaningful insights.”

IN THE FIELD

• More on Opera Boston’s sudden demise late last year.
• Bye bye Detroit Children’s Museum.
• Yikes! longtime conductor, author, and inspirational TED talker Benjamin Zander was let go by the New England Conservatory this month over a cover-up involving a videographer who was a convicted sex offender, as NEC clearly wanted no part of any Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky redux.
• LA Opera joins those trying out the dynamic pricing route.
• Interesting new curator time share model being pioneered by the Detroit Institute of Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
• When the IRS dumped hundreds of thousands of organizations from the nonprofit rolls last year, people hardly batted an eye – mostly because they assumed those organizations (who had failed to file required forms for three years in a row) were either no longer active or not accomplishing any good if they were. Yet my cultural asset mapping work has suggested that at least some of those organizations who had their tax-exempt status stripped were real and continuing to provide public programs. Thomas A. Kelley provides one such example in this account of an African American community center that is fighting to get its nonprofit status back.
• Jerome Weeks notes the difficulty that Dallas-area arts organizations are having with recruiting top leadership talent, and correctly follows the breadcrumbs to the lack of attractive opportunities for earlier-stage arts professionals:
  

  Jose Bowen says one reason the pickings remain thin is that the starting jobs for arts management graduates generally don’t pay well. And the punishing costs of college don’t help, either. Bowen is dean of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts. It’s one of the few that offers a double master’s degree in arts management – in the arts and business administration.

  Bowen: “Our students graduate and are immediately faced with a choice. Come work for Goldman and make more money or go work for a nonprofit and make less money. And when you have loans, right out of school? That’s a hard choice to make.”

  It’s really very simple, people. If senior leaders with demonstrated records of accomplishment don’t want the job, it’s time to consider either senior leaders without demonstrated records of accomplishment, or junior leaders who haven’t had a chance to demonstrate accomplishment yet. If arts professionals below the leadership ranks are never given an opportunity to take initiative, manage people, or own projects in their roles, they’re never going to be in a position to fill those positions effectively, after the person who did so for so long is gone. And that’s assuming they stick around on low salaries waiting for their big break. Something to think about.

BIG IDEAS

• I’ve been wondering for a while about the effect on the bottom line that election season must have for struggling traditional media companies – especially in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Well, Dave Copeland takes that thought further and notes how well-positioned online audience gatekeepers – such as Google – are to benefit from campaign ads.
• ArtsJournal hosted one of its blog debates last week called Lead or Follow, featuring Diane Ragsdale, Michael Kaiser, and others.  Doug McLennan continues to experiment with the form of these fora, and though I don’t think he’s quite nailed the perfect formula yet, the process is fascinating to watch. As background to this conversation, the Wallace Foundation published 54 stories of audience engagement arising from its Wallace Excellence Awards grant program from the previous decade, as well as four more in-depth case studies on its own site.
• Is your brain constantly bloated because it’s trying to take in too much information? Maybe you should go on an information diet! Beth Kanter reviews what looks to be an important book for folks like me who are constantly trying to drink from the fire hose.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Add a feather to Randy Cohen’s cap: the Americans for the Arts researcher’s National Arts Index project has inspired an imitator across the pond, the UK Arts Index. (h/t Mark Robinson)
• Kickstarter is out with its annual project stats. Kickstarter projects attracted nearly $100 million in pledges in 2011! Also of note, the number of high-volume donors (people who contribute to hundreds of projects a year and presumably seek them out as a kind of hobby) is growing.
• Nonprofit Finance Fund is conducting its fourth annual survey of nonprofits, analyzing how they are responding to and recovering from the financial crisis. The survey is anonymous and takes 10-15 minutes to fill out, and they’re looking for as many respondents as possible. They are taking responses through February 15 and you can participate here.
• Look out, American Red Cross! GiveWell is on the warpath to get you to release your evaluation of your own organization’s relief efforts in Haiti.

ETC.

• We haven’t had any silly links in Around the Horn for a while. Well, that’s about to change…

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.