• Mike Boehm has more on the important role California’s soon-to-be-defunct community redevelopment agencies have had in shaping Los Angeles’s cultural development.
• Gene Takagi provides this extremely helpful dispatch from a session on new “hybrid” legal forms such as the Benefit Corporation and L3C.
• Culture360 has published a helpful two–part history and analysis of cultural policy in South Korea.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Hewlett Foundation has a new President – and just like the last one, he’s a former dean of the Stanford Law School.
• Guidestar’s CEO, Bob Ottenhoff, is moving on.
• The Tennessee Arts Commission has announced Anne Pope as its new executive director.
• Welcome Sarah Lovan, new arts program officer for the McKnight Foundation.

BIG THOUGHT

• I’ve been thinking about transparency a lot lately. It’s harder than it looks, but here are two recent examples I find admirable from two organizations that have been committed to transparency from the beginning. First, the open embrace on the part of the Center for Effective Philanthropy of ways it can improve its flagship product, the Grantee Perception Reports. And second, a fairly devastating report from GiveWell on the progress of its #1 charity recommendation from 2010, VillageReach (to which I was one of many donors). The latter seems especially dicey at first, but GiveWell goes out of its way to praise VillageReach’s continued commitment to collecting and reporting data on its activities and adds, “we always prefer discouraging observations to no observations.”
• Lisa Bernholz lauds David Sasaki of the Omidyar Network for committing to blogging about every grant he makes. But Omidyar still lags behind on other transparency standards, as Glasspockets points out.
• You’re going to be reading a lot more about the term “Collective Impact” this year, I predict. Nonprofit consultants FSG, who coined the term last year in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, write about their choice not to trademark the name.
• Michael Eisen, co-founder of the open access publisher PLoS (Public Library of Science), opines on why the academic publishing model hinders scientific progress. (And yes, research on the impact of the arts, lest we forget, counts as science.)
• Check out these fun videos of “culture warriors in their native habitat” discussing Harvard Business School case studies, courtesy of Fractured Atlas Deputy Director Tim Cynova.

BIG MONEY

• The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation looks to become a major new player in visual arts philanthropy.
• NYC arts institutions will receive $100 million from Brooke Astor’s estate.
• It turns out that a portion of ArtPlace’s funding, which comes from a handful of major arts foundations, is restricted geographically to the areas that those foundations serve, leading to a disproportionate focus in some regions vs. others. While this revelation won’t be a shock for those who know the foundations in question – Knight, for example, has a particularly idiosyncratic geographic reach arising from the Knight family’s historical connections to newspapers in specific markets – it’s not going to be much comfort to the applicants who faced higher odds because of it, and reveals the challenges of relying on a patchwork of arts funders to create a truly national agenda.

IN THE FIELD

• Cute advertising conceit for a symphony concert plays on desperate fundraising campaigns.
• Is the Colorado Symphony following through on its supposedly transformative business plan? Inquiring minds want to know.
• The SAG-AFTRA merger is finally complete.
• I always appreciate interviews with artists in which they are candid about their economic circumstances and how they make money (or don’t). Jen Dziura has a nice one with musician Kim Boekbinder in the Grindstone.
• Barry Hessenius has a good interview with Doug Borwick, president of the Association of Arts Administration Educators.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA is out with a new study from arts education researcher James Catterall finding that at-risk youth with “arts-rich” educational experiences outperform their peers on various metrics of success. Almost simultaneously, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released updated numbers from its Fast Response Survey System covering K-12 arts education, a congressionally mandated study. Sunil Iyengar offers a first read of the result; Janet Brown expresses some skepticism at the numbers.
• The Pennsylvania-based Education Policy and Research Center has a report out providing arts education policy recommendations for state leaders.
• Survey fatigue is a real and growing problem for researchers who want to get information directly from customers, audience members or stakeholders.

• Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch has been appointed to the US Travel and Tourism Advisory Board. The advisory board “consists of up to 32 members that advise the Secretary of Commerce on government policies and programs that affect the U.S. travel and tourism industry, offers counsel on current and emerging issues, and provides a forum for discussing and proposing solutions to industry-related problems.”
• Sarah Lutman, CEO of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which has made waves recently with some field-leading audience engagement initiatives, is stepping down at the end of the month.
• Margit Rankin is the new director of Seattle’s Artist Trust.

GETTING HITCHED

• In 2010, the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) took on back office services for the financially troubled Columbus Symphony Orchestra, building a shared services empire that already included several theaters and has since added Opera Columbus. Now, another Ohio city, Dayton, is taking the concept a step further: the three “SOB” organizations (symphony, opera, ballet) are merging into the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. The new organization is billing itself as a “first-in-the-nation” entity.
• Two of Hollywood’s largest unions, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, are set to merge.
• The city of Abu Dhabi is combining its culture and tourism entities into one agency.

GETTING ENGAGED

• Check out this dialogue vehicle created by blogger and theater-maker Guy Yedwab. The second video is particularly interesting, as it combines audience responses to the Broadway show Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and an event designed to question the depiction of Andrew Jackson in the musical. So the video basically makes what was a one-way dialogue bidirectional.
• Joe Patti ponders what it might look like to get arts organizations engaged in arts advocacy campaigns in a deeper way.
• Wait – so Nina Simon’s a boxer too? Could this woman possibly get any cooler? (In seriousness, that’s a very wise post on audience engagement linked there.)

IN THE FIELD

• The Wallace Foundation has made a $4 million mega-investment in arts education on behalf of the Boston public school system. The local education nonprofit EdVestors has been leading the fundraising charge for this initiative, a nice example of a non-arts organization recognizing the value of the arts.
• Michael Kaiser sees dollar signs for American arts fundraisers in Europe and Asia.
• Seemed like a nice idea at the time, but a number of artists are finding that the value proposition of streaming services like Spotify just isn’t there for them and are pulling their tracks from the service.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Rosetta Thurman has a great list of 10 national nonprofit conferences with registration fees under $500, and I was glad to see the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention on there. (I wouldn’t be that surprised to learn that these are all conferences she’s speaking at, by the way.)
• Materials from last October’s 5th Annual World Arts Summit in Melbourne, Australia are now available online, including a summary report of the proceedings and full transcripts of the three-plus days of panels and keynotes – Rocco Landesman was one of the presenters. I’m often struck in reading about international arts policy gatherings how different the tone and content are from American conferences; they are generally more serious/academic and concerned with very different issues, particularly cultural preservation and globalization. Worth a skim if you have the time.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Two book reviews: the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar has a nice analysis of Stanford professor Robert Flanagan’s new book on the economics of symphony orchestras, and Elizabeth Quaglieri takes on Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum.
• What makes a street beautiful? OpenPlans.org is trying to put some data to this question by asking website visitors to engage in a sort of HotOrNot-style comparison of images from Google Street View. Try it: it’s kind of addictive, and will also teach you a lot about your own urban aesthetics.
• Have you ever been in a brainstorming session in which you’re told to “just get as many ideas out as you can,” withholding criticism of any of them? I was just in one of those earlier this month at the Yale School of Management Philanthropy Conference. And yet that same week, Jonah Lehrer had published a fascinating takedown of the brainstorming concept in the pages of the New Yorker. His piece is worth reading in full, but in a nutshell a number of studies of brainstorming effectiveness have concluded that it doesn’t really add value over and above people working alone – and that instead, creativity comes from just the right amount of clash and debate between people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan, for one, says he’s seen the light.

BEYOND THE ARTS

• Yikes! The International Humanities Center, a fiscal sponsor representing some 200 projects worldwide, imploded in scandal over the holidays, causing the evaporation of more than $1 million in donations intended mostly for grassroots activist activities. Some great investigative reporting by Nonprofit Quarterly‘s Rick Cohen in that article.
• Ever wondered how many L3Cs there are in the United States? Turns out there are a little over 550; here’s a helpful breakdown and list by state.
• I have to say, I cracked up at these nerdtastic economist Valentines by Elisabeth Fosslein, writing in response to the #FedValentines Twitter meme. Well done!

Under United States law, a private foundation (i.e., one that relies primarily on an endowment rather than raising its own money from public sources) is required to distribute 5% of its assets each year to charitable causes in order to remain tax-exempt. While most meet this requirement through grantmaking, a growing number of foundations are experimenting with program-related investments as a way to meet the distribution requirement. A few make PRIs a centerpiece of their resource allocation strategy; for example, the F. B. Heron Foundation invests about 10% of its assets in PRIs and nearly half in what it calls “mission-related investments” (market-rate but with substantial social benefit), seeing the strategy as a way to dramatically increase its impact.

The Artspace PRI will primarily be used for pre-development activities (such as hiring architects) for up to a dozen artist housing projects and arts centers across the United States. A list of Artspace’s current developments is available here. Artspace will pay back the debt over ten years at an interest rate of 1%.

Is this the first example of a program-related investment in an arts organization? While it is not uncommon to see PRIs used to support small businesses in economically disadvantaged areas, low-income housing, and the like, I have not previously heard of the tool being applied directly to the arts. (Some predicted that the L3C legal form would be a boon to the arts in the form of providing foundations with a more formalized way of making program-related investments in hybrid businesses, but that promise has yet to materialize in any real way and faces practical roadblocks so long as the IRS fails to give preferential treatment to the L3C.)

[UPDATE: I’ve received several comments in the past couple of weeks indicating that, though PRIs to the arts are not common, this is by no means the first example. Please click through to read them if you’re interested.]

PUBLIC POLICY AND THE ARTS – FEDERAL

• Teresa Eyring has a rundown of the Congressmen who spoke in support of the National Endowment for the Arts during the floor debate over the Walberg amendment.
• The Nonprofit Law Blog’s Emily Chan takes a look at the progress of the L3C, now three years after it was first adopted by the state of Vermont.
• Charitable deduction defenders: don’t worry, it wasn’t touched in the debt ceiling deal.
• The arts education blogstravaganza continues at Barry’s Blog, getting deep into discussions on federal policy and research. If the avalanche of text is too much for you there, Americans for the Arts’s Narric Rome synthesized his contributions to the forum so far in one post over at ARTSblog, and Bob Lynch did the same. Speaking of Lynch, he can be seen giving a recent lecture to the Chautaqua Institute in this video.
• Rick Perry has entered the race for President, and Alyssa Rosenberg is right on top of his record on the arts. (Shocker: it’s not good.)

PUBLIC POLICY AND THE ARTS – STATE AND LOCAL

• New York Times culture reporter Robin Pogrebin has been busy lately, penning a couple of articles on state arts agencies. The first round-up covered the recent round of big cuts and eliminations, focusing mostly on Kansas; and a follow-up takes a look at how South Carolina saved arts funding in the Palmetto State.
• Amazing! After gutting the Kansas Arts Commission and laying off all its staff in favor of a privatized solution, the Brownback administration has the chutzpah to ask the NEA not to cut the KAC’s matching funds. Umm, news flash Sam – the whole point of the matching funds arrangement is to prevent your administration from doing what it did.
• The Arizona Commission on the Arts has signed up basketball star Grant Hill to help make the case for arts funding.

GIVING AND PHILANTHROPY

• I’m really enjoying these giving stories from GiveWell. This one is from Vipul Naik and is an interesting window into how highly analytical donors think about their contributions.
• Looks like New Jersey is thinking about requiring nonprofits who raise more than $250,000 per year to give donors the opportunity to restrict their donations to particular programs. Nonprofit Finance Fund has a great rundown of why this is a dumb idea.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Simon Greer, currently head of Jewish Funds for Justice, has been named the CEO of the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

MERGERS AND CLOSURES

• Alliance for the Arts, an advocacy group based in NYC, is splitting its programming and assets between two organizations: Municipal Art Society, which will continue the Alliance’s research work, and WNET, which gets the group’s web operations. It’s unclear from the article when (or if?) the Alliance will formally close up shop, but clearly this represents a major sea change.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Ann Markusen is out with a new study on “next generation” arts leaders in California, commissioned by the Center for Cultural Innovation with funds from the Irvine and Hewlett Foundations.
• A new study looks at the economic impact of the recent Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.

IDEAS, TRENDS, AND COMMENTARY

• Lee Streby continues his remarkable series on reimagining orchestras. Trust me, this is worth checking out.
• The much-hyped free music streaming service Spotify is finally available in the United States, but at least one indie classical music label isn’t so excited.
• Diane Ragsdale is getting personalized event recommendations from the director of an upcoming festival, and if you lived in the Netherlands, you could too.
• Michael Kaiser gives small arts organizations the time of day.
• This Week in Urban Revitalization/Gentrification Through the Arts (thanks, Thomas Cott): Bushwick, Brooklyn becomes a hipster paradise; and the young and educated are helping to remake downtown Detroit.

ETC.

• Justin Wolfers reports on what he’s learned about using Twitter so far – it’s a useful list.
• Four Latin jazz musicians are suing the Grammys for eliminating their category (along with 30 others) in a decision announced this April. I wouldn’t be holding my breath if I were them.

(By the way: I’m starting to think that I might standardize the section titles in the round-up. Any thoughts?)

ARTS AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Rhode Island is the newest state to recognize the L3C.
• Tim Mikulski reports on the activities of a new coalition that is revising the 1994 National Standards for Arts Education.
• What would a Republican campaign for higher office be without a little copyright infringement? It’s really kind of inconvenient for them that most of the karaoke klassics out there were written by hardcore liberals.
• The IRS’s list of nonprofits whose status was revoked apparently contained some errors – apparently George Washington University and the University of Michigan were included, for example. Whoops!

THE ART OF GIVING

• The Irvine Foundation has announced its new strategy for the arts focusing on audience engagement. The WolfBrown white paper written about on this blog last week is clearly a part of this. You can watch the video and join the discussion on Irvine’s website – Rocco Landesman has already kicked things off.
• Meanwhile, former San Francisco Foundation program officer John Killacky has something to say to his erstwhile colleagues in the grantmaking world.
• Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest is back blogging, this time as a guest for Grantmakers in the Arts. In his first post, he points out that despite a major focus (and seeming agreement) within the funding community in recent years on the value of general operating support, there is little evidence of a pronounced upward trend in GOS grants. Change doesn’t come easy in the foundation world, I guess.
• Brian Newman wonders if the crowdfunding phenomenon exemplified by Kickstarter is, uh, crowding out donations from institutional funders.
• Finally, GiveWell offers a perspective on why we should expect giving effectively to be difficult.

MERGERS AND CLOSURES

• Arthouse at the Jones Center is exploring a merger with the Austin Museum of Art.
• Another orchestra down: The Seattle area’s Bellvue Philharmonic is no more after this weekend.
• Diane Ragsdale pays tribute to the now-defunct Florida Stage. The post also features a great and lengthy comment from National New Play Network Executive Director Jason Loewith.

APPOINTMENTS AND PROMOTIONS

• Lisa Philp will be the new Vice President for Strategic Philanthropy and Director of GrantCraft for the Foundation Center.
• Blogger, longtime executive director of the Center for Arts Education, and my former boss’s boss Richard Kessler will be the new Dean of Mannes College The New School for Music.
• Stellar Technology and the Arts blogger Amelia Northrup has taken on a new position as Strategic Communications Specialist at TRG Arts. Not content merely to share the news, Amelia goes out with a bang by sharing some fantastic tips for organizing your job search.

RESEARCH AND READINGS

• According to the latest Giving USA report, charitable contributions were up in 2010, but only slightly: 2.1%. The arts, however, fared better than most, seeing donations rising 4.1% after inflation. You might recall that Giving USA got some egg on its face earlier this year when evidence surfaced that its econometric models drastically underestimated the extent to which individual giving dropped during the recession. Now they say they’ve included another variable in the model that explains the drop, so this year’s estimate should (hopefully) be more trustworthy.
• With all the talk about eliminating or reducing the tax deduction donors receive for their charitable gifts, kudos to Sarah Lutman for digging into the Congressional Budget Office’s recommendations on the subject.
• Theatre Bay Area has published a report on social media use by arts organizations, authored by our friend Devon Smith of Threespot Consulting. Devon has her own account here.

ACROSS THE POND

• Going England one further, the right-wing government of The Netherlands is set to cut its arts funding by 25% and more than triple the tax on tickets to concerts. Sadly, the powers that be have chosen to let smaller arts organizations bear most of the burden – an especially heavy one since unlike here, government funding makes up the vast majority of revenue for most. Recommendations to phase in the cuts were ignored.
• Michael Kaiser reports from a trip to England (part I; part II); Michael Royce checks out the arts scene in Berlin (part I; part II; part III).
• Weirdness: a Chinese firm has contracted Albert Speer & Partner to build an exact replica of the Austrian village of Hallstatt – in Guangdong Province.
• Weirdness: Norway is apparently training its own diplomats how to explain black metal.
• Weirdness: a city in India has no municipal government – and is apparently doing pretty well. Marginal Revolution and Matt Yglesias provide interesting commentary.

BIG IDEA CORNER

• Meant to mention this last time around – National Arts Strategies is launching a cool-looking initiative designed to help CEOs become more effective leaders. Andrew Taylor provides his customary brief summary.
• Lee Streby has an extraordinary three–part exploration on what he would do if he were building an orchestra from scratch. And speaking of orchestras, Greg Sandow has been musing on how we might objectively evaluate the quality of their performances.
• Sasha Anawalt, Doug McLennan, et al. set up a five-day “pop-up newsroom” called Engine 28 last month to cover live theater convenings and events in LA. The LA Times has more.
• Dollars and sense: Assets for Artists is looking to expand beyond Massachusetts. Gary Steuer draws the line between arts education and economic development. Barry Hessenius on a different kind of arts endowment – and how we might fund it. And since I’m always a sucker for people questioning the premises behind microeconomics, here’s Justin Wolfers recounting how being a father has made him question the neoclassical model; and Seth Godin on why coordination, not competition, is the next frontier for economics.
• If you’ve ever played the mobile/tablet game Angry Birds, you know how addictive it can be. Now the company that makes Angry Birds, Rovio, is launching a totally visionary location- and accessory-based scavenger hunt in which visiting various special places in real life activates Easter egg features in the game. This is some seriously creative shit that arts marketers should be paying close attention to.

• A new candidate for NEA Chair? Scuttlebut says Nathan Cummings Foundation arts and culture program director Claudine Brown is being seriously considered for the position.
• This somehow escaped mention last week, but NewMusicBox is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a look back at the previous decade. Check out this cool video cobbling together some of the more entertaining interview moments.
• The Council on Foundations annual conference was last week, and Sean Stannard-Stockton hosted a rotating crew of commentators on his website. I especially appreciated this post from Kathleen Enright, CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, who notes that “the current pace of philanthropy is completely out of sync in our changed world.” Meanwhile, Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz was on fire last week, challenging philanthropists to “consider the alternatives” to the status quo at even the most basic levels and questioning why institutional isomorphism (organizations mimicing like organizations) need be rampant in the sector. Change, it seems, is just around the corner, if those in the driver’s seat are ready to take the wheel. Will the L3C help get the party started?
• Speaking of bloggers on fire, Holden Karnofsky from Givewell has been on a roll lately, publishing two important posts last week. The first makes the case against funding small, unproven charities if you’re an individual donor. I am more or less on board with his reasoning, with the caveats that (a) this really is about lay individual donors, not foundations who theoretically should have the expertise to evaluate unproven models; and (b) this idea is much more applicable to “save the world” type charities with very general missions, rather than organizations in fields that thrive off of diversity and competition (like, for example, the arts). Then, over the weekend, Karnofsky pointed attention to a new study showing unprecedented educational outcomes for Harlem Children’s Zone. This development, as Holden explains, is really an astounding event given the rigor of the study and the sheer magnitude of the impact demonstrated.
• And for the final entry on the “bloggers on fire” series, Andy Horwitz of Culturebot looks to be emarking on another grand multi-part rant on the future of arts management. The first installment is here.
• Things may have changed a lot in recent decades, but Europe still hearts the arts way more than the US of A. The latest is that Pennsylvania is threatening to completely zero out arts funding from the state budget, while across the country, the arts continue to get hit hard from all sides. Despite high hopes for the new administration, Quincy Jones’s culture czar idea seems to be going nowhere fast (though Quincy isn’t about to give up advocating). Meanwhile, across the pond, Britain is funding rehearsal spaces for rock bands. At least Forbes is showing public art some love.
• Arts policy geekout alert: Canadian consultants Lord Cultural Resources publishes a cool-looking quarterly called Cultural Capital. The spring edition is here.
• Great article about how Yale Med school is using art history/appreciation classes to help train doctors’ attention to visual detail.

Here’s your roundup for the week:

• As a reminder for the teabaggers out there, top marginal tax rates were over 90% from 1944 to 1963, including the entire Eisenhower administration. It took the administration of noted small-government advocate Lyndon Johnson to cut them below that level. (For comparison, under Obama’s plan, the top tax rate will rise to 39.6%. Taxes in the aggregate would still be lower than they were under Reagan.)
• The L3C is gaining momentum, having been passed now in Michigan, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, and the Indian Crow Nation.
• Uh oh: IMG Artists Chairman Barrett Wissman is guilty of securities fraud.
• Sean Stannard-Stockton marries my two favorite topics in talking about how philanthropy is like music.
• Here’s a sort of funny video from Network for Good about fundraising.
  

  “Let’s just keep it simple,” responds the donor/girlfriend. “I’m breaking up with you.”

  “I give and I give and I give, and I don’t hear anything from you,” she complains.

  “I sent you a plain-text e-mail receipt. It had your name on it, for God’s sake!” he counters.

  Yup.

• Via Americans for the Arts, the new Serve America Act includes new (paid) service opportunities for artists. Not sure if it’s related, but the Music National Service Initiative, a new social enterprise, is hiring MuiscianCorps Fellows.
• Speaking of AftA, they’ve just released their 2009-11 Strategic Plan and the results of an environmental scan conducted by AMS Planning & Research. (h/t @lisa_hoang)
• Good news? There are expected to be 24,000 management-level nonprofit job openings in 2009, according to a new report from Bridgespan. The bad news? That’s down from 77,000 in 2008.
• Steve Reich finally wins his Pulitzer.
• Two contrasting takes on blogs and profitability from two formerly employed journalists. In one corner, ex-Backstage editor and Createquity reader Leonard Jacobs is profiled in Crain’s New York, sharing his plans to turn the Clyde Fitch Report into a revenue-generating machine. And over there, we have ex-Boston Globe critic Thomas Garvey calling into question whether anything on the internet can be revenue-generating over the long run. The latter essay is a really powerful, challenging critique of much of our received wisdom about the wonderfulness of the information age.
  

  In fact, people are finally beginning to come to terms with the way in which the Internet actually destroys value rather than creates it. Indeed, the web may be the most efficient wealth-destruction machine ever devised. This was always the flip side of its immense efficiencies; the Internet made economic processes far less expensive, true, and cut out middlemen hither, thither and yon; but it also undercut the physical framework that made “value” possible. Indeed, the value of just about anything that wasn’t actually nailed down, like real estate, was quickly affected by the web. Locale, connections, knowledge – much of what made wealth possible at the individual level was attacked or simply replaced by the ever-rising tide of digital connectivity….

  So I ask myself, in this environment, how could the content of my blog have economic value? How could it be sold? It’s true a handful of bloggers, like Perez Hilton or DailyKos, have rocketed to some level of economic success. But they have done so by generating national audiences, and, perhaps more importantly, by intertwining themselves with existing real-world power structures or publicity machines.

  While not disagreeing with Garvey’s excellent points at all, Jacobs is probably in a better position than most to make it happen. Nevertheless, I am inclined to see blogs more as advertising vehicles for other services than as revenue generators in themselves. For more on this, via Seth Godin, here’s a great little pamphlet from blogger Chris Guillebeau on how he achieved overnight success in 279 days.

• Not surprising, but still worrisome: Nonprofit Finance Fund says America’s nonprofits are in trouble. More than half of respondents expect the current situation to have a long-term (2+ years) or permanent economic impairment to their organizations.
• NFF (whose Renee Jacob, a Yale SOM grad, gave an excellent presentation here over the weekend covering some of these topics) is also quoted in this NY Times story indicating that many arts organizations with fancy new spaces are now having trouble paying the bills.
• Easy to pay the bills when they’re free, though! smArts & Culture alerts Philly artists to a great opportunity for free space on South Street. (Incidentally, I lived half a block away on Rodman for about nine months right after college.)
• Future of Music Coalition just published some principles for compensation of musicians in new business models.
• Nate Silver takes on unimaginative neoclassical economist thinking like a pro. It amazes me that there are well-respected social “scientists” out there that continue to insist on this kind of ex-post-facto, non-empirically-based logical reasoning.
• Hey, why am I not on this list? In all seriousness, it’s unfortunate that all of the “art” blogs are actually about visual arts and not other kinds of art, but two of the sites on the Createquity blogroll are represented (Tactical Philanthropy and the GiveWell Blog), along with Give & Take (the Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s blog) and soon-to-be-added Seth’s Blog.
• Great post from Lucy Bernholz celebrating how far the conversation about shared metrics and platforms has moved forward and giving specific examples of projects of note.
• The IRS is supposedly going to rule on the L3C before the year is out. (thanks @tactphil)
• Say what you want about Bloomberg, but he gets nonprofits (and the arts). Behold his thorough prescription for helping NYC nonprofit organizations get through the recession.
• Check out these new “buzz maps” from researchers at UCLA and Columbia University. It looks like they’ve kind of backed into creating an interesting cultural asset map, though the accompanying article jumps to some conclusions that aren’t warranted (just because activity at high-profile cultural and entertainment institutions is more visible doesn’t make it hipper). Not to mention that using photographs from Getty Images as your primary data source is likely to introduce certain biases in that direction.
• Really fine quality piece here from David Brewster dissecting Seattle’s arts scene and its current budget troubles. He goes at it from an ecosystem perspective and doesn’t shy away from the numbers or the politics. More fodder for my New Haven analysis to come at the end of the semester.

I can’t afford to finish my works. I can design them, draw them out on my computer, archive them. But to print a giclee, to frame them for show, that runs me about 1500 dollars per image. – Hairy Carrion

Specialized shipping services for artwork can be very expensive-from building crates to fees for the actual carrier. – Richard

Money for visual artists to do their work is almost impossible to find. There are some residencies if you want to go somewhere to work or sometimes there is a little money to give a lecture but there isn’t support to just stay in your studio and make work. And when an artist shows work, there usually isn’t an honorarium or rental fee for showing the work. – jgoldner

In addition, multiple posters (more performing artists, I suspect) mentioned space rental, money to buy equipment as opposed to just renting it, and startup costs like building a website, insurance, demo CDs, legal fees, and so on. Money to “buy time” (i.e., to compose or write or create) was also a popular request.

Essentially all of the issues that have been identified above are symptoms of the winner-take-all economy in the arts. That is to say, it takes a certain amount of startup capital to create a successful artistic enterprise, whether as an individual or organization, and if one doesn’t have access to that startup capital, opportunities to exercise one’s talents are limited. Furthermore, essentials such as space, equipment and materials are in a sense more expensive to younger and smaller organizations because they take up a greater proportion of those organizations’ or individuals’ budgets, leaving less for “luxuries” like, um, paying the artists. This contributes to a feedback loop in which the artists who are already undercapitalized stay undercapitalized, because the system is set up to reward those who supply those basic essentials before it rewards the artistic output of those who use them.

Two of the Ortiz Foundation‘s four programs are designed to work in concert to attack this issue. The first, Building Infrastructure: Giving the Artists the Tools to Strengthen Communities, is designed to lower the costs for all artists by investing heavily in three key expense categories — space, materials, and equipment — and making them available on a non-curated basis at subsidized rates. The second, Supporting Start-Ups: Funding Emerging and Early-Stage Organizations, is a competitive program whose purpose is to provide that key initial capitalization to new projects and organizations that hint at untapped potential, raising the income for emerging artists as a result. Let’s take a look at these two programs in more detail.

Building Infrastructure

This program would be the Ortiz Foundation’s largest, starting off with an investment of $8.5 million a year and growing to $23.5 million per year by 2019. The initial undertaking would be the construction of a new community arts center in an easily accessible neighborhood of Queens with the following features:

• A deep proscenium theater with sprung floors suitable for theater, dance, and musical performance;
• A recording studio;
• A ground-floor gallery that doubles as the lobby of the theater;
• Numerous smaller, acoustically-sound rehearsal and studio spaces;
• Bulletin boards for information about events and training throughout the city; and
• Offices for the foundation itself.

The arts center would have a cache of materials and equipment on hand that would be available for rental at subsidized rates. There would also be a small fund to help artists buy equipment on a competitive basis. The center would be managed by an outside organization (either hired or created for this purpose) which would have a rotating advisory board of local artists to ensure broad community representation.

While this new construction would occupy the bulk of program funds for the first few years, the idea is that over time the Foundation would construct similar spaces in other parts of the city, with some including studio space for visual artists, others incorporating smaller more club-like performance venues, and so on. By consciously increasing the supply of these goods (space, materials and equipment) and directing them to those that need them the most, the Foundation hopes to make it easier for talented emerging artists to get off the ground.

A smaller part of the Building Infrastructure program would be aimed at existing venues and organizations. The first prong of this strategy would involve expanding the NYSCA dance rehearsal space subsidies to theater, music, and visual art spaces. The second is a unique idea: identify key for-profit companies that provide an important service to the arts community and find themselves struggling financially because of it (think Tonic), and offer them a package of management/legal consulting services and up to five years’ worth of bridge funding to turn them nonprofit. This “offer they can’t refuse” would be primarily targeted at organizations that are at severe risk of failing, but the program could also consider comparatively healthy organizations that wish to take a more proactive approach to their situation. (Depending on how the L3C develops, that could be a viable alternative to nonprofit status as well.)

Supporting Start-Ups

The Supporting Start-Ups program is essentially a classic venture philanthropy model writ small. Each organization accepted into the program would eligible for up to a total of $50,000 in funding over a period of up to five years. (The actual amount granted may be quite a bit less, depending on the specific budget needs of the organization in question.) The goal would not be to grow organizations “to scale” in the usual sense, so much as to grow them to the point where they can conduct their operations and programs insulated somewhat from the constant threat of extinction. After five years, organizations will have had ample opportunity to demonstrate their worth to the larger funding world and can continue on to greater heights if appropriate. The Supporting Start-Ups program will provide a significant level of technical support along with the money granted, and set realistic interim goals for each year in collaboration with the grantee. Failure to meet these interim goals on a consistent basis would result in an early termination of funding.

Decisions for Supporting Start-Ups grant awards would be made by an advisory group made up of journalists, curators, booking agents, publishers, mid-career artistic directors, and other individuals whose jobs require them to evaluate unsolicited work on a regular basis. The purpose of this model would be twofold: first, to rely on the expertise of field experts in determining the difference between, for example, a demo CD that sounds bad because it was recorded in somebody’s basement vs. a demo CD that sounds bad because the music stinks; and second, to build a bridge between these emerging artists, whether selected for a grant or not, and influential tastemakers in their field. (It is assumed that because of the low profile of most grant applicants, there will only be rare instances in which a panelist is already familiar with the work of the applicant; thus, conflict of interest is not a major concern.)

The combination of these two programs, it is hoped, would do much to enable emerging artists to overcome some of the systemic disadvantages that cause such burnout and attrition in the field. For our fourth and final installment tomorrow, we’ll look at the Ortiz Foundation’s other two programs, Arts Research and Art and the Public.

• What is the deal with Shepard Fairey and the Boston Police? Anyone from the visual arts want to weigh in on whether the Obama “Hope” poster artist is getting his due or just getting harrassed? In related news, the AP goes after Fairey for copyright infringement for that poster and writes a “totally” “bias-free” AP article about its own action.
• In tough times, it’s nice to have public officials who see the arts as part of the solution, not part of the problem.
• Arts bloggers are starting to discover the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, or L3C, after the Nonprofit Law Blog posted a very helpful roundup of internet coverage of the nascent legal form. We had Robert Lang, the L3C’s originator, here at the Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference in December. You can read about that panel here.
• Secretary of the Arts? Not so much, but there is a new arts staffer in the (White) house. Kareem Dale is a lawyer and former board chair of Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago. Notably, his position is within the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs, which was an explicit recommendation made by Jonathan Sheffer when he spoke at the National Arts Policy Roundtable I attended in November. Apparently someone listened.
• And you thought the $50 million for the NEA was the only way to get arts funding from the feds through the stimulus package? The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies says hi.
• Whoa – the Annenberg Foundation might move to LA? This is not good news for Philly arts organizations.
• Andy Horwitz spills some of the beans on his prescription for new models of cultural production. I am struck by how many of what I thought were my own crazy ideas about the arts (in this case, a shift away from gargantuan institutions toward a more decentralized neighborhood/community model, the idea of the arts as R&D for society, the integration of “wisdom of crowds” thinking into the system) are reflected here, and in the writing of other people around the web. It tells me that a lot of the stuff I’ve been pushing for is perhaps not as radical as I thought, but rather just common sense.
• Nice writeup on the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Cultural Data Project.
• Musical talent is not all innate, according to this new study of kids taking keyboard lessons. Their brains grew larger in the areas relating to hearing and dexterity than a control group of students who did not participate in the lessons. The areas relating to arithmetic, on the other hand, did not appear to be affected by the training.