ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

• Americans for the Arts’s Narric Rome provides a vital update on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, also known as No Child Left Behind), and what it all means for arts education, as it makes its way through the Congressional committee process.
• Proposed copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is mobilizing a lot of opposition from the “geek” community – and within the arts.
• A transportation bill making its way through Congress is potentially bad news for public art.
• This isn’t good: citing “budgetary constraints,” the NEA will no longer accept consortium grant proposals in FY13. It’s one organization, one grant from here on out.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The European Commission is betting big on culture, with a €1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) commitment to film, visual, and performing arts over six years under the name “Creative Europe.” ARTINFO is calling it “the world’s largest-ever cultural funding program,” although that seems doubtful once you take the six-year time horizon and inclusion of film into account. For example, in 2007 alone, Germany allocated more than 1.2 billion euros to culture. (via quiet.quiet.quiet.)
• Arts Council England is cracking down on unpaid internships among its grantees (they’re already illegal in the UK). Good for them.
• The Toronto Arts Council is facing a 10% cut.

PHILANTHROPY NOTES

• It’s giving season, and that means the advice is flying fast and furious. The Wall Street Journal is out with its annual special section on philanthropy, which features some stupid debates like “Should Charities Act Like Businesses?” (Umm, you mean like Lehman Bros.?) This year, as in the past, I plan to entrust my non-arts giving to GiveWell, which conducts the most comprehensive and intellectually honest research on giving opportunities I’m aware of anywhere, a veritable wonky wet dream. GiveWell just released its top recommendations for 2011, and they include two disease control charities, Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.
• Philanthropy futurist Lucy Bernholz is out with her annual forecast for philanthropists and social investors, Blueprint 2012. Here’s Lucy on the importance of open data as the building block for the future.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is convening a multi-agency task force to fund and promote research on the arts and human development, and has already published a white paper on the subject. This level of engagement with other agencies of government, centering on Health & Human Services, is unprecedented for the NEA’s research department, and has the potential to turn into a big deal if they stay on it. Sunil Iyengar has more.
• Whaddya know? Two of the ten happiest jobs in the United States, according to the highly respected General Social Survey, are authors (#4) and artists (#7). In fact, every single one of the top 8 exist largely or entirely within the nonprofit and public sectors.
• Speaking of happiness, a new study from the co-creator of the “Mappiness” iPhone app, who happens to be a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics, attempts to determine the association between various kinds of (self-reported) activities and (self-reported) happiness for the app’s UK-based users. Clay Lord did some honest-to-goodness journalism and found out that four out of the six happiest activities are arts-related. (#1 on that list, of course, is “intimacy/making love.”) Linda Essig has more.
• WESTAF has published the proceedings of a symposium called “Engaging the Now” featuring the participation of leading arts research lights Ann Markusen, Julia Lowell, and Steven Tepper among others.
• Theatre Communications Group has published the latest version of Theatre Facts.
• Alex Tabarrok on the problems of regression-based studies regressing to the mean. (Translation: small sample size can be a problem even when your sample size isn’t that small.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Adrian Ellis is stepping down as executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center to return to his consulting firm, AEA Consulting.
• And the arts journalism attrition continues: the Denver Post has offered buyouts to a number of longtime staffers, including at least two arts critics.

IN THE FIELD

• Things that make you go hmm: Knoedler & Company, a 165-year-old New York art gallery that was one of the most prestigious in the country, abruptly ceased operations last Wednesday. The next day, a lawsuit was filed by a collector claiming that Knoedler & Company sold him a fake Jackson Pollack for $17 million. ARTINFO has more.
• Well, it was just a matter of time: Occupy Wall Street Occupied Lincoln Center, with composer Philip Glass joining in a protest outside a performance of his own opera, Satyagraha.
• Videos from the National Arts Marketing Project conference are now available on Livestream.
• The blog series from the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council on notable trends in the field continues with Gabi Jirasek’s entry on the Grand Rapids Lip Dub project and Ebony McKinney’s analysis of arts incubators.
• Some blog salons going on now: Grantmakers in the Arts is having a discussion of Holly Sidford’s recently published cultural equity manifesto “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” from December 6-16, and Americans for the Arts is hosting its first ever local arts agency salon December 5-9.
• Rachael Wilkinson writes up some of the crowdfunding options available to artists. It’s worth noting that Fractured Atlas has partnerships with both IndieGoGo and RocketHub that allow fiscally sponsored projects to receive tax-deductible contributions through those platforms. For for-profit crowdfunded concepts, a bill making its way through Congress would loosen the investor regulations that currently apply.

ETC.

• The Pittsburgh Steelers have a unusual way of selling season tickets: fans can buy a “personal seat license” that gives them theright to buy season tickets for that particular seat. These PSLs are like real estate – they are durable goods, so therefore they increase in value over time. And boy, are they a hot property – Freakonomics reports that on average, prices have increased over 700% in ten years. And you thought dynamic pricing in the arts was bad! (Actually, could this be applied to the arts?)

• Remember that debate a while back about whether video games qualified as art? Well, the NEA just declared it over by including support for “digital games” in its new Art and Media program.
• To Scott Walters’s everlasting chagrin, however, the NEA is still providing funding to organizations in New York, LA, and Chicago disproportionate to the population level. Scott has more here and here. I think this is helpful and important analysis; the one thing to keep in mind is that it focuses only on grants in one discipline of one round of one the NEA’s grant programs.
• The Library of Congress, in partnership with Sony Music, has unveiled a “National Jukebox” of early sound recordings – and it got a million page views in the first 48 hours.
• Kudos to the Future of Music Coalition for staying on top of the potential implications of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger for artists. And speaking of mergers, don’t miss FMC’s collaboration with Fractured Atlas looking back at the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, one year later.
• A window into Finnish cultural policy.
• So now Congressmen want to micromanage the Smithsonian’s gift shops?

COMINGS AND GOINGS

• Rahm Emanuel has announced that Michelle T. Boone, formerly of the Joyce Foundation, will serve as the next Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
• Marc Vogl is out as program officer for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and in as executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition.
• Heather Hitchens has quit as director of the New York State Council on the Arts to take the top job at American Theatre Wing, which presents the Tony Awards. NYSCA’s budget has declined from $55 million to $35 million over the past four years.
• Blueprint Research + Design, a major consultant to foundations, is being bought out by Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors. As part of the transaction, Blueprint founder Lucy Bernholz will become a half-time managing director of Arabella, spending more time on writing and in her partnership with Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society.
• The Sloan Foundation, whose main focus is science and technology, is now getting into arts funding.

MULTI-PART BLOGSTRAVAGANZAS

• ARTSBlog has a great-looking discussion on tap this week about new business models, the 501(c)(3) legal form, and potential alternatives. The lineup of bloggers is stellar, including Diane Ragsdale, Adam Huttler, and Janet Brown.
• The indefatigable Barry Hessenius was blogging up a storm earlier this month at the 98th Arizona Town Hall focusing on arts and culture. The convening, which included addresses from Marian Godfrey and the suddenly ubiquitous Rocco Landesman, comes at a poignant moment for the state, given recent cutbacks in public funding for the arts in Arizona. Here are Barry’s reports from Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and the final wrap-up. There’s also a 268-page background report in case you’re looking for some further light reading.
• The staff at GiveWell, the charity rating agency, spent three months living and working in Mumbai last year. They have now posted thoughts and impressions from the visit, which provide an interesting check against their working assumptions going in. Here are the notes from staff members Holden Karnofsky, Elie Hassenfeld, and Natalie Stone, as well as thoughts on evaluating local charities in India.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The long-awaited Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) study has finally been published. The press release puts a positive spin on the findings, noting that 92% of alumni of arts training programs who responded to the survey have work (of any kind) and that two-thirds indicated that their first job after school was a close match for what they wanted. However, I’m more intrigued by the stat that only 57% of the over 13,500 respondents have ever been a professional artist, and only 41% currently are (keep in mind that most of the survey pool graduated within the past five years). We’ll be taking a closer look at this one.
• Meanwhile, last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the largest source of debt in the US.
• The NEA has a new research note applying data from the American Time Use Survey to the performing arts industry.
• At ARTSBlog, Lynne Kingsley reports on the unequal distribution of arts education programs by discipline (a lot more visual art and music than theater or dance). And Tim Mikulski shares recommendations from the new report on arts education from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
• The Alliance of Artist Communities has a new study on support for dance through artist residencies.
• Rosetta Thurman reports on a new study of perceptions of diversity in the nonprofit workplace.
• Americans for the Arts aren’t the only ones doing economic impact estimates. Google says that it benefits the American economy to the tune of $64 billion – in pure profits. Take that!

CONFERENCE CRANNY

• The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago has been on fire lately, and held a great-looking Emerging Practice Seminar last month. Materials from the session (including lots of video!) are available here.
• Matthew Guerrieri provides a dispatch from the Rethink Music Conference in Boston.
• Beth Kanter reports from the Center for Effective Philanthropy Conference.
• Trista Harris has video from the “Philanthropy On Trial” event at the Council on Foundations Conference.

TRENDWATCHING

• Wow. For the first time since 1992, the rate of television ownership in American households has declined. To 97%.
• Crowdfunding isn’t just for donations and loans anymore; MicroVentures is now taking tiny equity investments for new startup companies.
• The Daily Beast on Amazon.com and the future of book critics.
• Composer Jeff Harrington offers a personal history of his reliance on free content distribution as a career strategy, and relates it to the issue of class in the arts.

ETC.

• Really fascinating indictment of today’s urban planning field and the (unintended) legacy of Jane Jacobs.
• Barry Hessenius interviews Kristen Madsen, Vice President of the GRAMMY and MusiCares Foundations.
• I have to say (and no, I am not being paid for this), I am so glad I signed up for the free trial of the New York Times’s digital subscription service sponsored by Lincoln when I had the chance, and I will certainly be renewing when it runs out. Without it, I’d be missing out on great reporting like this piece on a “pop-up” restaurant that served a six-course lunch to a dozen passengers on the L train, and this exposé of some shady-sounding business practices on the part of Columbia Artists Management promoting foreign orchestras who aren’t what they seem.

The Acumen Fund Blog
The Acumen Fund is good people. I added this one after Rob Katz visited my school and gave a really great presentation about the organization. The blog itself is a mix of profiles of Acumen Fund investment recipients/fellows and broader thought pieces from the likes of Sasha Dichter and Jacqueline Novogratz.

david toub
“David’s waste of bandwidth,” as he calls it, has been around for a while, covering topics as varied as music, Apple technology, medical trends, and politics. I know David from my Sequenza21 days, where he was and remains a frequent commenter.

Full of IT
So, I found this blog because I noticed it had linked to mine, and realized that the culprit was likely Morgan Lindsey Tachco, whose name I had first encountered on Sarah McLellan’s now-dormant Resources for Emerging Arts Leaders blog. Full of IT appears to have some relationship to the Innovative Theater (IT) Awards Foundation, as Morgan is their Community Relations Manager, although confusingly there is another IT Awards blog on Myspace that seems to have different but concurrent content. Despite its organization-specific focus, Full of IT has some good stuff about local advocacy and off-off-Broadway theaters which is worth reading.

Nico Muhly
Nico is a wünderkind composer who has worked with Björk, Philip Glass, and other big names in the classical and not-so-classical fields. But that’s not why you should read his blog—you should read it because it’s some of the most entertaining damn stuff on the web. Nico’s writing style is ebullient and effusive, with lots of intentionally creative spellings and linguistic gymnastics like Icelandicizing various words. He also makes good use of media as he documents his many travels and performances.

Parabasis
Young writer/director Isaac Butler served on the Obama Arts Policy Committee during the 2008 campaign, and now I see his blog quoted everywhere. Isaac somehow finds time to write intelligently about pretty much everything, ranging from arts policy commentary to theater reviews to electoral politics to “Battlestar blogging” to an online book club for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and much more. Seriously, sometimes he knocks out like five posts in an hour—I’m lucky if I do two a week.

Philanthropy 2173
Lucy Bernholz is the founder of Blueprint Research & Design, a very well respected consultant to foundations and donors, and a former board member of GiveWell which has received some virtual ink in the past here. Lucy was apparently one of the first philanthropy bloggers out there, and her main interests have to do with the concept of philanthropy as a field and the building of information markets for donors and social investors. She’s also a huge Twitter cheerleader and is pretty much the reason why I joined.

PhilanTopic
This is the official blog of the Foundation Center, which is one of the most important information resources in the philanthropy community. Mitch Nauffts and Regina Mahone hold down the fort here, but PhilanTopic also features guest commentary from people in the field and other recurring features like Quote of the Day and Weekend Link Roundup.

Ted Hearne
My buddy Ted Hearne, composer, has a blog called “Teddy Boy.” His posts tend to be either tiny twitteresque hits (many related in some way to his awesome music) or long, cogent essays. I’m listening at the moment to an absolutely sick performance by his bandsemble Your Bad Self courtesy of the blog. I recommend you do the same.