ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• This is pretty much the most creative cultural tourism gambit ever.
• The Michigan House approved a plan to contribute $195 million in state money to the “grand bargain” to save the Detroit Institute of Arts from the city’s creditors; this money would join the $366 million pledged by foundations, $100 million pledged by the museum itself, and possible funding from union groups. Some creditors still reject the deal, although the judge overseeing the proceedings has refused their request to remove and appraise every painting in the collection.
• “National and local governments don’t take decisions about arts funding based on evidence, however convincing it is.” The Guardian argues that our only hope for better public funding is to create “the kind of solid public support that makes cuts politically dangerous or, even better, unthinkable” through closer ties to local communities.
• Score one victory for the arts lobby: after a vigorous campaign by organizations such as the League of American Orchestras, the Obama administration has carved out an exception for musical instruments in its new ivory regulations.
• Meanwhile, the FCC is accepting public comments on its latest proposed net neutrality rules, which would seem to allow internet providers to strike deals with content sites for faster service – deals akin to those that already exist with tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Given the Commission’s recent flip-flopping, there’s no telling where this will lead, and we may not know until after the next election. One thing we do know: the idea of America itself is at stake.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Handler will be the new executive director of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, sponsor of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Handler is currently the program director at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
• Moy Eng, former director of both the Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program and Palo Alto’s Community School of Music and Arts, has been announced as the first executive director of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a real estate services provider for artists and arts organizations.
• John Horn, of the Los Angeles Times, will be the new host for an arts an entertainment program on KPCC, Southern California Public Radio.

IN THE FIELD

• Just a year after losing its highly respected director Deborah Cullinan to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts has just announced a major restructuring that will result in the closure of several programs and the layoffs of key staff. And NPR is cancelling “Tell Me More,” a little-heard daily talk show aimed at minority audiences, and eliminating 28 jobs. The National Association of Black Journalists blames lackluster promotion efforts.
• The San Diego Opera lives! But along with a full 2015 season, the company has announced layoffs including 13 full-time staff. And now the auditor is calling.
• New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning to gut-renovate its modern and contemporary wing to make room for a major gift of Cubist paintings and potentially create a new entrance from Central Park. Is this another case of museum hubris?
• The plan to dissolve the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been finalized, with the collection going to the National Gallery of Art and other museums it chooses and the building and design school going to George Washington University.
• When you think of St. Louis, do you think of jazz? A $10 million expansion to Jazz St. Louis—to be called the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz—hopes to make the two synonymous, establishing St. Louis as one of the top hubs for jazz in the world.
• Lower Manhattan is home to a new performing arts school. Thanks to three years of significant growth, Pace University’s performing arts program will become a school within Pace’s liberal arts college.
• Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Jonathan Safran Foer on behalf of all of those without enough to read, Chipotle cups will now be adorned with short texts by literary luminaries. Not everyone is enthusiastic.
• Those Colorado Symphony mile-high marijuana concerts are now invitation-only, due to an overlooked regulation banning toking up in public. The Denver Post’s music critic went and got blasted – I mean, had a blast.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• AT&T announced that it intends to buy DirecTV. The “media chessboard is moving more than it has in the past decade,” with Comcast’s February purchase of Time Warner cable and Sprint’s overtures to T-Mobile…
• … and reports that Apple is planning a major new foray into streaming music with an acquisition of Beats Audio and of co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, though something is holding up the deal.
• Nearly four years after announcing a name change, a new mission, and a new grantmaking strategy focused on impact, Cincinnati’s ArtsWave (formerly the Fine Arts Fund) seems to be seeing results. The united arts fund raised a record $12 million for its annual campaign this year, helped catalyze last year’s creation of a new multidisciplinary arts festival drawing national attention, and is starting to form strategic partnerships with non-arts funders. Retiring CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson deserves a lot of credit for seeing this transformation through.
• The Hewlett Foundation’s Fay Twersky defends the decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative as data-driven in the face of William Schambra’s accusation that a leadership change was the primary driver. Let’s hope this public debate doesn’t dissuade grantmakers from following Hewlett’s lead on transparency.
• The Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund has announced a new capitalization program, including its largest-ever grant of $200,000 to the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. The Fund created the program in response to research showing that even many of the city’s strongest arts groups were constrained by having only three months of financial cushion.

BIG IDEAS

• Is it time for foundations to embrace partisan politics instead of trying to remain above the fray? Writers for the Stanford Social Innovation Review think so. “Partisan conflict is not an external factor that advocates can work around,” they write. “It is the defining axis of American politics today, and funders must be unafraid to reckon with it.”
• The expansion of the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge – a promise to give away at least half of one’s fortune – to include billionaires from around the world raises questions about different cultural attitudes toward philanthropy (in China, public or transparent giving is eschewed) and about the relative merits of the Big Philanthropy model vs the more distributed community foundation model of giving.
• Arts entrepreneurship aficionados, look out: Barry’s Blog has a stellar lineup, uh, lined up for a weeklong blogathon on the topic starting…today!

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Academy of Sciences has hard numbers that show students learn better through hands-on activities than through lectures – at least when it comes to the sciences.
• Philanthropy Northwest reports on a year-long peer-learning project on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts involving 10 foundation CEOs in the region.
• Corporate giving is up again, according to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s annual tally.
• South Arts has released two research reports on arts education in the South. The first, a survey of nearly a third of all principals in the region, found among other things that Southern students have less access to visual arts and music than other American students but greater access to dance – with significant variation among Southern states. The second, case studies of nine strong arts education programs, found that the successful schools cultivated a shared vision of the arts, incorporated the arts into the core curriculum driven by state and national standards, and exposed students to working artists.
• Bringing the ability to make snazzy charts and tables to the masses, evaluators Stephanie Evergreen and Ann K. Emery have developed a data visualization checklist for the graphically challenged among us.
• In case you ever wondered about the correlation between per capita consumption of cheese and the number of people who die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets, Tyler Vigen has you covered.

• 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.

• The public has spoken: polling released in late September shows 75% of Detroiters oppose cutting pensions and 78% oppose selling artwork from the Detroit Institute of Arts to ease the city’s financial troubles. Meanwhile, the DIA is pitching a long-shot plan to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder that would direct significant state funding to the museum – possibly in exchange for the city’s relinquishing ownership.
• Is Philly’s status as a world-class cultural city at risk? The Philadelphia Inquirer explores the potential impact of sharp cuts in private and public funding in a city where arts tourists outnumber sports tourists 4:3.
• Washington, DC may be paralyzed over ObamaCare, but you don’t have to to be: Fractured Atlas follows up on its infographic guide to ObamaCare for artists with a similar guide for small business owners. And the Future of Music Coalition has announced a new website designed to be a comprehensive resource on the implications of the Affordable Care Act on artists. There’s even an artist-friendly hotline.
• In an interview in The Atlantic Cities, Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell talks about how the city benefits from – and has to adapt to – the huge festivals that undergrid its cultural economy.
• “Be A Creator” enters California elementary schools later this year as a pilot program designed to teach K-6 graders that sharing other people’s ideas and artwork without permission is stealing. The Center for Copyright Infringement (CCI) prepared the curriculum in conjunction with the California School Library Association and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition to address online piracy by educating the young. Detractors claim the curriculum is just “thinly disguised corporate propaganda.”
• Meanwhile, voluntary agreements held by the entertainment, advertising and internet industries to address issues of content piracy are apparently going well, according to testimony from a recent Congressional hearing. That’s good news following the controversy over the SOPA and PIPA bills last year. However, notably missing from the hearing were independent labels and the artists themselves.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Kansas Arts Foundation, established after Governor Sam Brownback abolished the Kansas Arts Commission in a controversial and unsuccessful attempt to eliminate state art funding, has named Karen Lane Christilles its first Executive Director.
• Lois Lerner, embattled head of the IRS tax-exempt organizations division, has retired after bearing the brunt of the blame for the recent scandal involving targeted investigation of Tea Party-related organizations. A review board that was about to propose she be fired alluded to “neglect of duties” during her 12-year tenure at the agency, which raises an interesting question: is Lerner just a political scapegoat or has the IRS’s nonprofit unit actually been mismanaged for years?

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Copper heiress Huguette Clark’s will established an arts foundation and bequeathed it her $100m California estate to showcase her art, but other aspirants to Clark’s $400m fortune have taken to the courts.

IN THE FIELD

• New York’s 70-year-old City Opera is closing its doors following a decade of deficits, an unsuccessful campaign to avert bankruptcy and, according to Mayor Bloomberg, “a business model [that] doesn’t appear to be working.” Michael Cooper and Robin Pogrebin provide the most in-depth reporting on the institution’s final days and just how precariously it held on to life up to the final act.
• How many stagehands do you need in a new education space? Carnegie Hall’s opening night gala was abruptly canceled in the wake of a union dispute over jurisdiction of Carnegie’s still-under-construction education wing. The feud is raising eyebrows, particularly given that five of Carnegie’s top ten earners are stagehands, each earning more than $300,000 apiece.
• In an interview with Ellen McSweeney, Cynthia Cyrus of the Blair School of Music discusses the role of MOOCs in music education and the challenges posed by murky copyright law.
• Two great examples of museums keeping pace with changes in the education sector: the Museum of Modern Art recently wrapped up its first MOOC on museum teaching strategies, and reflects on how it went. The American Museum of Natural History, meanwhile, graduated its first class of science teachers, thanks to a federal grant that made it the first (and maybe not the last) museum in the nation to offer a full teacher prep program.
• Perhaps not such a great example of a museum keeping up with the times: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art recently offered a Groupon “deal” for an $18 admission voucher. The only problem? Entry to the museum is supposed to be free five days and two nights a week. This bit of deceptive advertising appears to be just another episode in the institution’s shady history of misleading visitors about its pricing structure.
• The now year-long labor dispute at the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra has prompted both celebrated music director Osmo Vänskä and composer Aaron Jay Kernis to resign, dealing a major blow to the future of the organization. The question that remains is whether the board will try to rebuild the 110-year-old orchestra or the musicians will strike out on their own.
• Meanwhile in Germany, the Berlin Philharmonic has led a massive country-wide strike to protest further decreases in job opportunities for orchestral musicians.
• British museums are adjusting to a world with less public funding. The Museums Association recently released its annual review, finding that nearly a third of survey respondents have had to cut staffing, replacing many of the positions with volunteers and interns. Interestingly, museum attendance is at an all time high.

BIG IDEAS

• David B. Pankratz reports out on a few ideas about research generated at Americans for the Arts’s National Convention back in June: better link research to policy, create pathways for young researchers to study the arts, expand the focus of research beyond nonprofit arts, and more speed dating, among others.
• At WorldFuture 2013 (the best-named conference around), Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child project and co-founder of MIT Media Lab, described four different ways to see the future. In this post Elizabeth Merritt applies the theories to attempt to forecast the future of museums.
• Clayton Lord celebrates the recent Arts Dinnervention with a week’s worth of posts from himself and three other participants. Linda Essig joins in the conversation.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Where have all the theater nerds gone? The National Endowment for the Arts’s latest survey of public participation in the arts is out, and reports a nine percent drop in musical theater attendance and twelve percent drop in play attendance since 2008 – but greater participation by the young in arts festivals and by non-white and Hispanic Americans in art performances broadly. 
• Chris Unitt examines a a new report from the UK’s Culture 24  documenting the second phase of its action research project on “understanding and measuring digital engagement” in the cultural sector.
• Also out of the UK, Ticketmaster has released the results of a survey of playgoing among the British, who are more likely to have attended the theatre than a concert or sporting event. Audiences skew younger and more experimental than you might expect – which means audience codes of conduct are shifting, too.
• Last month Capacity Interactive released its Performing Arts Digital Marketing Benchmarking Survey Study with some interesting findings to report. Perhaps not surprisingly, “the biggest obstacle for digital marketing success is lack of budget.”
• Theater Communications Group has released its annual Theater Facts 2012 report, authored by the folks from the National Center for Arts Research. It’s possible to spin the news a few different ways, but what’s clear is that in many key areas, things are starting to look like they did before the recession: revenue is up, subscriptions are up, income from single-ticket sales is up. The full report is here.
• New neuroscience research finds adults with musical training perform better on tricky cognitive tests than those with little to no experience playing an instrument. And creativity in music doesn’t just happen randomly; freedom, flexibility, time and “being in the moment” are the key elements needed, according to a new study led by John Rink, professor of musical performance studies at Cambridge University.