Capitol Hill, Washington DC – by Flickr user KP Tripathi, Creative Commons license

Several policy shifts are underway in Washington that may have significant effects on arts nonprofits and funders. First, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the America Gives More Act, which would 1) make permanent three expired tax deductions – including the important IRA Charitable Rollover provision that allows seniors to donate up to $100k of their retirement disbursements without paying taxes on it – while 2) allowing individuals to credit deductions made before April 15 of one year to the previous tax year, avoiding the Christmas scramble for donations before patrons know their tax situation, and 3) simplifying the excise tax rate paid by foundations to 1% (it can currently rise to 2% in some circumstances). The future of the bill is uncertain: Obama Administration and many Congressional Democrats oppose it because it does not contain any revenue provisions to offset the reductions in tax income. The Senate is not expected to consider the bill before the fall.

Second, the IRS has released form 1023-EZ, a dramatically streamlined application for 501(c)(3) status that will allow applicants to become tax exempt simply by filling out a 3-page form (vs 26), paying $400 (vs $850), and swearing under penalty of perjury that they have less than $50k in annual income and less than $250k in assets. Some 70% of applicants are expected to be eligible for the EZ path, and the IRS won’t even review these applications as a matter of course. Some fear this may open the door to abuse, but aspiring nonprofits eying the 60,000-organization line to be reviewed may feel differently.

Finally, in pre-legislative news, the House Appropriations Committee approved level budgets of $146m for the NEA and NEH, restoring $8m cuts made to each in subcommittee, while the artist resale royalty rights bill is gaining momentum, attracting new Congressional co-sponsors in advance of a potential vote this year or next.

More money, more problems at the DIA: As the City of Detroit’s much-anticipated bankruptcy trial looms – it begins on August 16 – two contending valuations of DIA’s art have emerged. Artvest Partners, hired by the city, placed the total value of the 60k-piece collection at $2.8-4.6B; a creditor’s expert, Victor Weiner Associates, at $8.5B. But that’s in theory: Artvest estimated that the works would fetch only $850m to $1.8B in the current market, accounting for a potential glut of masterpieces if the museum were to deaccession en masse. (Victor Weiner acknowledged the actual haul would be lower but did not venture to say by how much.) Meanwhile, donations continue to flow toward the “Grand Bargain” that could spin DIA off as a separate non-profit, if the courts allow it, with a group of business leaders, companies, and corporate foundations pledging $26.8m toward the $100m DIA must raise. Oh, and there is art happening, too: DIA began installing reproductions of its masterpieces in Michigan communities for the fifth year of its Inside/Out project.

The fate of the Corcoran’s collection hangs in the balance: Back in February, the long-troubled Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design announced they would be taken over by the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University. The Corcoran’s 17,000-piece collection would be split up, with the bulk going to the National Gallery and the remainder distributed to museums around the country. Now, a group of advocates — including museum donors and alumni of the college — has filed suit to stop the deal, arguing longtime board mismanagement is to blame for the current state of affairs. At issue is whether the Corcoran’s lawyers can show that the proposed arrangement is the “next best” option to maintain the original intent of the institution. While alternative solutions are bandied about and exhaustive arguments laid out on both sides, the Corcoran’s fate should be decided by the end of August.

Another shakeup at the William Penn Foundation: Philadelphia’s only remaining major arts funder is showing alarming signs of instability. Managing Director Peter Degnan, the foundation’s second leader in less than two years, has resigned after less than six months on the job, citing “personal reasons.” He succeeded Jeremy Nowak, whose tenure ended in 2012. Chief Philanthropy Officer Laura Sparks will take over as leader of the foundation with the new title of executive director. While she will likely have broader authority and responsibility than her predecessor, she is not expected to make major changes in the grantmaker’s strategic areas of focus.

Looking for affordable artist housing? Take a number: In a jarring indication of how bad New York’s affordable housing crisis is, a recent lottery for housing slots in one renovated Harlem building generated a whopping 53,000 applications from artists. The building, El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109, is a former public school that was sold to Artplace two years ago. Foundations, politicians, and local departments of housing and cultural affairs contributed $52.2 million in renovations to create 89 housing units — begging the question of how big an investment would be needed to make a dent in artists’ demand for affordable living spaces.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Andy Horwitz is leaving New York City to launch a new consultancy called Applied Creativity; though he will continue writing in other venues, Culturebot will go on sabbatical indefinitely from September transition to new leadership.
• Reuben Roqueñi will join Hewlett as a program officer in Performing Arts; he is currently program director at the Native Arts and Culture Foundation in Washington State.
• Laura Packer has become ED of the Howard Gilman Foundation in NYC. She had been Arts Program Director at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in New Jersey.
• The Nathan Cummings Foundation has tapped former Trustee Ernest Tollerson as interim CEO while a search gets underway.
• Longtime National Arts Strategies VP Gail Crider will take over as President and CEO from Russell Taylor at the start of the year.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The California Film Commission reports that film and TV projects worth $2 billion relocated their production away from California over the last four years, often when other states offered better tax breaks.
• Another bleak snapshot of the writer’s life: median author income in the UK fell by almost a third over the last decade, to $18.5k per year.
• Meanwhile, on stage: Last year, London’s 241 theatres served 22m patrons, earned $1B, and employed 3,000 performers at a time. This was the first quantitative report of this kind, so the historical trend is unclear.
• More than a third of 18-34-year-old tourists to the UK identified culture as a major draw in a new survey; historical buildings and arts institutions got special mention.

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

BIG IDEAS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

• The New York Times reports on the state of Rhode Island’s disastrous investment in former Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios. Little Rhody gave Schilling a $75 million loan as an incentive to locate in the Ocean State, as part of a new Knowledge District in downtown Providence. Just two years later, 38 Studios went bankrupt and the state (for now) is left holding the bag. It’s a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to believe that investing in the creative economy is any kind of magic bullet – as with any investment opportunity, strong leadership and close oversight are paramount.
• The number of nonprofit organizations just continues to spiral out of control, and – wait, what? They actually dropped in 2012, for the second year in a row? Must…resist…pre-existing…narrative….

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• A little late on this one, but attorney and nonprofit executive Melissa Beck is the new CEO at the Educational Foundation of America. EFA has funded creative placemaking efforts around the country for the past few years.
• Barry Hessenius scores an interview with former ArtPlace director – and new Knight Foundation VP – Carol Coletta. I think this exchange encapsulates things well:
  

  Barry: What are your one or two big takeaway lessons from your stint at ArtPlace?

  Carol: …There is a piece of communication wisdom that I believe in deeply: Say one thing. Say it simply. Say it over and over.

  We tried our best to do that. People didn’t always like it, but we stuck to the path we originally carved out.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Great Woodruff Arts Center Million-Dollar Embezzlement Mystery has been solved. Amazingly, the perp was a maintenance worker.
• Dance music acts are getting paid royalties at a lower rate than other genres in the UK, according to The Guardian.
• I found this observation from Michael Kaiser’s weekly column of note: “I do believe that there will need to be some adjustment to cost structures, especially for the highest priced talent like guest soloists, conductors, choreographers, etc. I am already witnessing a softening in the fee demands of all but the most famous artists. (Not coincidentally, these fee reductions are coming at a time when European arts organizations are losing large amounts of their government funding and cannot afford to pay high fees either.)” Kaiser runs DC’s Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s largest performing arts presenters.

IN THE FIELD

• NPR’s All Things Considered ran a three-part series on arts education last week. The first story covers the Presidential Committee on the Arts and Humanities’s Turnaround Arts Initiative; the second examines James Catterall’s efforts to study creativity; and the third reports on Life Pieces, an after-school arts program in Washington, DC.
• National Arts Strategies has a 20-minute “video case study” with Springboard for the Arts regarding the latter’s Irrigate creative placemaking project.
• Boise dance company Trey McIntyre Project has begun selling its creative process to corporate clients. (Note that Pilobolus has been doing similar things for years.)
• Three Chicago performing ensembles are trying out a shared fundraising structure. The new group is called Creative Partners, and will spend a quarter of its time raising money for each constituent group and the last quarter pounding the pavement for the entire collaboration.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• If you missed Theatre Communications Group’s Audience (R)Evolution Learning Convening in Philadelphia earlier this year, Jim O’Quinn has a massive wrap-up for you (with pictures!).
• Steven Dawson shares his notes from the 2013 Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium at American University, and Efrain Gutierrez does the same for the Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy National Conference in Chicago.

RESEARCH CORNER

• I’m not exactly sure why Pacific Standard journalist Tom Jacobs seems to be doing a gigantic literature review of research on music and psychology (maybe he’s prepping for a book?), but I’m grateful for it. Here, he analyzes a study of anxiety and depression rates among college students who listen to heavy metal. In a related item, a Boston College study finds an association between after school arts activities and depression in teenagers. “Further widening the jock-artist divide, the study found that the teens least likely to become depressed are those involved exclusively in sports activities.” The usual causation vs. correlation caveats apply, of course.
• The NEA has announced its latest round of research grants, as well as a book coming out of last May’s arts and economic development convening that was organized in collaboration with the Brookings Institution.
• Grantmakers in the Art’s Janet Brown: “We’ve done an analysis of the financial health of arts groups in the twelve cities where we’ve presented our funders’ capitalization workshop…In some cities, mid-sized and major organizations have, on average, negative liquid net assets. This means, they don’t have a dime to pay the electric bill should money stop coming in the door today.”
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund, which helped GIA initially with its capitalization work, conducts an annual State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey. Rebecca Thomas analyzes the 2013 edition from an arts perspective.
• FSG has published a list of 27 indicators with which to track the project of so-called “backbone” organizations involved with Collective Impact efforts.
• The Ford Foundation has released the results of its 2012 Grantee Perception Report.

So hooray for all that! And now to our regularly scheduled programming…

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Remember the item a while back about patent trolls? Rachael Wilkinson at the Technology in the Arts blog alerts us to a very disturbing case of a troll targeting an arts organization, in this case a theater in Connecticut for using the “Tweet Seats” concept. Looks like it’s time for arts organizations to speak up for patent reform.
• Federal arts education standards do make a difference in practice.
• Danielle Brazell of Arts for LA writes about bringing the arts into the upcoming Los Angeles mayoral election.
• Don’t miss this fantastic interview between Barry Hessenius and NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, one of my favorite people in the arts (and you’ll soon see why in the interview). Side note: I had no idea that Jamie served on the board of a group called the “No-Pants Theatre Company,” but that is just awesome.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Cultural Data Project finally has a new CEO to lead its transition to an independent nonprofit: Beth Tuttle, a consultant with METStrategies.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• One of the big trends I’ve been seeing over the last decade, and that I think we’ll see accelerate in the next, is the slow migration of low-profit enterprises with social value – think jazz venues, record labels, newspapers/journalism providers – to a nonprofit context. That trend includes independent bookstores, and this article from the Toronto Globe and Mail explains why.
• More food for thought on the economics of music streaming.
  

IN THE FIELD

• Catherine Michna has only been a blogger for two weeks, but this post on “how NOT to be a gentrifier with your theater” in New Orleans is certainly a way to make an impression.
• This is some truth right here: “[International Art English] often ‘insists on art’s subversive potential.’ Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors.”
• The Sacramento Philharmonic and Sacramento Opera will merge into the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance, following a model pioneered by the Utah Symphony | Utah Opera and the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. The article has a helpful rundown of recent mergers in the performing arts and what people are saying about them.
• Dallas Shelby at the National Arts Strategies blog: “As in politics, the key to increasing the power of your mandate is to increase the amount of stakeholders’ engagement more than they increase their expectations.“
• My Fractured Atlas colleague Tim Cynova is up at Hyperallergic discussing 7 ways to build a sustainable art career this year. (I can take credit for the “Well-Informed Arts Professional” bit.)

BIG IDEAS

• A fascinating and lengthy essay by Trevor Butterworth on Big Data and its associated necessity, Big Criticism (or as he terms it, Big Crit). Worth a read in full.
• Last month, Jacquelyn Strycker explored the artistic side of food, including the new creations coming out of the field of molecular gastronomy. Elizabeth Merritt from the Center for the Future of Museums considers another angle: the potential intersection between food and 3D printing.
• Doug Borwick offers a very helpful definitional boundary distinguishing community engagement (by arts institutions) from the more commonly-used term audience engagement.
• Bill Ivey is out with a new book (Handmaking America), and Russell Willis Taylor has the scoop.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In which all of our stereotypes about kids and music preferences are shown to be true.
• New research from the Netherlands suggests a link between practicing a musical instrument and lower blood pressure.
• We talk a lot about arts organizations needing to diversify their audiences, but that conversation is all too often painted in frustratingly broad strokes. Clay Lord is experimenting with some ways to lend a bit more definition.
• Interesting visualization and analysis of age demographics in US cities, courtesy of the Urban Institute and Atlantic Cities.
• How the Hewlett Foundation is thinking about evaluation these days (and, as Lucy Bernholz notes, a victory for transparency).
• Wow! The Foundation Center, GuideStar, and Urban Institute collectively spend close to $2 million annually to extract and upload nonprofit form 990 data into databases. A new report from the Aspen Institute argues that the government should have nonprofits fill out those forms online so that they’ll be in a database already, and then make the contents of that database publicly available.
• A new survey and report basically find that a significant portion of nonprofit development directors hate their jobs.

ETC.

• John E. Craig, Jr. explains the whys, hows, and what nexts of foundation archiving (part 1; part 2).
• What is there to say about this amazing article covering the Portland karaoke scene, other than read the whole thing? So many gems in this one, but just to whet your appetite:
  

  Portland does have dozens of karaoke bars, and over the course of six nights we did our best to visit them all. I sang Lee Ann Womack in a honky-tonk in far southeast Portland, Kanye West in a comedy club and INXS in a Chinese restaurant. I watched Emilie, my seven-months-pregnant sister-in-law, sing Melanie’s “Brand New Key” onstage at Stripparaoke night at the Devils Point, a teensy, low-ceilinged club on a triangular lot well outside Portland’s downtown, while a topless dancer worked the pole next to her. Afterward, the dancer — whose bare stomach featured a tattoo of a vividly horrible shark and the word REDRUM — gave Emilie a sweet hug.

  And…

  Chopsticks III: How Can Be Lounge is located between a heavy-equipment rental shop and a Hanson pipe factory. It’s the kind of awful nightspot where if your watch was broken, you could keep time by the diminishing height of the melting heap of ice dumped in the urinal in the men’s room. When the heap of ice read 10:00, Chopsticks III was jammed with 50 people or more: groups of women out for a night away; a dwarf with an Afro who submitted his power ballads under the stage name Micro; a group of four buddies whose Monday-night karaoke club requires them to sing any song a friend challenges them to, blind. Also, a troupe of puppeteers from a local children’s theater, their snakes, ducks and cowgirls laid carefully across a table in the back of the bar.

  This was puppet karaoke.

  And my favorite…

  Correction: January 23, 2013

  An earlier version of this article  referred incorrectly to a puppet that appeared in a show at a local karaoke club. It is known as Señor Serpiente, not Señora Serpiente.

• “Kansas arts agencies have been on hold several months, waiting for a clue as to how state dollars allocated by the 2012 Legislature might translate into an economic boon to arts programs.”
• The recent public arts funding update had some grim news from the UK. Here’s one possible reason: an annual study reports that donations to charity fell by a whopping one fifth in 2011-2, though the eye-popping numbers have come in for some scrutiny. Whether true or even just a little bit true, politicians’ assurances that private giving would make up for cuts to Arts Council England and other public bodies have seemingly turned out quite empty indeed.
• Isaac Butler makes some very good points on the copyright implications of the news that Disney is buying Lucasfilm for over $4 billion:
  

  What this means is that Disney is hoarding up the closest thing 20th and 21st century culture has to folk tales and mythology, and locking them up in a safe where we can’t touch it without getting sued. As artists, we should be deeply troubled by this.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Victoria Hamilton has moved on from her post as founding executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Why we need arts policy: multi-millionaire financial mogul, founder of a mysterious firm that makes its money executing high-speed trades to exploit market arbitrage opportunities, has left his day job to focus instead on establishing “free art schools in Anguilla, the Dominican Republic, Pennsylvania, Sri Lanka and Thailand” to teach poor students the craft of photorealistic painting. Said donor thinks this is going to “change the art world” and is developing luxury hotels to put alongside the schools.

IN THE FIELD

• It’s not just nonprofits that have suffered from Hurricane Sandy; Broadway’s losses are estimated at $8.5 million (Book of Mormon still sold out though). Things are rapidly improving in Chelsea, though they are not out of the woods. The Art Dealers Association of America, the New York State Council on the Humanities, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Lambent Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts have all stepped up to help out, and there is a more general New Jersey Recovery Fund as well.
• Cool post from CEOs for Cities listing ten (relatively) simple creative placemaking ideas aimed at enlivening city streets. And Toronto-based Artscape has developed an online toolkit for DIY creative placemaking (h/t Greg Baeker, via Thomas Cott).
• It seems like there’s recently been a spate of articles plumbing the depths of musicians’ finances to a level we rarely see. Franz Nicolay (indie rocker, formerly of the Hold Steady, briefly a coworker of mine) has always been remarkably open about such matters, and a recent blog post of his lays out exactly how much he made (and didn’t) during his years of highest public profile and since.

BIG IDEAS

• I was totally going to write a post-election blog post that was all like, “are arts organizations the Republican Party of the creative economy?” and then Trevor O’Donnell went and did it for me.
• Michael Kaiser has caught a fair amount of flak from arts managers of my generation before, but I suspect they’ll be pleased with this column of his.
• More evidence of Nina Simon’s awesomeness: she’s designing a You Can’t Do That in Museums summer camp (tagline: “You Can. We Will.”) to be held in Santa Cruz next July.
  

  This camp will be a 2.5 day event at which participants work in teams with pre-selected permanent collection objects to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences. If you’ve ever wanted to design an object-based exhibit that really pushed the boundaries, this is the event for you. Registration will be $150 and by application only. We will also offer a half-day series of workshops on July 10 for a wider audience for $50. Yes you can sleepover at the museum to heighten the insanity and reduce the cost. No you don’t have to be a museum professional to participate. Yes you can apply now. Please do.

• And here’s Nina’s TEDxSantaCruz talk on opening up museums (with her own as Exhibit A).

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Last year, I went to the Independent Sector conference on scholarship from the Ford Foundation and had a great experience learning from my peers across the nonprofit space. I wasn’t able to attend this year, but Nonprofit Law Blog’s Gene Takagi went and brings us this report in two parts.
• National Arts Strategies is posting a bunch of videos in connection with the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders – interviews with the young leaders themselves, as well as more established folk like Diane Ragsdale.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Is there a link between creativity and mental illness? A new study suggests yes, but this fantastically thorough analysis by Keith Sawyer urges skepticism of the results.
• The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation has released a report recapping a 2011 convening called “Strengthening the Bones.”
• Phil Buchanan speaks the hard truth: “For Markets For Good to result in meaningful change, a big part of the emphasis must be foundations stepping up and supporting the development of good, credible data and robust nonprofit performance management systems.”
• The Foundation Center has re-launched IssueLab, a repository for research of all kinds within the nonprofit sector.
• The first studies funded through the NEA Art Works: Research program are starting to come out. Here’s one about the link between arts participation and civic engagement in the 2002 General Social Survey. As always, correlation does not equal causation.
• Maria Rosario Jackson’s latest (and, presumably, last) publication for Leveraging Investments in Creativity explores artist-driven spaces in marginalized communities.
• Guy Yedwab demonstrates how it’s possible to create useful graphs from Fractured Atlas fiscal sponsorship data. Good call too to create budgets in the same format that you’ll have to report them in (for most people, this is the Cultural Data Project or something like it).

• Judilee Reed, formerly the executive director of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, joins the Surdna Foundation as director of its Thriving Cultures program. With Reed’s departure, LINC – which was designed from its inception in 2003 as a ten-year program – begins the process of counting down the clock. I suspect it’s no accident that the funder collaborative that makes up ArtPlace, which shares many of its participating foundations with LINC, is gearing up just as LINC is winding down.
• Helena Fruscio is the new Creative Economy Industry Director for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, replacing Jason Schupbach, who had become Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts last year. Fruscio was formerly director of Berkshire Creative; you can read an interview with her here.

ON PHILANTHROPY

• Lucy Bernholz points us to a database of online giving marketplaces. And explains why asking philanthropists to fund core public services (like roads and bridges) is a very bad idea.
• This Q&A with ArtPlace director Carol Coletta represents the clearest explication of that initiative’s goals and strategies that I’ve yet seen. Kudos to Regina Mahone for asking some good questions.
• Hey, remember the $3 million program-related investment that Artspace got from the Ford Foundation? Well, that’s nothing compared to the $24 million in tax credits it just landed for its PS109 project with El Barrio in East Harlem, New York City. And how’s this for impact?
  

  While named above, one last shout out to ArtPlace, which provided the final philanthropic investment before our tax credit application was reviewed.  Without ArtPlace’s timely and significant support, our application would almost certainly have been denied.  As such, it is also fair to say that ArtPlace’s [$1 million] investment was essential to securing an additional $24 million investment in the arts.

• What? A private foundation actually asking its constituents what its program strategy should be?

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• In addition to Createquity’s Grantmakers in the Arts coverage, there’s also Mike Henry, Marete Wester, Pam Korza, Emily Peck, and the official conference bloggers, Barry Hessenius, Richard Kessler, and Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer. A number of videos from the conference are now online as well.
• Marete Wester reports from the National Arts Policy Roundtable in Aspen, CO.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture has released an economic impact study on the local music industry.
• The NEA has a new research report out on artist workforce statistics.
• Whoa! The Gates Foundation is funding the Pew Research Center to conduct a new three-year study on public libraries to the tune of $1.4 million. That’s some expensive research!
• I liked these lists of “intrinsic” benefits of arts education from Elliott Eisner, Lois Hetland, and Ellen Winner, via Americans for the Arts’s Kristen Engebretsen. One that I don’t see fully articulated on either list is the ability to question the assumptions and frames of conventional thinking. I became deeply aware of this during my experience in business school, where most of my classmates did not have a meaningful background or experience in the arts. While they could run rings around me creating discounted cash flow statements, I often sensed a discomfort around ambiguity and alternative frames.
• Great blog post from GiveWell demonstrating how labor-intensive evaluating impact (even without engaging in any primary data collection) truly is. The implication being, of course, that “rating agencies” that don’t put in this kind of time aren’t truly measuring impact.

IN THE FIELD

• Rosetta Thurman has a thoughtful series about four types of nonprofit leaders we need now. Meet the True Believer, the Ruthless Innovator, the Ambassador of Diversity, and the Courageous Advocate. Rosetta also has a sharp new blog theme to complement her sharp intellect.
• On the Art Works blog, Scott Provancher shares some of the background behind the new local crowdfunding platform, Power2Give, that his Arts & Science Council of Charlotte-Mecklenberg has developed.
• National Arts Strategies has been on fire lately. Fresh off the first meeting of its 100 CEOs, the capacity building organization released, in collaboration with the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University, this list of 21 must-reads for arts managers covering topics like leadership, strategy, and organizational culture. Any first-time executive director should definitely take these home. And even better, earlier this month NAS announced that its Business of Arts and Culture seminars will be name-your-price starting in 2012, with National Arts Strategies covering any shortfall in program costs.
• Speaking of all-but-free leadership training programs for arts professionals, the Rockwood Leadership Institute is looking for applicants for its Fellowship for Leaders in Arts and Culture. Hurry up – nominations close November 2!
• Michael Kaiser brings up a good point in discussions of culturally specific organizations:
  

  Individual donors are the bedrock of American arts funding, giving more than 60% of the money received by arts organizations. Yet the average African American, Latino, Asian American or Native American arts organization receives less than 10% of its funding from individual donors.

  To me, this is more evidence that structural inequities in our society are at the root of inequities in cultural budgets. During one of the sessions I attended at GIA, Eugene Rodriguez from Los Cenzontles spoke of how difficult it was to cultivate individual donors for his Latino cultural center serving San Pablo, CA. What with the vast disparities in wealth between white households and black and Latino households, culturally specific organizations have had to either make do with fewer resources or rely on the generosity of white people (or foundations controlled by white people) in order to get by. It’s hard to see how that changes without more wealth creation in communities of color.

• Can’t stop listening to/watching the treasure trove of jazz performance videos from the avant scene in New York City featured on Search & Restore’s new website. This is music that’s always deserved a wider audience but, for so long, has lacked the institutional support or grander vision to make it happen. Props to S&R’s Adam Schatz for taking things a step in the right direction.

(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.

We also touched on the Pro-Am Revolution and other topics. You can see the full set of videos here.