On to the news:

YOU’RE FIRED

• The orchestra world has been shaken to the core this month. The largest institution yet to face such troubles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has filed for bankruptcy (the restructuring kind, not the “we’re throwing in the towel” kind). On the one hand, I am sure that the Fabulous Philadelphians’ financial troubles are very real. On the other, it does strike me as curious not only that (as others have noted) an organization with a $140 million endowment would file for bankruptcy, but that the move precedes the announcement of a $160 million fundraising campaign to save the orchestra. Andrew Taylor digs into the bankruptcy filing docs.
• The Syracuse (NY) Symphony Orchestra has filed for Chapter 7 (we’re throwing in the towel) bankruptcy, after canceling the rest of its season a week earlier. Looks like it’s lights out for this one, not to mention the SSO’s 95 musicians and staff.
• Albuquerque’s New Mexico Symphony has filed for Chapter 7 as well. 80 musicians and staffers will lose their jobs.
• On the plus side, the Detroit Symphony musicians are back to work, albeit six months later. The new three-year contract calls for 25% cuts in salaries (to $79,000 base pay, hardly slave wages) and additional funds available for optional community-service work. The orchestra’s size will be reduced from 96 to 85 musicians.
• The artistically successful but financially troubled Intiman Theatre  in Seattle has cancelled the rest of its season due to money problems. Its artistic director, Kate Whoriskey, has now left as well.
• The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival is kaput after 17 years in operation, making it the second major Baltimore arts organization to fold since the start of the Great Recession (after the Baltimore Opera). The article contains this quote that would make Tyler Cowen smile: “‘We started as a non-Equity company, and if we had dropped our contract, it would have cut our costs,’ Toran said. ‘But that’s exactly what we weren’t going to do. You want to pay your actors, just like you pay lawyers and doctors and teachers. Our goal wasn’t survival at any cost.'” So because they wanted to pay the actors so badly, they decided to give them fewer work opportunities?
• The New York City Opera, two years after spending the 2008-09 season inactive and raiding most of its endowment to stay alive, is facing a possible strike and the delay of its season announcement for next year.
• Pittsburgh arts groups are exploring increased collaboration as a survival strategy.
• Meant to write about this a while ago, but Pepsi Refresh has relaunched with a different process and set of rules after complaints of gaming the system last year.

I QUIT

• Ellen Rudolf is stepping down as longtime director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures Program, which she had initiated with the foundation 17 years ago.
• Jeremy Nowak, a noted advocate for the power of the arts in revitalizing communities, will no longer be the President and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund – for good reason: he’s about to become the new head of the William Penn Foundation. (via GIA News)
• Nina Simon, author, blogger, and museum design consultant extraordinaire, is quitting her consulting and speaking business to be the new Executive Director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA. Thankfully, she is not quitting her blog.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

• Whoa…a donor’s estate in Bermuda is withdrawing an £82 million donation to Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival for no reason at all, apparently.
• Chad Bauman riffs on the recent cuts to DC’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission from a marketer’s perspective.
• Michael Kaiser takes a dim view of the trends in corporate giving to the arts. Here are some numbers from the Foundation Center.
• Americans Gave a Lot Less in the Recession Than Experts Predicted, reads the Chronicle of Philanthropy headline. Among other things, this story is a pretty big black eye for Giving USA, the annual report on individual giving that had estimated that donor activity was holding steady or barely dropping during the same period.
• Meanwhile, foundations gave (slightly) less in 2010 than 2009, despite the fact that their assets increased by 5%.
• Why don’t more foundations publicly explain the rationale behind their gifts?
• It looks like the growth of new 501(c)(3)s has finally slowed (and the numbers will actually drop considerably once the IRS releases the names of the nonprofits whose status it has revoked as a result of nonfiling). Of course, this hasn’t stopped composer Philip Glass from founding a new festival in Carmel Valley, CA.

SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE

• My colleagues at Fractured Atlas have a new publication laying out what the health insurance reform law means for artists.
• A new publication from the Boekman Foundation in Amsterdam: Cultural Policy Update. And check out this fab cultural policy blog salon put together by my friends at Emerging Arts Professionals – San Francisco Bay Area, featuring an admirably diverse range of voices.
• Not surprisingly, the social media cognoscenti are all abuzz about the new report from the Knight Foundation, “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks.” Beth Kanter is all over it here.
• CEOs for Cities reports on the residential clustering patterns of the “young and the restless” – college educated 25-34-year-olds. Seems cities’ “close-in neighborhoods” are more important than ever.
• Partners for Livable Communities reports on strategies for arts organization outreach to senior and immigrant audiences.
• Shannon Litzenberger is back with a massive report on cultural policy in the Windy City.
• Won’t you help Devon with her epic Facebook experiment? (It begins tomorrow.)

SEE YOU IN COURT

• David Byrne has come to a settlement with former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who had used the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” without permission during Crist’s unsuccessful campaign for Senate last year. (Seems a rather auspicious choice, no?) The settlement terms apparently included Charlie recording this apology video, which actually almost makes me feel sorry for him.
• Matthew Guerrieri reports on a dispute between the Music Publishers Association (UK) and the International Music Score Library Project.

BEAUTY CONTESTS

• Bubble sort as demonstrated by Hungarian folk dance.
• Eric Whitacre is back with the Virtual Choir 2.0, this time performing his “Sleep” and featuring over 2000 performers. Sounds great, but fair warning: the video is even cheesier than in the last one.
• To draw in new audiences, an orchestra plays for cows.
• I find a lot of public art less than inspiring, but I have to admit, this is pretty awesome:
  

  After more than a decade of disagreement, Berliners have settled on a monument to celebrate German reunification and the 1989 peaceful revolution: a giant, rocking dish.

  The 55-metre, 330-tonne glittering steel wing can hold up to 1,400 people at any one time, but it needs at least 20 people to get it moving.

  The monument to unity is called Citizens in Motion, and is apparently all about people coming together. If you want to make it move, you have to get a group together and all go in a particular direction.

As you might have heard, public funding for the arts has been under pressure at the local and especially state levels ever since the recession hit a few years ago. This year, those pressures have spread to the federal government as well, and during the recent negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress to agree on a budget for the remainder of the current fiscal year and avert a government shutdown, there was worry that the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arts in Education program at the US Department of Education, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would face some of the heaviest burden in the drive to cut $39 billion from the current year’s budget.

As it turned out, the arts did suffer as a result of the cuts – but all things considered, it could have been worse. According to Mike Boehm’s excellent roundup at the Los Angeles Times’s Culture Monster blog, the National Endowment for the Arts‘s budget was given a haircut of 7.5% from this year’s approved level of $167.5 million to $155 million. That’s the same amount as was funneled to the Endowment two years ago, excluding one-time stimulus funding, but still below the level from 1981. The National Endowment for the Humanities, whose budget has been informally tied to the NEA’s for a few years now, saw the same cut. A reduction at the Institute for Museum and Library Services was more serious, from $282.2 million to $237.9 million – or 15.7%. Meanwhile, the US DOE’s Arts in Education program, which had been zeroed out in the temporary continuing resolution passed earlier this year due to a misconception among lawmakers that it represented an earmark, was partially reinstated at a level of $25.5 million – 36% below the original appropriation of $40 million for this year.

Other arts-and-culture-related line items were affected as follows:

• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides partial funding to both NPR and PBS, saw its budget essentially unchanged at $445 million as a result of negotiations. This was a huge loss for conservatives, who had pushed a bill defunding CPB entirely through the House of Representatives earlier this year, only to see it go nowhere in the Senate. NPR had come under attack from the right wing last year after conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Juan Williams was fired for making remarks perceived as anti-Muslim.
• The Smithsonian, another cultural institution that had drawn negative attention from Republicans as a result of a controversial exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, also did just fine, retaining level funding at $761 million.
• On the other hand, Washington arts groups are scrambling because of a steep, seemingly mean-spirited midyear cut to the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs grant program. The agency’s appropriation dropped from $9.5 million to $2.5 million, a 74% drop. The NCACA money had distributed large grants to a limited number of organizations, representing nearly a fifth of some grantees’ budgets, but only two-one-hundredths of one percent of the total savings achieved by the spending bill.
• Two more federal expenditures on the arts, State Department funding for cultural exchange programs and funding for the National Gallery of Art, took modest hits of 5.5% and 7.2% respectively. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts saw its funding remain steady.

Meanwhile, at the state level, the last couple of months have been a mixed bag. Three state arts agencies that had been at risk of elimination or drastic cuts look to be in good shape after significant local advocacy efforts on their behalf. First up, the Kansas Senate voted to override Governor Sam Brownback’s executive order to eliminate the Kansas Arts Commission last month and reinstated funding for the agency at the current year’s levels. The House’s version of the budget still zeroes out funding, however, so arts advocates still have their work cut out for them in the Sunflower State. Second, both the Washington State House and Senate have passed budgets preserving $1.1 million in funding for the Washington State Arts Commission, which Governor Christine Gregoire had proposed to cut to $250,000 and eliminate as an independent agency. Finally, both legislative houses in the Palmetto State have proposed budgets calling for essentially level funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission, in defiance of Governor Nikki Haley’s attempt to eliminate the agency.

On the other hand, pressures continue elsewhere in the country. The news is not good for the Texas Commission on the Arts, which has been taking quite a bit of heat this year. After Governor Rick Perry suggested eliminating the arts council in his State of the State address (but not in his budget), the Texas House passed a budget that zeroes out funding for the TCA. It seems the best case scenario for the TCA now is the 38% cut that was proposed in the Senate. And now two new states are on the chopping block for significant arts cuts. Governor Scott Walker, in his spare time between presiding over the most explosive labor relations battle in the country, has proposed the elimination of the Wisconsin Arts Board as a separate agency and a 68% cut for arts funding by the state. And the New Hampshire House has eliminated support for the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts entirely in the budget it has sent to the Senate in that state. The NHSCA’s state appropriation had already been cut almost in half over the past two years.

You can keep up to date with the legislative appropriations process on a state-by-state basis via the Americans for the Arts State Arts Action Network website, which also has links to the arts advocacy organizations in each state.