“The Blue Marble,” by flickr user Chris Jupin

Every December since 2009, Createquity has compiled the Top Ten Arts Policy Stories of the Year, ranking the impact of key issues from a global perspective. With the end of this year coinciding with the last rays of Createquity’s sunset, we didn’t want to leave our loyal readers hanging – and so we’ve decided to do our traditional roundup looking back not just on 2017, but on the whole ten years that Createquity has been around!

It turns out that a lot can change in a decade. While selecting which stories are “most important” inherently involves some editorial guesswork, we have tried to use some semblance of a formal methodology, incorporating criteria like how many people were affected by a given story, how deeply, for how long, and how much of that impact was specific to the arts? Below is our selection of the Top Ten Arts Stories of the Decade, compiled by members of our editorial team with individual authorship indicated at the end of each item.

1. New tech and media swallow the world whole

When Apple founder Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he touted three key innovations: its blending of an iPod media player with a smartphone; its widescreen, multi-touch interface; and its internet friendliness. All three proved pivotal in the subsequent decade’s tech revolution. Apple’s iOS quickly stoked competition from Google’s Android OS to put the “internet in every pocket” of global citizens (now in 2 billion+ and counting), in turn catalyzing the hothouse growth of industries including audiobooks and podcasts and electronic games (while helping kill off others such as compact cameras). The proliferation of social media platforms – including Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Tumblr, and Instagram – transformed networking and distribution patterns for creative professionals and their audiences, dramatically reshaping how we access and filter information in our daily lives.

All the while, internet service providers have been keeping pace with phone and app makers in their quest to continually increase broadband speed and access. The result? A media-streaming revolution that has sparked its own race for consumer dollars between corporate giants including Netflix, Apple, Disney, 21st Century Fox, AT&T (via Amazon – wait – make that Time Warner) and Sony, each trying to outmaneuver each other in both content creation and consumer distribution. Depending on your view, the Peak TV phenomenon is a boon for watchers, an ominous power-grab, or a societal antidote to the arts themselves. But then, television is so 20th century. Enter the new tech art forms: virtual reality and augmented reality are competing among global users to enhance everything from ballet performances to gaming on the go.

All the above innovations are underscored by the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence itself. As machines show creative capabilities to rival those of humans, AI projects are demonstrating mastery of tasks ranging from besting champs at complex games to self-driving cars; from creating lip-syncing videos to teaching salsa lessons. Advances in AI now enable Google’s Translate service to crank out translations in literature that are almost indistinguishable from those of humans. The excitement of these developments is tempered by growing fears of rampant automation and machines displacing artists, even taking over the world.

Regardless of how it turns out, the ubiquity and scope of Silicon Valley’s wonders qualify as the single most impactful arts story of the past decade. Discourse on the intersection between technology and the arts has often tended toward the trite (remember how QR codes were supposed to revolutionize…something?), but we see the relationship as something far deeper and more fundamental to the human experience every day. For good or ill, the disruptions of New Tech – and the mysteries of where they are headed – remain on a path of constant acceleration. –Jack Crager

2. China rises as a global power in arts and entertainment  

In 2006, the Asia Times Online published an article lamenting that China, despite its ballooning economy, lacked influence in the cultural sphere. Today – thanks to that ballooning – the story is quite different: in fine art, film, gaming and even music, China has arrived. The country holds steady at third place worldwide in the global art market (behind the United States and the United Kingdom) with an 18% share. The surge in art collecting by mainland Chinese was first noted in 2011, and now that China has eclipsed the United States in its number of billionaires, the trend will surely continue upward, especially as younger collectors begin to take on the (art) world. In July 2016, the Taikang life insurance company (run by the founder of Guardian, China’s first government-run auction house) became Sotheby’s largest shareholder, augmenting China’s influence in this sphere. We’re not just talking the realm of the super-rich: Beijing’s National Museum was ranked the world’s most-visited museum in 2016. In fine art, trends have tacked toward consumption of imported works, but elsewhere China shows major gains in production of original content. On the silver screen, Ernst & Young’s 2012 predictions that China would be the world’s biggest film industry by 2020 seem to be manifesting ahead of schedule. In November, Chinese box office revenue surpassed $7.5 billion, and a nationalist, homegrown film – not a Hollywood export – fueled it: Wolf Warrior 2 is the second-highest grossing movie of all time in a single market (behind 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and we can expect to see more of the same, given China’s plans for a new $2 billion film studio in Chongqing and its recent history of buying up big players such as Dick Clark Productions and Legendary Entertainment. On smaller screens, in 2017 China overtook the U.S. as “gamer capital of the world,” with global revenues hitting $100 billion, thanks largely to smartphones. Especially notable is that 93% of all money spent by Chinese gamers go to titles developed by Chinese-based companies. Even China’s music market, which historically has been small, is showing robust growth in the world of streaming, and Western labels are looking to China as a new potential market. The Cultural Development Action Plan for 2016-2020, part of the Belt and Road initiative announced in 2013, was released earlier this year, providing further direction to these increased cultural opportunities.

So far China and the Trump administration have not been fast friends. Yet for U.S. companies, the allure of a untapped market is hard to resist: Nintendo, Google, Apple and Hollywood each have already made concessions to Chinese interests as they vie for a piece of the pie. Some in Congress are concerned, and for good reason: China ranks 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, and its airtight Great Firewall includes bans on most social media networks and news sites that reflect a negative image of the country. (Createquity has previously covered China’s repressive tactics including virtual borders, film regulations, and cultural censorship of television and the arts.) China is a country of 1.4 billion people – more than four times the population of the U.S. and twice that of Europe – and, yes, there is (a lot of) money to be made. But at what cost?

The implications of China’s growth will be felt first by China itself – we can expect a type of lost generation as it all comes to a head, especially considering that 40% of this socialist society currently lives on $5.50 a day. The implications for the rest of us will follow: the impact of China as a global force in entertainment will affect business models, jobs, language, tolerance for human rights – even creativity itself – in ways we cannot yet imagine. –Clara Inés Schuhmacher

3. Democracies around the world curb freedom of expression

Events of the last decade have demonstrated that free expression for artists and media is a critical indicator of the strength (and struggles) of a country’s democracy. In recent years we’ve seen an upward trend in the suppression of artistic freedom of expression throughout the world, with ostensibly democratic governments headed by authoritarian leaders attempting to exert tighter control of the media and use their roles as financial supporters of the arts to control the creation and content of various art forms, all as part of a broader strategy to consolidate and maintain power. Under the increasingly iron-fisted rule of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has forged a track record of suppressing free expression, including targeting cultural dissidents through state-run television. These trends will likely continue should Putin “win” his election as president for a fourth term extending to 2024, as is widely expected. Meanwhile in Turkey, a failed coup resulted in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shutting down 29 publishing houses and ramping up his jailing of journalists who are critical of the government. Erdoğan’s reaction to the coup continues an alarming trend toward authoritarian rule since his rise to national power in 2003 – further amplified last spring by his (contested) narrow victory in a national referendum granting the president new, sweeping powers.

Although Russia and Turkey are the clearest examples of democracies going down the drain over the past ten years, several other countries are veering gradually or rapidly in the same direction. In Hungary, the government has continued to place tighter restrictions on the media since right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s election in 2010. The Hungarian Academy of Art (MMA) became a state institution in 2011, exerting control over governmental support of the arts and other state-run cultural institutions. In 2016, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed new media laws giving his government the authority to appoint the heads of public television and radio (which has been met with various forms of resistance); the government has also tried to control the dominant narrative around historical events through its support of museums. Venezuela’s political and economic unrest has resulted in President Nicolas Maduro canceling a government-sponsored tour of the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gustavo Dudamel, a native Venezuelan musician trained through the country’s renowned El Sistema program. Dudamel had recently become more critical of the government’s repressive tactics, including the shooting of young Venezuelan violist Armando Cañizales. In Israel, Miri Regev continues to use her role as the Minister of Culture and Sports to support artists who demonstrate loyalty to her nationalist message (though she’s discovering the limits to the power of her office). Even in the U.S., the election of Donald Trump has triggered concerns that the president would use the office to intimidate political opponents, including artists and journalists, just after the previous two administrations amassed unprecedented powers to spy on American citizens. The lesson? Democracy is more fragile than we thought, and the voices of creators are crucial to keeping it intact. –Ruth Mercado-Zizzo

4. Artists and audiences get caught up in terrorism’s wake

During the past decade the global impact of terrorism by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or Dae’esh ‘داعش’) – as well as other groups including Boko Haram, TAK, Ansar Dine, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda, plus numerous far-right and lone-wolf actors – reverberated throughout the arts community, which has endured attacks on tangible cultural heritage, on free speech, and on artists and their fans. The destruction of antiquities has been particularly extensive and in many cases absolute, with 2015 being an especially tragic year for heritage crimes from Mosul Museum to Sabratha, Nimrud, Hatra, Palmyra, and beyond. The problem is complex and it extends beyond destruction: a 2015 report found that ISIS was taking 20% or more of the revenue (that’s hundreds of millions in USD) from the systematic resale of blood antiquities on the black market in the Western art trade (although some believe this is an overestimation.) The impact on Syria recalls similar attacks on cultural heritage in Iraq, Yemen, and Mali; in the later, a perpetrator pled guilty and was for the first time ever sentenced by the International Criminal Court for war crimes against cultural heritage. ISIS has even incorporated Hollywood-style screenwriting and cinematographic techniques to augment its recruitment tools. In response, it turns out that the world cares very much about its shared heritage: archaeologists are racing to digitize the Middle East’s historical sites before they are destroyed, and in 2016, France and the United Arab Emirates announced a $100 million Cultural Heritage protection fund. Most recently, CBS ordered the television series “Blood and Treasure” on the subject for summer 2019.

But terrorists’ crusades against free speech have extended well beyond archeological sites, directly targeting the lives of creators and their audiences. Aggressions have included the assassination of a Somalian comedian in 2012, the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in February 2015, and the 2016 murder of Amjad Sabri, one of Pakistan’s most famous and respected musicians. But it is the attacks on large groups people – enjoying themselves in cultural spaces – that have most shattered our sense of reality. The past few years have seen cultural venues joining sports stadiums, churches and mosques, open-air markets and transportation hubs as regular targets for terrorist attacks and other mass shootings around the world. Years of seemingly relentless attacks have taken place at the Shingar Cinema in India, a British cultural council in Afghanistan, the Century Aurora movie theater in Colorado, La Bataclan music hall in Paris, National Bardo Museum in Tunis, Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival in Las Vegas, and sadly more.

The world has responded in a couple of ways. One reaction has been to hunker down: train staff in crisis response, step up police presence at major museums, purchase Terrorism Risk Insurance, and hold international conferences on culture and terrorism. The alternative has been to open up. Following the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon, several local museums opened free as places of respite for the community. The Tunis museum reopened to the public just 12 days after the attack there and some of the looted museums in Yemen became shelters for displaced residents. Amidst and despite these acts of terror, artists and their institutions continue to gather and to create work – supporting the United Nations’ 2015 Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, and each of us. –Shawn Lent

5. The Great Recession wreaks havoc on the global economy

Though many of its most acute effects have now waned, the Great Recession cast a gloomy backdrop behind the other key news stories of the first half of the decade. Driven by fevered investment in questionable assets such as subprime mortgage loans, the money-making party stopped with the failure of financial giants such as Lehman Brothers, AIG, and others in the fall of 2008. The fallout slammed an abrupt correction on private investment and dampened funding for arts organizations in both nonprofit and for-profit sectors. During the downturn arts council funding in many states took a nosedive, and those in Kansas and South Carolina, among others, survived near-death experiences. To their credit, the arts and nonprofit sectors responded with a series of creative solutions and financial adaptations. And in many ways the recession is now past-tense, given the continuing U.S. economic recovery, the soaring stock market, downward-ticking unemployment, and the stabilizing effect of reforms. Yet other remnants of the downturn – such as the permalance labor market, the stagnation of wages, and ongoing fiscal battles – simply represent a “new normal.” Some experts point out that the recovery has been historically weak and sluggish and that recent unemployment figures actually reflect growing cultural disparity. Others warn that prevailing U.S. political priorities – namely the recently enacted Republican tax bill – portend reduced charity giving and cuts to housing for artists, while the specter of a ballooning deficit threatens the ability of the government to respond to the next economic downturn. Amid all the economic and political hoopla, one thing is clear: given the cyclic nature of history, there is no reason to believe that the Great Recession couldn’t happen again. –JC

6. Racial equity becomes a rallying cry for arts policy and philanthropy

The past ten years have produced a flurry of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the arts, prompted by the efforts of artists of color and the communities that support them. These efforts have gained significant ground thanks to grantmakers restructuring their criteria to address long-standing inequities in the arts ecosystem. Foundations and national agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Council England adopted new policies, resulting in organizations attempting to diversify their staffs and promote wider representation in race, cultural background, gender, and sexual orientation – onstage, backstage, and on screen. The results of these efforts can be hard to gauge: for example, despite Hollywood waking up to its “diversity problem” and an #oscarssowhite movement that contributed to the 2017 Academy Awards honoring the most diverse pool of contenders to date, there’s little evidence yet that it’s more than just a blip on the radar, and 2018 is predicted to be #oscarsstillsowhite. And it’s not just about the film industry: funding gaps continue to be a problem in rural areas and among communities of color across the arts sector. The increased interest in racial equity and social justice takes place against a backdrop of larger cultural shifts in the United States and worldwide: the past decade has witnessed both the election of first African-American president and a sharp increase in racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiment. In the U.S., the Black Lives Matter movement has strongly influenced conversations about racial equity, while in Canada and Australia that issue centers more on reconciliation with Indigenous populations – particularly prominent this year during a series of controversies surrounding cultural appropriation in publishing and journalism.

There’s still a long way to go, especially considering how growing nationalism impacts equity in the arts, and divergent views remain about what constitutes cultural equity based on the art produced or funded by any given organization or agency. But many artists, organizations, and policymakers seem to be ready to disrupt the status quo in ways that they did not ten years ago, with debates on equity in the blogosphere and funding policies for equity and inclusion marking a shift toward de-centering whiteness and acknowledging the schools of thought and traditions of culturally diverse arts practitioners. –Lauren Warnecke and Fari Nzinga

7. Asian governments make huge investments in cultural infrastructure

The past decade has seen substantial fluctuation in governmental arts funding around the world with developing countries, particularly throughout Asia, spending big on modern-day cultural palaces and sweeping public initiatives. New initiatives include a $27 billion mixed-use development in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; a $2.3 billion development of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong; the building of a $2 billion film studio in Chongqing, China; and a state-funded Artist Welfare program in South Korea, which insured nearly 24,000 resident artists. (Some of China’s other investments are discussed in item #2 above.) This largesse occurred against a backdrop of Great-Recession-induced cuts in arts funding in traditionally generous Western Europe; in particular, state arts appropriations in Holland and England were cut by 25% and 22% respectively, with other European countries following close behind. To the south, Australia cut 70% of grants to individual artists as part of a stressful period of upheaval in that country’s arts funding structure, and Brazil got rid of its Ministry of Culture altogether, albeit briefly. One contrasting bright spot is Canada, which saw a doubling of its Arts Council funding to $1.9 billion from 2016 to 2021 under the administration of Justin Trudeau.

Many governments have turned to unique funding initiatives to ensure that their tightened purses are being spent appropriately (see Italy and Brazil’s voucher programs and the United Kingdom’s much-debated Quality Metrics program). It should also be noted that declaring winners and losers based on national arts funding alone tells an incomplete story, as some of the new heavy hitters have been accused of inhumane labor practices and harsh government crackdowns while some of the countries that have scaled back have seen increases in private sponsorship. –Andrew Anzel

8. The never-ending battle over net neutrality continues to not end

When Net Neutrality first landed on Createquity’s Top Ten Stories of 2010, the angle was “this is a story that is still being told.” We’re still in the telling. This contentious debate has polarized the tech-policy world since the term “network neutrality” was coined by Tim Wu in 2003, and it shows no signs of letting up, especially after the Federal Communications Commission’s recent repeal of regulations put in place by the Obama administration that were supposed to have laid the issue to rest once and for all.

Here’s how the battle lines are drawn: the pro-net neutrality camp calls for a free, fast and fair internet, where everyone gets equal access to everything. This side argues the internet is a basic human right and a critical tool for social movements, small businesses and start-ups. (Content providers from Netflix to Etsy and Kickstarter tend to be in this camp.) Opponents (usually broadband providers, like AT&T and Verizon) argue the internet should be left to free-market forces. The story begins in 2005, when Bush-era FCC Chairman Michael Powell first articulated a policy of network neutrality. This policy was tested the following year, when the FCC ordered Telco to stop blocking VoIP, and light-ish regulation followed, with the FCC going after AT&T and Apple, MetroPCS, and Verizon, among other efforts. In 2008, the White House switched hands, and the Obama-era FCC delivered major wins for the pro camp: in 2010, it introduced the Open Internet Order (with new guidelines prohibiting discrimination on “wired” services) and in 2015, following a lost lawsuit to Verizon, it voted along party lines in favor of classifying broadband Internet as a public utility. This was vote hailed as historic by advocates of a fair, fast and open Internet and many considered the battle won. (Createquity’s coverage of Obama-era net neutrality stories ranges from victories for proponents to appeals-court reversals to debates within the administration over policy.)

Then, of course, came the election of Donald Trump. Just days past his confirmation in early 2017, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai began rolling back the Obama-era regulations, and in November, Pai released a plan to repeal the 2015 ruling classifying broadband as a public utility. On December 14, despite fake comments and calls to delay (from its own Commissioners, Senators, and the City of New York), the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 rules. As before, the vote was along party lines – and hailed as historic, this time by advocates of deregulation.

So what now? In the short term, expect a slew of lawsuits and Congressional action. But here’s the thing: this is 2017, not 2003. Today we’re in a Google-Amazon-Facebook oligopoly world, and Big Tech has been conspicuously quiet this time around, suggesting they may be rich enough not to care. Some, like award-winning jazz musician Maria Schneider, say net neutrality be damned: we’ve already lost big to Google, and companies had already been denying us content access even under the Obama-era guidelines. And let’s not ignore the regulatory gap created by the AT&T vs. the Federal Trade Commission case, which rules that the FTC is banned from regulating a company if they are, even in a small way, regulated by the FCC. If there’s one thing that both sides can agree on, it’s that the internet is increasingly central to our lives – and the more it matters, and the more money there is to be made, the more we’ll fight about it. –CIS

9. The (near-)death of arts journalism

“It’s not that the book critic goes before the city hall reporter. It’s that the book critic goes before the guy who covers high school hockey,” wrote Jed Gottlieb in a comprehensive review on the state of arts criticism last January. Buzz about the impending demise of arts journalism started gaining steam around 2008 (though troubling signs were in evidence well before that). A flurry of publications – ranging from newspapers like the San Jose Mercury News and the Houston Chronicle to magazines like Time and Newsweek – have slashed A&E sections due to declining subscriptions, free-falling ad revenues, and questions about the relevance of arts criticism in the age of social media, when seemingly everyone is a critic. Even stolid institutions like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have not been immune to cuts to arts and entertainment coverage. In the aftermath, arts critics are opting for buyouts, shifting (by choice or not) to freelance positions or other beats, or exiting the field altogether. News outlets have answered declining readership by pushing writers to create generalized content (read: puff pieces) that arts patrons and hockey dads alike will click on their e-readers, keeping dwindling ad revenue rolling in (for now). Yet critical arts writing has seen a resurgence in alternative venues, with foundations and arts service organizations committing dollars and programs toward initiatives driving innovation in arts criticism and nonprofit journalism, including the emergence of artist-critics who both make and comment on art. To some, however, these shifts can create questionable conflicts of interest. Debate continues – mainly among writers, some employed, and some not – over whether the loss of the independent arts critic’s subjective, evaluative voice will prove a bigger blow than artists would like to admit. –LW

10. Obamacare passes and survives…so far

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, topped our annual review of Arts Policy Stories back when it became law in 2010. Over the years we watched Obamacare have a rocky start, overcome two challenges in the Supreme Court, and battle against increased premiums. Still, we believe Obamacare has been the piece of federal legislation that has most deeply affected the arts ecosystem in the United States in the past ten years. We think this for three reasons. First, by increasing affordable healthcare options for freelance and low-income folks, Obamacare reduces the financial risk often associated with careers in the arts and may allow more individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to enter the field. Second, lower out-of-pocket healthcare expenses (after taking subsidies into account) for previously uninsured artists may allow artists to spend less time working non-artistic “day jobs” and more time in their artistic medium. Finally, by reducing out-of-pocket expenses for newly insured folks (although not the promised $2,500 annually), Obamacare affords individuals more disposable income to participate in the arts. While several attempts by the Trump administration and current Congress to dismantle Obamacare have failed, the recently signed tax legislation could dramatically elevate costs by repealing the insurance mandate. Congress has acknowledged that such increases could also be used to justify cutting $1.3 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid, both of which enroll artists. Even so, Obamacare, or something like it, is likely to exist for at least a little while longer, to the continued benefit of the arts ecosystem. –AA

Honorable mentions

• Corporate media consolidation
• The rise of Kickstarter and equity crowdfunding
• The 2016 U.S. presidential election
• Culture and its place in global Sustainable Development Goals
• Detroit Institute of Arts rescues/is rescued by Detroit
• The rise and (partial) fall of creative placemaking
• The rise of effective altruism and tech philanthropy

“Dance” illustration by Flickr user Luciana Ruivo

Quickly advancing technologies are altering reality in ways that, not long ago, were the stuff of science-fiction movies. Computer scientists have developed a Photoshop-like tool for video, allowing users to paste audio files into a video and manipulate the subject’s lip movements to depict speeches that never happened, or took place in a different context. The algorithm was developed by researchers at the University of Washington, who claim that the lip-synch technology could improve communication and be a boon for the film industry – for example, by enabling editors to save on reshooting already filmed scenes. But there are obvious concerns that the tool might (umm, will) be used to create deceptive videos or propagate hoaxes. Still, investors like Samsung, Google, Facebook, and Intel see the the new technology’s potential in the realms of artificial intelligence and augmented reality – which have themselves seen lots of new developments this month. Apple is developing augmented reality salsa dance lessons with its new ARKit, which allows aspiring dancers to practice their technique at home, with or without a partner. Bots for poetry and art are producing work that’s competitive with human creations. And neurologists have created an instrument that can be played – wait for it – with your mind. The breakneck pace of bot and AI technologies has sparked discussion of the best practices for using these tools, as well as potential ethical and regulatory guidelines that will need to be implemented as humans and machines increasingly live side-by-side.

Things are looking up for the NEA and NEH. Nearly level funding for the major federal arts and culture agencies has been approved by the House of Representatives appropriations committee. The committee’s proposed insignificant cuts stand in stark contrast to those in President Trump’s budget proposal, which would completely have defunded both agencies. Trump first touted widespread cuts to federal arts and humanities funding in January, which some saw as more of a symbolic gesture than a genuine effort to balance the budget. Nevertheless, a call to action among arts advocacy groups and constituents has put pressure on Congress, which has demonstrated support for the arts from both sides of the aisle. The ultimate fate of the NEA and NEH won’t be known for some time: while the House could vote on the bill as soon as the summer recess ends, it likely won’t reach the Senate until the end of the year. Nevertheless, with the most conservative arm of Congress having already taken its turn, it seems likely at this point that the Endowments are safe for another year.

Arts funding for the 2%. Five years ago, Holly Sidford’s research report “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” shook the arts funding world to its core, revealing that top 2% of arts organizations (in terms of budget size) received 55% of charitable contributions to the sector. Now, “Not Just Money,” a follow-up study from Sidford’s Helicon Collaborative, reveals that the gap has actually widened among 41,000 arts organizations nationwide, with big-budget institutions increasing their take to 58%. “Not Just Money” further traces the majority of funding to 925 culturally non-specific groups whose work centers around Eurocentric art forms and reaches predominantly white audiences. Helicon reports that communities of color are represented by a quarter of nonprofit arts organizations, but they only get 4% of the funding; meanwhile organizations representing LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and rural or low-income communities are similarly underserved by funders. The trend raises questions about whether ethnocultural organizations must concentrate efforts on collaboration with bigger institutions in order to remain sustainable, and whether continued efforts to close the gap are actually making a difference. Speaking of such efforts, as part of New York City’s newly released cultural plan – which made diversity, equity, and inclusion a top priority – mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed linking future city funding to cultural institutions’ staff and board demographic makeup. Although de Blasio declined to specify target goals, the move has raised concerns of “class warfare” over arts funding between established institutions and smaller ones in disadvantaged neighborhoods, along with predictable pushback from the conservative press.

Fixing the arts education crisis in Detroit schools. Detroit’s public school board seeks to address a yawning gap in arts instruction in the city’s public schools, of which nearly half offer no formal education in music or visual arts. Detroit’s decline in arts education stems, in part, from the public school system’s exclusion from the city’s reorganization after filing for bankruptcy. (The situation is not restricted to Detroit: In 2012 a reported 108,000 students across Michigan were lacking arts education despite the State Board of Education’s mandate that students earn at least one arts credit to graduate high school.) After Detroit’s new superintendent Nikolai Vitti started in June, a freshly elected school board has allocated $500,000 for Vitti to hire art and music teachers who will travel between schools and begin to fill the gap, which is most prominent in elementary and middle schools.

Separation of church and retail? Controversy surrounding Washington, D.C.’s proposed Museum of the Bible has come to a head regarding the museum’s Green Collection. Scholars have long expressed concerns about the Green family, which began acquiring extraordinary numbers of biblical artifacts in 2009. The evangelical Christian family also owns Hobby Lobby, a U.S. chain of retail arts and craft stores, which received shipments containing ancient clay cuneiform tablets in 2010 as packages marked “tile samples.” The artifacts have now been seized as part of a federal investigation claiming that the items were smuggled from historical sites in Iraq. Hobby Lobby’s failure to verify the artifacts’ origins means the company is facing a hefty $3 million fine, on top of relinquishing a majority of the 5,500 pieces, which were bought for $1.6 million. Controversy is not new to Hobby Lobby, which in 2014 won a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the company’s right to refuse contraception coverage to full-time employees, but the new probe also casts a cloud over the Museum of the Bible – for which Steve Green sits as chairman of the board. Museum leaders claim they were not aware they were smuggling artifacts into the country, despite obtaining legal advice from an expert in cultural properties law warning against the 2010 purchase.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• Ted Russell has been appointed associate director of arts strategy and ventures at the Kenneth Rainin Foundation in Oakland, CA.
• Karen Mittelman has been appointed director of the Vermont Arts Council. Mittelman was previously at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation has appointed Jessica Solomon as its new senior program officer overseeing arts and culture.
• Arts research and strategy consultant Victoria Plettner-Saunders has joined WolfBrown as principal.
• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies has appointed Magdalena Moreno Mujica as executive director.
• Dennis Scholl, former vice president of the Knight Foundation, has moved to Miami’s ArtsCenter as its new president and chief executive.
• Former NEH chairman William Adams and Spencer Foundation’s Michael McPherson have been appointed senior fellows at the Mellon Foundation.
• The arts management program at George Mason University has announced a new director: alum Aimee Fullman.
• New York magazine has named theater director Sara Holdren as its lead theater critic.
• DataArts seeks a new president and CEO.
• Dance/USA is accepting applications for director of programs through August 18.
• The Glorya Kaufman School of Dance at USC is seeking a part-time professor specializing in Dance Leadership.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• Consumers are spending more on the arts, according to data collected between 2000 and 2014 by the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account. The trend is particularly strong for opera and musical theater.
• Research by British publication The Stage indicated a nine-to-one ratio of male to female writers in books, lyrics, or musical scores across musicals presented in the West End over the last decade. Howlround looked at designers and directors within the League of Resident Theatres and similarly found a staggering gender gap in all areas except costume design.
• On the heels of the successful Wonder Woman film, a new report analyzes the gender expression and representation of female comic book characters.
• In the UK, jobs in creative industries are growing as a faster-than-average pace compared to the general workforce.
• A data analysis from Know Your Own Bone suggests Generation X citizens and Millennials will not “grow into” caring about arts and culture as much as previous generations.
• R&B and hip-hop are the top music genres in the U.S. this year, while classical music registers last with just 1% of sales so far. Research in the Journal of Popular Music Education has tried to get to the bottom of why millennials aren’t into classical music, citing length of concerts, restrained audience behavior, and lack of emotional attachment as barriers to appreciation.
• New York City is still king for artists, says a CityLab report, but artists are increasingly moving out of neighborhoods traditionally considered to be “artsy.” With work space at a premium, some artists are looking to school facilities as a potential resource.
• A report from the Creative Industries Federation offers policy recommendations on how governments can provide support to the creative freelance economy.
• Results for All recently published the Global Landscape Review, which aims to understand approaches governments take in using data to make decisions.
• New online tools provide insight on the arts and culture sector. GEOLOOM co>map visualizes cultural activity in Baltimore, neighborhood by neighborhood, and the National Center for Arts Research has created a visitor-to-staff index for comparing performance among similar sized organizations.
• Two reports looking at creative placemaking as a driver for community development show promising results in Cleveland and Washington, D.C.
• A new monitor provides comparable data on European cities across multiple domains related to culture and creativity. Meanwhile, an index published by the Joint Research Centre identifies the ideal European locale as a combination of eight cities.
• A new report makes a case for funding amateur choirs at the same level as sports teams.
• Survey data confirms that Australians place high personal and societal value on the arts.
• The Asia Europe Foundation has released the Indonesia edition of its series of guides looking at the connection between art and sustainability in Asian countries.
• A report of pilot projects by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation evaluates a framework by which social issues might be positively impacted by indigenous artists’ work.
• Digital tools are reducing opportunities for kids to create original artwork. The trend is not exclusive to the U.S. and recently supported by research from the Netherlands.
• A University of London study reports that one in three professional musicians have suffered from an eating disorder at some point in their lives.
• Two years in the making, the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing has released findings on the potential benefits of arts participation.
• The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies has published its annual report forecasting arts funding at the state level.
• GrantCraft’s paper on theoretical frameworks shaping private foundations offers tools for aligning purpose, public benefit, and action.
• In a survey of 3,200 donors, women gave differently and more generously than men.
• A Grantmakers in the Arts report offers proposals on how funders might reshape their strategies to better reflect the cultural landscape in the 21st century.
• Writing for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Megan O’Neil and Joshua Hatch’s analysis of 1600 organizations shows that many big nonprofits are stockpiling cash, with more money coming in than goes out.
• Art hung above eye-level is perceived by most to be aesthetically inspiring.
• Surprise! Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on whether the impact of the news media on society is positive or negative.

“I am the walrus” by Steven Coutts | via Flickr (Creative Commons)

A controversial editorial published by the Writers’ Union of Canada’s magazine Write has resulted in resignations from the author of the piece, Hal Niedzviecki, and an editorial board member, as well as a formal apology from the union and statement from its Equity Task Force. Niedzviecki had made the interesting choice to publish an editorial brushing off the harms of cultural appropriation and calling for a tongue-in-cheek “Appropriation Prize” as the introduction to an issue of the magazine dedicated to the voices of indigenous Canadian writers. Niedzviecki’s prize would have encouraged writers to reach outside their personal experiences to “imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities.” The backlash was swift, but many top members of Canada’s literary community defended Niedzviecki’s statements on Twitter – which in turn led to editor-in-chief Jonathan Kay’s resignation from The Walrus, a highly esteemed literary magazine. Debates about cultural appropriation and representation in the arts world appear to be only intensifying in recent months. Also in May, the Walker Arts Center in Minnesota decided to work with Native American elders to dismantle a sculpture by a white artist evoking the hanging of 38 Dakota men in 1862 that it had started to install in a public park, following a public outcry that echoed the strong opposition to a white artist’s painting of Emmett Till’s casket showcased at the Whitney Biennial earlier this year. Meanwhile in the theater world, the Edward Albee estate’s decision to block the casting of a black actor in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is likewise stirring widespread contention.

Terrorists make arts and culture targets the new normal. The May 22 suicide bombing killing 22 and injuring more than 100 people outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England signaled a direct attack on young people enjoying a cultural event and engaging in leisure activities. On the heels of the one-year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, the Manchester atrocity came just days before terrorist attacks – with responsibility claimed by ISIS – on an ice cream parlor in Baghdad and unassuming pedestrians on London Bridge. The attacks point to a larger trend: the desire to bring chaos to cultural products and turn places of joy into tragedy. It remains to be seen whether and how heightened security measures at live events and heritage sites will alter the ways in which people engage in arts and culture.

Federal arts agencies get a boost – for now. Despite the potential threats of federal slashing of agencies such as the National Endowments for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting that made headlines in January, February, and March, arts organizations can breathe a small sigh of relief: the final federal spending bill for fiscal year 2017 spares the CPB and actually increases the budgets for both the NEA and NEH through September. The Trump administration had sought to cut the current year’s budget as well as next year’s, but those recommendations met opposition on both sides of the aisle, with several key Republicans among those fighting to maintain arts funding. Nevertheless, with President Trump’s proposed 2018 budget officially released this month. Entitled “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” the budget, if enacted, would take deep bites out of funding for the arts, education, scientific exploration and scholarly research – it remains to be seen whether the future will be sunny on Sesame Street.

Seattle’s art tax goes to the ballot box. King County residents will vote in August on whether or not to raise sales taxes in an initiative intended to fund more than 300 arts organizations across the region. Modeled after the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District in metropolitan Denver and other tax initiatives in places like St. Louis and Cleveland, the bill imposes an additional 0.1% sales tax hike, yielding approximately $67 million a year toward Seattle-based arts and culture. Amid concerns that the arts would get a bump over critical issues such as homelessness, poverty, and the criminal justice system, council members ultimately altered the measure to ensure the county’s outlying areas see an equal share of the money in an effort to encourage Washingtonians to start and maintain arts organizations in rural locations.

New rights and protections for NYC and Hollywood freelancers. On May 15, New York became the first U.S. city to enact a law aimed at shoring up protections for freelance workers. The Freelance Isn’t Free Act places harsh penalties on employers who withhold payment from independent contractors or fail to pay on time or in full. The law rose out of an extensive 2015 report created by the Freelancers Union illustrating the impact of freelancers and the high percentage of workers who have struggled to receive payment. Under the new law, New York freelancers stiffed by their employers can file a complaint with the city, which will intervene on their behalf. The news follows the announcement earlier in the month of a new labor agreement between the Writers Guild of America and Hollywood studios which was widely seen as a win for struggling television and movie writers.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities William D. Adams unexpectedly announced his resignation on May 22. Deputy Chair Margaret Plympton will serve as acting chair until a replacement is named, which could be a while since that replacement would have to be nominated by the Trump administration.
• Publisher Françoise Nyssen has been appointed the new Culture Minister of France.
• Jaime Dempsey will be the new Executive Director at the Arizona Commission on the Arts in August. Previously deputy director of the agency, she succeeds Robert Booker, who will retire after 40 years in the arts.
• Rose Ann Cleveland will retire from the D.C.–based Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation in October.
• Executive director Eloise Damrosch of Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council will retire at the end of June.
• The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving announced its new president, Jay Williams, will begin in July.
• Motion Picture Association of America chief Chris Dodd will leave his post five months before his contract ends, to be replaced by Charles Rivkin. Rivkin was an assistant Secretary of State for economic and business affairs during the Obama administration.
• Juilliard has named Damian Woetzel as its seventh president. The former New York City Ballet star was previously the director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program.
• The New York Review of Books named Ian Buruma as its new editor after the death of founding editor Robert B. Silvers.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• A recent study from Berlin promotes incentives for donors, with results indicating that those provided with a certificate stating the quality of the charitable product or organization gave approximately 10 percent higher contributions. However, a study by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy indicates that President Trump’s proposed tax reforms could reduce charitable giving by as much as $13.1 billion in the United States.
• The first ever World Cities Culture Finance Report analyzes how cities fund cultural activity. Results indicate that Paris, Moscow and London spend the most on arts and culture.
• A new report analyzes results from a pilot program by the National Endowment for the Arts aimed at increasing access to arts education in rural areas. Access is proving to be key: A deeper analysis of the 2016 National Assessment of Educational Progress in the Arts indicates that access and opportunity take precedence over achievement in the arts.
• A policy briefing from the Brookings Institute provides a framework for implementing the goals of the Every Student Succeeds Act and measuring success in arts education.
• Aesthetic Perspectives is a new framework produced by Americans for the Arts’s Animating Democracy program. It establishes 11 attributes that may be used to describe and assess creative work intersecting community engagement and social justice.
• Across the pond, the UK’s Department for Culture, Media & Sport published an in-depth review of Arts Council England’s priorities and positioning. A House of Lords report indicates that theater patronage in the UK is “still dominated by rich, white people.” These findings are supported by additional survey data indicating a 7 percent drop in participation among Asian audiences across all artforms in the UK over the last 10 years. And MyCake founder Sarah Thelwall completed her fourth annual ‏report on the Arts Council’s grantees, analyzing income sources across creative organizations, and differences between small and large organizations.
• George Windsor and Cath Sleeman have completed an analysis of job advertisements in the country to determine what skills creatives need to be successful professionals in the UK.
• A new publication explores the current status of urban cultural policy at local levels across Europe and outlines the challenges that lie ahead.
• People from working-class backgrounds tend to view themselves as relatively more interdependent with and connected to others, according to new research.
• Some librarians really hate those cute “Little Free Libraries.” Research indicates that they are most present in upper-middle class, white neighborhoods – areas that already have increased access to public libraries.
• Apparently rainy days motivate people to visit museums, but more so if storms ease up in the afternoon. And though tourism and leisure are many visitors’ primary goals when visiting museums, measurable learning occurs even when it’s not their intention.
• UNESCO-funded initiatives safeguarding and rebuilding indigenous architecture in Vanuatu following the 2015 Tropical Cyclone Pam are evaluated in this final report.
• New data indicates that automation will affect jobs in Las Vegas and California’s Inland Empire more than the so-called “Rust Belt.”
• A visual interpretation of research spanning three years, 75,000 concerts and 7,000 bands analyzes the chances of a band “making it” big in New York City. The odds? Roughly 0.3 percent.
• The fiction books you read can shape your world view and tilt your moral compass, according to newly published research in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Poetry may also have a profound effect: scientists researched physiological responses to “this is your brain on poetry” and discovered that responses differ from those of music or movies.
• Research suggests a gap between fact and myth in what music teachers believe about music and the brain.
• Last but certainly not least, is the Biebs responsible for killing the good, old fashioned love song? According to the journal Sexuality & Culture, hit songs are more likely than ever to be all about sex.

Digital Painting Caricature of Paul Ryan by David Lacasse | via Creative Commons

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare, will live to see another day after the American Health Care Act (AHCA, a.k.a. Trumpcare or Ryancare) failed to make it to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote March 24. Despite the president’s campaign promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, Republicans who had spent eight years vehemently opposing the ACA could not come to an agreement on a bill that would appease enough conservative GOP Congressmen to secure passage. The kibosh placed on the AHCA means the survival of the status quo, at least for the time being. It remains to be seen whether the administration will take any measures to save the current system from “exploding,” as Trump termed it. The longer Obamacare (or some form of it) survives, the bigger of a win it is for self-employed artists and creative workers, many of whom have depended on Obamacare to gain access to health insurance. (See Createquity’s coverage of the original passage of the Affordable Care Act here.) For now, Trump seems disinclined to try again with a new healthcare bill, preferring to move on to new legislation including tax reform and infrastructure.

Trump follows through on threats to cultural agencies. In a widely anticipated move, the Trump administration’s initial budget proposal cuts large swaths of the arts and culture sector, fully defunding several key federal agencies including the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB, which funds NPR and PBS), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and others. We shared our thinking on this development earlier this month, but it’s hard not to notice that the NEA and CPB tend to suck up all the energy in this particular debate. In reality, the NEH and IMLS are significant in their own right, with IMLS’s budget greater than either Endowment. As with most policy questions, the issues here are not black and white: in an op-ed for the Washington Post, for example, CPB board member (and Obama appointee) Howard Husock questions whether federal subsidies on television and radio remain necessary in a totally different media landscape that now creates plenty of content for audiences that, 50 years ago when the CPB was formed, had few to no options. People can and do make similar arguments about whether public libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions are still needed in the digital age, but we tend to side with Cosmo on that one. Ironically, some of the greatest contributions of agencies like the NEH, IMLS, and NEA are in research, which is useful in determining whether such institutions are remaining relevant. In any case, Congress ultimately must sign off on the new budget, and while it may not vote strictly down party lines, state agencies, philanthropic organizations and arts organizations are bracing for a blow, with rural, red states standing to lose the most if Trump gets his way.

Borrowers “cannot rely on” student loan forgiveness. For the 550,000 people working in public service, the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program provides an “out” to student loan debt. Or at least that’s what they’ve been led to expect. The program promises to cover student loan debt for individuals who work at least ten years in the public sector for national, state, or local government agencies; service fields such as public school teachers, police and firefighters; or non-profit organizations, many of which serve the arts. While the program especially benefits professionals such as lawyers working as public defenders, it has also enrolled many artists who work in the public sector and have likewise amassed considerable debt. But enrollees got a jolt when, on March 23, the Department of Education issued a legal filing indicating that borrowers enrolled in the program may no longer qualify for loan forgiveness, and that the offer may be rescinded at any time. This filing comes on the cusp of the program’s tenth anniversary in October of this year, when the first wave of qualified workers can file claims after the required ten years of service. While legal battles over loan forgiveness will likely unfold case-by-case, the development has raised red flags among student-loan advocacy groups. For his part, President Trump campaigned on the idea of an income-based repayment program for everyone, whereas the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program requires consistent full-time employment with an organization for ten years (which is perhaps less beneficial for artists given the growing freelance economy).

Disney refuses to go back in the closet for Malaysia. The new live-action version of the beloved 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast has received a whole lot of press, in part because it’s the first Disney film to include an openly gay character. The reaction has been mixed, with LGBTQ activists questioning the choice of Gaston’s bumbling sidekick LeFou as its only LGBT character ever, while anti-gay activists at home and abroad are either refusing to screen the film or asking for amendments to the “gay moment.” In Malaysia, Disney postponed the film’s release in response to film censors’ request that they cut out the “scenes promoting homosexuality,” which is punishable by law in the country. But befitting a Disney movie, this story has a happy ending … kind of. Shortly after Disney announced it would not alter the film, the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia relented and will let the four minutes of gay stuff slide, but you’ve got to be 13 years old to get in to see it.

Destruction of cultural heritage is now a war crime. While the rise of ISIS and the Syrian war have taken their toll on precious art, artifacts and global heritage sites in a culturally significant region of the world, donors and the United Nations are fighting for conservation – with dollars and legislation (if that’s any kind of reassurance in a war zone). The UN was already focused on addressing the looting and an international trafficking ring of artifacts from war-torn areas of the Middle East into Europe and the US, but upped the ante significantly on March 24 when the UN Security Council declared that intentional destruction of cultural artifacts and heritage sites could be punished as a war crime. While a welcome measure, it remains to be seen whether this move will successfully prevent the total demolition of culturally relevant sites such as Palmyra as the conflict continues.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• The New York Times announced that Jesse Green (formerly of New York magazine) will fill the vacancy left by Charles Isherwood on May 1 as a co-chief theater critic with Ben Brantley. Isherwood, who was suddenly fired by the Times last month, is reportedly moving to Broadway News, a new online source spearheaded by the daily theater newsletter service Broadway Briefing.
• The New Yorker hired Kevin Young as its new poetry editor. He replaces Paul Muldoon, who stepped down March 15 after a decade in the job.
• After 15 years, executive director Pam David will step down from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund at the end of 2017.
• Baltimore’s Mid Atlantic Arts ‏Foundation named Theresa Colvin as its new executive director following the retirement of Alan W. Cooper. Colvin is leaving behind 30 years at the Maryland State Arts Council, 16 of which she served as executive director.
• The Vermont Arts Council’s Alex Aldrich has announced he will step down as executive director after 20+ years at the agency.
• In the past year, three of the six major Hollywood film studios have had a change in leadership involving replacements of top executives.
• London-based charity Julie’s Bicycle has multiple administrative positions available. The organization focuses on creativity as a resource for combatting climate change and promoting environmental sustainability.
• Metris Arts Consulting, a firm based in Easton, PA, and committed to measuring and evaluating arts impact and improve cultural vitality, is seeking a senior researcher.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• A number of new studies look at artists’ attitudes about engaging with new technologies and the sharing economy. An arm of the UK-based Nesta analyzes the digital economy across Europe, ranking Bulgarians and Spaniards most optimistic about incorporating new technologies, and Germany the most skeptical. Regarding the arts, Nesta suggests that technology is changing audience expectations at a rapid pace, and adopting new digital technologies could bolster arts organizations toward sustainability and reduce barriers to arts participation. Across the pond in Canada, two extensive reports by Canada Council for the Arts explore how the arts in that country have adapted to, and impacted, the digital era.
• Another Nesta report offers ideas on how a revised, more inclusive definition of “R & D” might better serve creative industries pursuing cultural knowledge.
• The Economist reports that conducting statistical analysis on literature presents a unique set of challenges for researchers, as when one author imitates another, but new and improved computational analysis leading to correct attribution provides useful contextual clues.
• A nationwide study conducted by NYU found that middle-school students of all races are likely to have more positive perceptions of teachers of color than white, non-Hispanic instructors. And Boston-area Brandeis University researchers suggest that white, non-Hispanic Americans likely inherit the economic mobility enjoyed by previous generations under racially discriminatory policies, challenging the “bootstrap theory” that the racial wealth gap results from effort alone. Nevertheless, mid-life mortality rates are rising among white, non-Hispanic people in the U.S. with a high school education or less, mainly attributed to increased “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.
• Ghent University researchers found that boys who consider themselves “typical males” or feel pressure to conform to gender stereotypes show less interest in cultural activities.
• In her RAND Graduate School dissertation, Jennifer Novak-Leonard investigates un- and under-explored questions regarding arts participation, noting the significant impact immigrant groups make to the arts and culture sector.
• Music psychologists from Oxford and Exeter have conducted research on the effects of world music. The results indicate that as little as five minutes of listening to West African or Indian pop music can elicit more positive attitudes towards those cultures.
• A UN report by Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights Karima Bennoune analyzes the impact of fundamentalism and extremism on the pursuit of equality and the expression of cultural rights across genders, races, religions, and sexualities.
• A new report from PolicyLink provides examples of policies that utilize arts and culture to help reach goals in communities of color and low-income communities.
• Rising rents and gentrification in London may force 3,500 artists out by 2019, according to a new report by the London Assembly Regeneration Committee.
• A University of Pennsylvania study examines the impact of culture on social wellbeing in NYC, with a focus on micro-cultures existing within urban neighborhoods. The social, economic, and psychological impact of arts and culture were also measured in Minnesota, through a joint effect of Creative Minnesota and Minnesota Citizens for the Arts.
• An evaluation of Aesop’s Dance to Health program suggests that dance specialists can deliver effective health care programs at a lower cost to participants. The report suggests that such programs aimed at fall prevention and social interaction could be a viable source of income to arts organizations.
• Despite decrements in executive function, older adults maintain the ability to detect dissonance in music as they age. Meanwhile, new fMRI data contributes to scientists’ understanding of musical anhedonia, in which a person has no physiological response to music, and finds it boring or distracting.
• Dolby Labs is using EEG and other biofeedback technologies to conduct its own research on physiological responses to TV and films. The results may be used to create media that elicit a particular response.
• In the audience engagement arena, a report by the Audience Agency revealed trends in classical music attendance. Results indicate that most participation in the UK is through single ticket sales, with patrons booking once in a two-year period and gravitating toward lower prices. And WolfBrown recently published a two-year study assessing the audiences of 23 North American choirs; participation and personal relationships with the performers were cited as having a positive impact on audiences.
• Attendance at cultural institutions benefits from marketing to adults rather than families, according to research from the IMPACTS consultancy. Promoting family-friendly events and institutions as “just for kids” can be a barrier to adults, even if they have children. The same group’s surveys suggest the reputation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art got a boost after featuring Muslim artists as a response to the travel ban.
• Museums are presenting more exhibitions than ever as they try to draw in new audiences, focusing on a wider variety of offerings that cater to niche crowds.
• A report by the Motion Picture Association of America indicates that 2016 was a record year for movie theater attendance by African Americans.
• The 2017 edition of the TEFAF Global Arts Market Report indicates art sales are up worldwide, with the Asian art market particularly booming. While purchases continue to away from declining auction houses, private transactions are on the rise.
• Mindless television is thought to make people impressionable and vulnerable. A working paper in Italy questions whether it is a factor in the rise of populist leaders. Meanwhile, in their new book, psychologists Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson push back on the belief that video games are responsible violent behavior and an uptick in school shootings.
• According to the Center for Effective Philanthropy, limited life foundations share few similarities regarding spending down strategies apart from a desire to create impact.
• Timothy Ogden weighs the pros and cons of randomized controlled trials in a section of his new book, Experimental Conversations: Perspectives on Randomized Trials in Development Economics.

For the past decade, Createquity has taken a technocratic approach to covering arts policy in the United States and beyond. We’re not mindless cheerleaders for arts funding; we recognize that governing requires making tradeoffs in the face of limited resources, and have argued against certain types of government arts support in the past. Nevertheless, we believe that the National Endowment for the Arts and other targeted federal agencies do valuable work and are worth saving.

Here are some perspectives on the current budget situation that you may find of use:

Are all these cuts actually going to happen?

Probably not, but that doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real. It appears that Trump’s budget was heavily influenced by staffers from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has long targeted agencies including the NEA and CPB out of an ideological belief that the government shouldn’t be funding the arts and humanities at all. Nevertheless, the budget proposal is already running into opposition from Congressional Republicans, who are seeing it as unrealistic and poorly targeted. Furthermore, eliminating the NEA and NEH will require an actual act of Congress, not just a ratification of the president’s budget. All of that suggests it’s unlikely (though possible) that the agencies will disappear completely, at least in FY18.

That said, it seems virtually certain that we will see at least some cuts. Trump’s budget is so aggressive in so many areas that pushing back on all fronts simultaneously will be very difficult—indicative of a classic hardball negotiation technique.

How will regular people be affected if these agencies are actually eliminated?

It depends on where they live. The vast majority of foundations and individual donors concentrate their giving in the immediate geographic area around where they’re based, which means that the areas with the most wealth (largely big cities on the coasts) are also the ones that receive the most philanthropic funding. As a result, resources are few and far between for arts organizations and public radio and television stations alike in rural America.

In the NEA’s case, the agency has made a point to provide direct funding in every congressional district in the country. Perhaps even more important, though, is the NEA’s system of partnerships with state and regional arts councils, which come with a carrot of matching funds from the federal government in exchange for appropriations from state budgets to their respective state arts councils. In the years following the Great Recession when state budgets were under severe pressure, many of these state arts councils survived in no small part because of this matching fund arrangement. Meanwhile, an external assessment estimates that eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would mean 12 million people losing their access to over-the-air public television, mostly in isolated areas.

As for arts organizations, museums, and public broadcasters in other regions of the country, some will have a tough time to be sure, but the overall effect on the ecosystem would be subtle. The United States didn’t have the NEA, the NEH, CPB, or IMLS for the first 190 years or so of its existence. We believe these agencies create more value than we spend on them, but if they are eliminated, arts and culture will soldier on.

Speaking of creating value, I read that the NEA gets a return of $9 for every dollar invested. Is that true?

No, and we wish arts advocates and the agency itself would avoid using this misleading statistic. It falsely assumes that none of the matching funds leveraged by the NEA would otherwise be there for grantees if the federal funding went away. In reality, matching funds are fungible to a large degree, meaning that the non-federal money is often already committed and it’s really the government that is providing the match, not the other way around. (The big exception here is matching funds for low-budget state arts councils, as discussed above.) Framing it as a “return on investment” is even more misleading, as this implies an astronomical multiplier effect to the spending that simply has no basis in evidence.

Right. So why can’t the arts just fend for themselves on the free market?

They already do. The United States is an outlier among developed-world economies in that its arts funding system is highly decentralized and market-driven. Just 1.2% of arts organizations’ budgets comes from the federal government, so artists and arts organizations have no choice but to sink or swim in the private sector. And as noted above, for all conservatives’ trumpeting of the free market, private philanthropy isn’t very generous to the rural areas and red states that helped Trump get elected. In any case, getting rid of the NEA doesn’t get the government out of the business of funding the arts. In fact, the most significant federal arts funding sources are the Smithsonian ($840 million) and the Department of Defense ($437 million for military bands alone). Yep, that’s right: we spend three times as much on military bands as we do on the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Not to mention, it’s a little rich to complain about nonprofit arts organizations drinking from the government trough when we give away billions of dollars in free money to for-profit industries including oil & gas, corn, and airlines.

Wait, so if the NEA is so insignificant, why bother fighting for it? Wouldn’t it be easier to just take the money and create a parallel private endowment with the same mission?

Yeah, that does sound nice, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t work. Just to maintain current funding levels, which are well below the agency’s inflation-adjusted peak from 1992, one would have to raise an endowment of approximately $3 billion, which would rank up there with the nation’s largest private foundations. Interestingly, Kansas tried to do something like this several years ago—Governor Sam Brownback terminated the Kansas Arts Commission with the plan of setting up a new private entity, the Kansas Arts Foundation. The plan never got off the ground due to poor fundraising results, and the next year, the arts council was brought back to life under a new name.

The NEA’s budget is slight, but as a result it’s had to learn to accomplish a lot with a little (by federal government standards, anyway). The agency does important knowledge infrastructure work, most notably by organizing the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted every five years in collaboration with Census Bureau. The SPPA provides us with widely-used statistics about arts participation that would be extremely hard to replicate with the same accuracy in the private sector, because the imprimatur of government is so important for reliable surveys. As a government agency, the NEA also possesses an important power to help set agendas in an otherwise leaderless ecosystem. The contemporary creative placemaking movement was almost entirely incubated at the NEA under the leadership of former Chairman Rocco Landesman, which looms as one of the Endowment’s biggest policy wins in recent history.

What about the argument that the arts and media are better off operating outside the influence of government?

We largely agree with this—it’s one reason why the United States is better equipped to withstand creeping authoritarianism than democracies with more centrally controlled institutions. But as noted above, America’s arts funding system is already far too weak to make political work risky for artists in the way that it is risky in some other countries. Thus, while protecting freedom of expression could be a valid argument against increasing the agencies’ budgets by too great an amount, it is not an argument for decreasing them.

What about other agencies? Is the impact on the arts limited to the Endowments, IMLS, and CPB?

Unfortunately, no. The Trump budget is very wide-ranging in its targets, and includes relevant cuts to the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Interior Department’s National Heritage Areas, funding for after-school and summer enrichment programs within the Department of Education, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which helps fund low-income artist housing initiatives.

Is it wise to put energy into defending the NEA and these other agencies when there’s so much else going on (climate change, threats to immigrants, international relations, etc.)?

That’s a tough call, but we believe the answer is yes. The Trump administration represents a unique challenge for America today, and picking battles seems to play into its strategy. Legislators make the budget, legislators for the most part want to keep their jobs, and they respond to pressure from their constituents. So you know what to do. #SavetheNEA.

Cover photo credit: Felix Russell-Saw

Demonstrators protest in front of the White House in support of Net Neutrality | Photo by Joseph Gruber via Creative Commons

Just days past his confirmation, Ajit Pai, the Trump administration’s pick for Federal Communications Commission chairman, is already rolling back regulations put in place by the Obama administration in 2015 to protect net neutrality and increase access to the Internet. Changes that have already been enacted include the removal of nine companies from the Lifeline subsidy program, former chairman Tom Wheeler’s initiative which reduced the cost of broadband access for low-income families; the FCC also put a stop to data-security rules enacted in October. These actions signal a rapid-fire change in the FCC’s direction and portend new battles over Internet access. Pai has yet to lay out a specific plan to reverse the FCC’s classification of broadband internet as a utility like electricity or water – one of the landmark decisions under Wheeler’s tenure – but he’s made clear that he sees that move as a “mistake” that has depressed growth in new broadband investment. Some critics consider the loss of a free, open, and affordable Internet one of the biggest potential threats to the arts, favoring corporate interests at best, with the looming possibility of censorship at worst.

Brits attempt to impose quality standards on art. Arts Council England has earmarked £2.7 million to implement Quality Metrics, a controversial process aimed at measuring the quality of art presented to the public by government grantees. Drawn from a series of evaluations by peers, audiences, and the grantees themselves, the system seeks to measure artistic quality across various art forms and types of arts organizations, and will be mandatory for all organizations receiving at least £250,000 per year in operating support from the Arts Council. The plan is set to roll out despite many concerns raised following an independent review of the pilot phase of the program, particularly regarding the use of a single set of metrics across a plethora of artistic disciplines and questions regarding feasibility, data ownership, and anonymity. Buy-in from artists has been equally lukewarm, with many expressing resistance to the very idea of quantifying the arts.

It’s getting even harder to make it in Hollywood. A recent episode of the NPR podcast Freakonomics examined America’s ailing visual effects industry, which has endured economic troubles as jobs continue to migrate out of Hollywood. Despite visual effects playing an increasingly large role in filmmaking (and obliterating trades like special effects in the process), multiple companies in the industry remain in dire economic straits. Their job attrition likely stems from producers and directors chasing tax rebates in neighboring states, and increasingly abroad, forcing many film jobs out of California and hastening the globalization of the industry. At least one Hollywood profession may be getting some help: the Los Angeles City Attorney brought charges last month against five casting workshops accused of using a pay-to-play scheme trading acting roles for cash. In announcing the charges following an investigation involving an undercover actor, the city cited the Krekorian Talent Scam Prevention Act, which bars casting agents from requiring actors to pay fees for auditions.

Libraries grapple between access and ownership. In an era of inevitable change for public libraries, some are relaxing or even doing away entirely with overdue fines, questioning whether the penalties ultimately hurt Americans who need libraries the most. The decision stands in stark contrast to recent crackdowns on overdue books in Alabama and Texas, in which authorities threatened delinquent borrowers with jail time in an effort to recover hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in lost property. The US is not alone; in the UK, more than 25 million books are lost and unaccounted for in that country’s libraries according to industry sources. So, while releasing borrowers from fines may remove the economic barrier and increase libraries’ appeal for marginalized communities, it also inevitably means fewer titles to chose from.

Federal arts funding hangs in the balance. Arts organizations are gearing up for battle as the Trump administration continues to toy with the idea of cutting arts agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts in first drafts of the federal budget. While these cuts have not yet been formally instigated, their possibility has spurred activists to flood congressional offices in opposition. Much attention is focusing on the small but politically significant cadre of Republican arts champions, including New Jersey congressman Leonard Lance and senators Shelley Moore Capito and Susan Collins, both of whom signed a letter of support organized by fellow senator Kirsten Gillibrand. The ramifications of losing these agencies would be most deeply felt in rural areas, which receive less support from state and municipal arts funding. Despite a gradual uptick in appropriations to state agencies dating from the recession, the biggest gains of recent years have been concentrated in populous states like Florida and California, while it’s one step forward two steps back in places like Iowa. Bigger cities may have the best chance for surviving a wholesale cut to the arts: Atlanta and New York are among those plotting ways to increase support at the local level by proposing dedicated arts and culture taxes, providing incentives to artists who live in particular cities or states, and bolstering public art programming.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• Director Craig Watson of the California Arts Council will step down from his role with the agency effective April 2017.
• Philadelphia’s William Penn Foundation has named Shawn McCaney as its new executive director. McCaney was previously director of Penn’s Creative Communities program.
• The Wallace Foundation named Giselle “Gigi” Antoni as its new director of learning and enrichment. Antoni had developed a national reputation as the leader of Dallas’s Big Thought arts education initiative.
• The Alaska-based Rasmuson Foundation has announced Alexandra McKay as its new vice president of programs.
• Seattle arts critic Jen Graves voluntarily resigned after more than a decade at The Stranger, stating that it’s “not a viable place for me to do the work I’ve always cared about.”
• Perhaps less voluntarily, the outspoken New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood is looking for work. Despite the implosion of jobs in arts criticism, the Times intends to fill the full-time position.
• DataArts is seeking a senior research manager to lead teams in study design, data analysis and interpretation and the delivery of the organization’s research services.
• The Boston-based Barr Foundation is hiring an arts & creativity program officer.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• The National Endowment for the Arts shared its latest installment of data on economic trends in arts and culture, produced in collaboration with the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Upshot: artists add value to the economy, but public funding for arts education is in a sharp decline.
• Out of 1,000 responses to a survey by the UK’s Guardian Teacher Network, 80% claimed their schools made or are planning to make cuts to the arts.
• New evidence suggests that formal artistic education (i.e. conservatory training) can have a positive impact on artists’ career sustainability, as can financial and business training. Of course, one must be able to afford such training; indeed, the Sutton Trust noted that British actors from wealthy backgrounds are more likely successful than those with modest upbringings. Meanwhile, college-educated white adults make more than college-educated black and Latino adults according to Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, challenging the assumption that higher education can neutralize racial wage gaps.
• Exponent Philanthropy reported that small foundations and individual donors are developing strategies to up their impact potential in grantmaking. But larger funders tend to rely on their peers as the most trusted source of knowledge, according to a Hewlett Foundation report.
• An evaluation of Arts Council England’s Catalyst program indicates it provided a significant kick-start needed to increase the fundraising capacity of grantees.
• Museums and other cultural attractions continue to face challenges. A new metric indicates that visitor confidence to US cultural organizations is experiencing a sharp decline. However, a recent review of the literature indicates that museums are developing new fundraising strategies by looking beyond wealthy socialites as sources of individual donor support. Meanwhile, the American Alliance of Museums, as it does each year, published its TrendsWatch report considering what the future might hold for the industry.
• A new Ipsos survey asked Canadians across the county to define their culture and its products in the digital age.
• A new study identified hip and arm movement as the mark of good dancing in women. A rebuttal from Slate’s Daniel Engber, however, questions the relevance of the study, deeming it science’s version of clickbait.
• Grantmakers in the Arts produced a review of the literature regarding the arts in medicine, with a specific focus on optimizing investments.
• Research from the University of Chicago indicates that it’s easier to have a negative attitude then to look on the bright side.
• New research suggests that, compared to other teens, ballet dancers experience greater rates of “psychological inflexibility,” leading to anxiety and depression. Dancing may contribute to a greater fear of failure and pressure to achieve a physical aesthetic, which may also lead to such symptoms.
• Violent video games are thought to be associated with negative behaviors. Could uplifting games elicit the opposite effect? A UNESCO-sponsored study indicates they could.
• The Kennedy Center has partnered with the National Institutes of Health to create Sound Health, an initiative that explores music’s effects on health and wellness. Fast Company interviewed author Daniel Levitin about his new book on a similar topic: the neuroscience of music, and how playing music at home impacts behavior, attention span and productivity. Levitin’s work indicates that music is no longer as prevalent in the home, perhaps due to increased screen time, and could be used to facilitate mental breaks from focused tasks. His findings contrast evidence that positions silence (differentiated from quiet, or ambient noise) as an underutilized productivity tool.
• An annual report on freedom of expression around the world released by Freemuse finds that violations of artists’ rights more than doubled in 2016.
• The University of Wisconsin found that people of color accounted for 22% of children’s books characters in 2016, a 13-percentage-point increase over the course of two decades.
• Despite the success of high-profile female artists like Adele and Beyoncé, women are, on the whole, seriously underrepresented on the top 40 charts.
• #OscarsSoYoung could be the latest hashtag criticizing the Academy Awards. A new report from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism indicates that there were only two characters over 60 nominated over the past three years…and both were played by Michael Keaton. USC researchers also found that women directors working on the top-grossing films were unlikely to have released more than one film in the last decade.

“Why ask why” sign from Defenestration: an art installation in San Francisco. Photo by Lynn Friedman via Creative Commons

Amidst the storm and thunder leading up to the Trump administration’s first days in office last month, The Hill reported that advisors to the president had suggested privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which supports PBS and NPR) and eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of a broader effort to reduce federal spending. Coming from former staffers from the far-right Heritage Foundation and drawing heavily on past Heritage Foundation positions, the proposal was not entirely unanticipated, but it certainly met with immediate resistance. As a number of commenters have pointed out, cutting the NEA and NEH wouldn’t do much to balance the federal budget, given that they account together for just $296 million out of a four trillion dollar total. Because of this, the NEA’s contribution to national arts infrastructure has often been described as “symbolic.” Yet that description ignores the fact that the agency’s state and local partnerships create significant impact at the state level, where its policy of offering matching funds for state arts councils helps a lot of those councils stay in existence. (It doesn’t help that about a third of US states have little to no local infrastructure for arts advocacy and rely heavily on federal resources.) The NEA’s research initiatives would likewise be hard to replace if they went away, particularly core activities like the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts conducted every five years in partnership with the US Census Bureau. Losing the NEA and NEH is far from a done deal: Trump would need the support of Congress to make it happen, and Americans for the Arts reports that there are “about a dozen procedural steps that Congress and its committees must take” before either agency can actually be eliminated. And it’s far from clear to what extent that plan represents the actual intentions of the administration, which seems to change its mind about major policy positions from one day to the next. In the meantime, life goes on for the NEA, with the administration already having appointed representatives to liaise between the West Wing and the Endowment.

Arts advocates who are laser-focused on the survival of the NEA may be missing the forest for the trees, though. In a move some see as an even bigger threat to the arts, the president nominated Ajit Pai to head the Federal Communications Commission. Pai is an avowed foe of net neutrality and his ascendancy at the agency is almost certain to bring the controversial measure back into government consideration. Meanwhile, executive orders affecting people’s ability to travel and obtain health care are leaving many artists bewildered, worried, and angry. As much as losing the Endowment would be a loss, the sad irony is that if we had a stronger agency to begin with, our arts infrastructure would presumably be under even more direct threat right now.

South Korean artists face consequences amidst controversy. Concerns are growing about artistic freedom in South Korea as the scandal surrounding President Park Geun-hye continues to unfold. Park’s questionable friendship with the daughter of a cult leader named Choi Tae-min resulted in corruption charges and Park’s impeachment. Now, the New York Times reports that government aides have blacklisted thousands of artists, quietly collecting information and threatening legal action against those whose work is critical of their recently ousted leader. The moves only deepen the scandal in South Korea, which when compared to its neighbors to the north and west — North Korea and China — is considered a mecca of artistic freedom and opportunity. South Korea is one of only a few countries to increase arts and culture spending in the last decade and its artists earn roughly 77% of the country’s average income. The state-funded Artist Welfare Act of 2012 insures nearly 60,000 artists with a form of workers’ compensation. Despite these promising stats, there’s a clear agenda for promoting nationalism and prioritizing positive depictions of South Korea in arts and culture, an ongoing effort since the end of the Korean War. The emergence of this situation in a country as democratically-oriented as South Korea indicates the tension between artists’ (and citizens’) rights to freedom of speech and expression and countries’ desire to control the narrative observes fewer national boundaries than we might have hoped.

A crack in art’s black market. An investigation involving 18 countries has resulted in the arrest of 75 people allegedly affiliated with an international crime ring smuggling historical artifacts and other pieces of art out of Middle Eastern countries under siege by ISIS. The investigation found that items from Syria, Iraq, and Libya, among other countries, were systematically transferred to Western countries and resold on the black market, very likely helping to finance the Islamic State’s reign of terror. Authorities say many of the 3,500 items recently recovered were found in Spain and Greece. In a landmark case last September, jihadist Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was convicted and sentenced by the International Criminal Court to at least nine years in prison for war crimes after ordering the destruction of shrines in Timbuktu, Mali. It could be a precedent for what lies ahead in this latest investigation. Historians, archaeologists, and artists are attempting to retrieve and restore, and in some cases, recreate the important artifacts that have been recovered or destroyed in the conflicts. A team at St. Petersburg’s State Hemitage Museum is developing a 3-D model of Palmyra, Syria, and a 25-square-meter replica of an authentic Syrian home sits in the middle of Norway’s flagship IKEA store. Last year, the Roman Colosseum featured reproductions of Palmyra’s archive room of Ebla and the Temple of Bel. And last month it was reported the National Archives of Finland has taken custody of digital copies of key Syrian documents for safekeeping in case the originals don’t survive the country’s civil war.

The Lucas Museum finds a home in LALA Land. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is expected to open in Exhibition Park in Los Angeles by 2021. More than a Star Wars museum, the $1 billion project will house items from George Lucas’s extensive personal art collection and Hollywood artifacts. The Marin County native’s museum was initially meant for San Francisco, but met strong opposition to the proposed site near the Presidio. The project then looked toward Chicago, where Lucas became embroiled in two years of negotiations over prime real estate on the city’s lakefront. A community group called Friends of the Parks filed suit — much to the dismay of Mayor Rahm Emanuel — contesting the notion that Chicago’s lakefront is public property, despite the fact that the site Lucas wanted (and on which he refused to budge) is currently occupied by a parking lot. The filmmaker eventually gave up on the idea, looking again to the West Coast at new locations in San Francisco and LA. LA won the sweepstakes, and area residents and local officials appear to be anxious for the project’s completion.

Apple wants what Netflix is having. Apple says it plans to begin creating movies and TV, hoping to capitalize on consumers’ hunger for streamed original series. The technology giant is experiencing a slump in sales for the first time in 15 years, back when Netflix was still primarily a mail-in-your-DVDs model. Netflix’s massive investment in original content ($5 billion last year) is paying off in spades, yielding the company’s biggest quarter in history last month amid hit after hit. Others are scrambling for a piece of the action and estimates indicate the number of original scripted television shows may soon surpass 500. Netflix remains the leader, but Hulu, Apple, AT&T (via Amazon), and Sony are all in hot pursuit. In an unusual twist, the satirical news giant The Onion signed a deal with Lionsgate to develop three feature films in partnership with Serious Business, an affiliate of Comedy Central. The move follows the lead of a recent Buzzfeed partnership with Warner Bros. to produce the film Brother Orange.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• The Rockefeller Foundation named board member Rajiv J. Shah as the foundation’s next president.
• Writer and historian Tristram Hunt has resigned his seat in the British parliament to lead the Victoria and Albert Museum.
• Andrea Noble-Pelant has been named executive director of the Alaska State Council on the Arts, consolidating the position with her role as the visual and literary arts program director.
• After 24 years with the agency, Nevada’s Department of Tourism and Cultural Affairs Administrator Susan Boskoff is retiring this March.
• Deana Haggag is leaving The Contemporary to lead United States Artists, a Chicago-based granting organization.
• The Barack Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s south side is hiring a museum director.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Major UK government agencies have partnered to launch a pilot study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of crowdfunding matches on arts and heritage organizations. And the Center for Effective Philanthropy offers recommendations for measuring fundraising effectiveness.
• The initiative Community Catalyst has produced an in-depth report on strategies for museums and libraries to strengthen and evaluate social impact.
• A number of studies measure characteristics of art to determine social and economic impact, but few consider perceptions of quality, according to the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar. Meanwhile, a systematic review of arts papers in accounting journals discusses the challenges of evaluating the artistic performance of publicly funded organizations; similarly challenging is predicting the price of art, which doesn’t appear to follow specific trends.
• Lawyers Lena Saltos and Angela Lelo take a look at the legal precedent for applying copyright law to street art.
• A 2015 census by Americans for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts shows promising growth for arts agencies on the local level.
• Norway gets the top spot in the World Economic Forum’s new Inclusive Development Index. Factors included in the index go beyond GDP to include employment status, life expectancy, poverty rates, and dependency ratios. The United States, on top by GDP alone, ranks 23rd on the IDI.
• Children emulate superheroes’ aggression, but not their valor, according to a 2017 study on the behavior of 240 preschoolers.
• Research summarized by the New York Times column The Upshot illustrates how regional choices in TV are related to consumers’ political views. On a related note, studies suggest that viewing diverse characters in television and movies can increase empathy and reduce prejudice. And new data indicates that cultural attractions aren’t just competing with other organizations, but also with potential patrons who’d rather remain in their PJs on the couch.
• Colombian researchers found that recording in a daily dream journal boosts creativity.
• Millennials are often given credit for the migration revitalizing many American cities and invigorating arts and culture in downtown districts, but an article in The Upshot questions whether that now-aging generation will stay downtown for the long haul. Offering a strong rebuttal to the piece in CityLab, Joe Cortright predicts that Millennials are likely to remain in cities as they age and have children.
• According to a study by Isaac William Martin and Kevin Beck, renters are more greatly affected by gentrification than homeowners, and rising property taxes aren’t dissuading owners from staying.
• A report by the Association of British Orchestras notes that strategies to restructure ticketing and audience engagement may eventually leave them in the red. Over a three-year period, a 7% increase in the number of events produced only a 3% increase in audiences.
• Research confirms what musicians already know: that music training results in faster reaction times than that of non-musicians.
• The Louvre announced a $10 million loss and a sharp decline in visitors in 2016. An analysis of museum visitor numbers in the UK indicated a similar decline. The chief reason, say researchers, is that overseas visitors are staying home because of the fear of terror attacks. On the bright side, a new report suggests that London grassroots music venues are in the black for the first time in a decade.
• The UK also saw a 5% increase in book sales compared to last year, thanks to J.K. Rowling’s latest installment of the Harry Potter series and publications by fitness guru Joe Wicks. Despite speculation that digital readers would lead to the book’s demise, a Gallup poll indicated that Americans still read books at a rate comparable to that of 15 years ago, while ebook sales are starting to slip.

The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: One: About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. Two: By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. Three: For us. That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. Four: Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.

–W.E.B. Du Bois, from the program for the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theater in 1925, reprinted in Crisis magazine (published by the NAACP) in 1926

About us. By us. For us. Near us. It has been almost a century since the great W.E.B. Du Bois–one of the co-founders of the NAACP–offered this stirring call for what, today, we would call “cultural equity.” To say much has happened in those ninety years would be to oversimplify. Significant progress has been made. And yet for many, and on many levels, it is not enough. In a speech given just last year, Jeff Chang, executive director of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, exclaimed: “at a moment when…our images depict us as one happy rainbow nation, and yet the structures of power, including the national culture complex…is still overwhelmingly white, we begin to recognize that we have not yet achieved cultural equity.”

It is certainly not for lack of effort–a deep, ongoing, heroic effort by dedicated activists, institutions, artists, funders, and even the government. And yet, read Chang–and below, Campbell, Lowry, Rosen, Erickson, Kourlas, Sonntag, Vega, and Grams–and one thing soon becomes clear: “cultural equity” means different things to different people. Over the course of some ninety years, distinct, and sometimes competing, visions of success have jostled for attention, complicating a complex conversation, and creating tensions that often go unresolved. Diverse goals and desired outcomes–over time and between different groups–have made change a juggling act; meanwhile, efforts to add on fixes to a system that was not built with equity in mind have met with mixed results.

Just as we cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it, we cannot achieve cultural democracy or equity with the same tools, strategies, and structures that built and have maintained our current inequitable systems. To move forward, we must look, think, and act widely.

–Figuring the Plural, a research report about ethnocultural organizations published in 2014

The past few years have been deeply trying for race relations in the United States. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to widely publicized violence against unarmed black people at the hands of private citizens and the police, along with an increasing anti-immigration rhetoric on the political stage, have given new urgency to initiatives focusing on decreasing racial inequality and combating racial bias. The relevance of cultural equity in the nonprofit arts world is all the more immediate against this backdrop. As borne out by the results of our reader poll earlier this year, along with our own observations, perhaps no other issue is more present for arts professionals in 2016 than this.

Many of the core issues in today’s debate around cultural equity harken back to the beginning of arts in America. As outlined in our earlier article on growth and change in the nonprofit arts sector, the “beginning” here can be traced to the 19th century, when, in the aftermath of the Civil War and amid an influx of immigration, a new class of urban white commercial elites established institutions–such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and Metropolitan Opera, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–to preserve and present art in the classical European canon. While these well-heeled individuals–America’s early philanthropists–sought to promote civic pride and validate America’s position as a “civilized” world power, they also used these institutions to establish and protect their own class status. It was not until the 1960s that private philanthropy began to focus on broader cultural expressions. By then, however, this structural disparity, which showered the lion’s share of philanthropic funding and policy attention on art forms originating in Western European traditions and wealthy organizations upholding those traditions, had thoroughly defined the very word “arts” as well as nearly all of the infrastructure associated with it.

Institutional efforts to bring equity to the arts have a long history. The African American theater tradition envisioned by DuBois at the opening of this article, for example, was developed in part thanks to New Deal programs in the 1930s. Since then, the federal and some state governments have stepped in for periods of time to create dedicated funding streams for organizations rooted in communities of color. In 1968, the New York State Council on the Arts launched its Ghetto Arts Program (later wisely renamed the Special Arts Services Program), which provided opportunities for black artists to work in their communities, and three years later, the nascent National Endowment for the Arts launched the Expansion Arts Program, designed to support “community-based arts activities.”

The NEA has succeeded in encouraging programmatic diversity in terms of the projects offered by a wide range of institutions. What it now requires is structural diversity that is within the boards, staffs, and patronage systems of institutions.

– Mary Schmidt Campbell, former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner [From her 1998 A New Mission for the NEA]

Many of these policy interventions, however, ultimately proved fleeting in the face of shifting political winds, especially at the federal level. Undeterred, several generations of artists and activists worked in the latter half of the 20th century to support participation in and expression of cultural heritage, sometimes with the help of private philanthropy and sometimes without any outside help at all. The fruits of those efforts today include a number of prominent institutions presenting works by artists of color, several national service organizations such as the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and Association of African American Museums, and thousands of ethnocultural organizations providing important services within their communities.

In my own experience I have found that ethnic origin is not a bar to artistic response if there is equal access. I cannot believe that persons of color do not respond to good art.

–W. McNeil Lowry, former Vice President of the Ford Foundation who launched the foundation’s arts funding program, in a 1991 article in response to the
Arts and Government report from the American Assembly

In recent years, cultural equity has once again risen to the top of the national arts agenda in the United States. From coast to coast, foundations, arts councils, advocacy organizations, universities and others have doubled down on their commitment to diversity and equity in the arts. Though many factors have led to that shift, a clearly pivotal moment was the 2011 publication of Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” A monograph completed as part of the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy’s review of social justice grantmaking practices in various fields, “Fusing” reported figures suggesting that the majority of arts funding in the United States does not benefit communities of color, and called decisively for change. Grantmakers in the Arts gave substantial visibility to the report and its ideas within the arts funding community over a period of several years, which culminated in the organization releasing a statement of purpose detailing its commitment to racial equity in arts philanthropy in April of 2015.

[S]ocial inequities continue to be reflected in the funding practices of private philanthropy and governmental funders in the arts. Therefore, in order to more equitably support ALAANA [African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American] communities, arts organizations, and artists, funders should take explicit actions to structurally change funding behaviors and norms.

–Grantmakers in the Arts, Racial Equity in Arts Philanthropy Statement of Purpose

Sidford’s and GIA’s calls for equity have reverberated with increasing volume among other national service organizations, local arts agencies, and foundations across the land. In 2014, following in the footsteps of a Mellon Foundation program to increase the diversity of curatorial staff at encyclopedic museums, the American Alliance of Museums released a diversity and inclusion policy statement. In the past two years, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission have engaged in something of a bicoastal dance, with the former conducting a study of the diversity of the arts organizations it funds and the latter undertaking a Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative to improve “diversity in cultural organizations, in the areas of their leadership, staffing, programming and audience composition.” Americans for the Arts, the national service organization that represents these and other local arts councils, released its own widely circulated and discussed Statement on Cultural Equity in May of this year.

I heartily support the NCRP report’s recommendation that philanthropic investment in the arts should benefit underserved communities and promote greater equity, opportunity, and justice. But I take issue with the suggestion that foundation support to large-budget organizations and those that perform the Western canon is, by definition, at odds with these goals.

–Jesse Rosen, League of American Orchestras, 2011

Our goal here is not to present a detailed history of the movement for cultural equity. Folks far more qualified than us have done so already. Instead, we are more interested in looking forward: what is the change we collectively want to create, and what will it take to make that change happen?

At Createquity, we are on a long-term mission to investigate the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them. Yet in order to use research and evidence to help our sector move forward, we must have a clear, and shared, understanding of what success looks like. And therein lies the rub: the further we delved into the literature around cultural equity, and the more we consulted experts and connected with some of the activists who precede us, the more we came to realize that shared understanding simply doesn’t exist.

That there are different visions for cultural equity is clear. Where exactly the lines are drawn, however, is somewhat less so. There is an inherent difficulty in examining positions forged through dialogue via documents authored by a few, and any attempt to develop a taxonomy will have its flaws. But in our own conversations, we found it helpful to divide the visions for success we were reading and hearing from advocates into four archetypes: Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution, and Self-Determination. In the rest of this article, we present the differences between these visions, and consider the implications for a healthy arts ecosystem.

Let’s take a closer look.

Vision One: Diversity

There is another argument for inclusion, one that is at least as powerful as inequity in employment, and that is what it means for the audience to see a fully inclusive world on our stages….

–Brad Erickson, Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area, March 2016

The one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called “mainstream” institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous. The “Diversity” vision for cultural equity seeks to rectify this, calling for these institutions to become more reflective of the communities they serve.

What does that actually mean in practice? Over the course of the past half-century, conversations about diversity have tended to focus first on audiences, then on programming, and finally on leadership. Diversity’s core concern is about who is ultimately benefiting from the work; if diverse audiences are taking advantage, then that is the surest sign of success. Many early efforts thus adopted the theme of “access” to the arts, on the assumption that underrepresented audiences wanted to participate but could not because of barriers like cost or convenience. Gradually, however, as organizations discovered that simply offering free events and pursuing more targeted marketing wasn’t enough, the focus shifted to artists themselves–who was on stage, on the page, on the walls, on screen, or coming out of the speakers–and the cultural narratives they represented. In recent years, attention has turned more and more to the staffs and boards of arts organizations as advocates have sought to diversify the decision-makers behind the scenes. Thus, whereas the Diversity vision began as a simple push for more diverse audiences, today it calls for change at the infrastructural level in addition to the programmatic level.

“Misty Copeland, American Ballet Theatre” by flickr user Kent G Becker

More than equality is at stake when Ms. Copeland—the first African-American principal female dancer in the [American Ballet Theater’s] 75-year history—dances. When a company is diverse, the audience becomes more diverse, too, and for those faced with aging, dwindling audiences, that is priceless.

– Gia Kourlas, New York Times, 2015

Why do mainstream institutions and their stakeholders care about diversity? Much of the interest springs from a recognition of the changing demographics of America. Non-Hispanic whites have made up a smaller proportion of the US population in every Census since 1940, and the Census Bureau projects that people of color will become the majority nationwide by 2044. Meanwhile, figures from the National Endowment for the Arts show a long-term decline in rates of participation in so-called “benchmark” art forms (a definition that includes classical music, jazz, opera, plays, ballet, and visits to an art museum or gallery), as well as relatively lower engagement from non-white, young, poorer, and less-educated audiences. These statistics pose a strong threat to the narrative of universal relevance that many mainstream organizations actively promote, particularly when such institutions are located in heavily diversified downtown urban cores. The more an individual feels reflected within the culture of a mainstream institution, it is assumed, the more comfortable that individual will be engaging with the institution’s programming. If that reflection is not taking place, a significant proportion of the population is being left out in systematic ways.

While many proponents see Diversity as morally righteous on the strength of these arguments alone, there is a solid business case for relevance too. If the assumption above is true, mainstream institutions have a better chance of making out in the long run if they can successfully engage more members of their ever-shifting communities through diversification strategies.

Vision Two: Prosperity

It’s an incredibly appealing product. Ailey is an admirable company that has capitalized on its artistic strengths to ensure its financial future.

–Douglas C. Sonntag, director of dance at the National Endowment for the Arts, referring to Ailey’s artistic product, staff, and board, quoted in a 2004 article for the Washington Post

Though Diversity is unmistakably a call for change, its supporters share early American philanthropists’ faith that the institutions they founded can and must play a central, unifying role in the cultural life of their communities. Not everyone agrees.

The Prosperity vision takes Diversity’s belief in the power of organizational scale and applies it to institutions started and led by artists of color. These institutions follow the standard model of nonprofit growth–cultivating a wide audience, a fundraising board, diversified streams of income, and professional staff–all with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Though rarely stated outright, an underlying assumption of Prosperity is that large, established institutions of color will last longer, and thus provide more benefit to society over many generations, than an ecosystem of smaller organizations that may be more transitory in nature.

What we are calling the Prosperity vision evolved out of the success of a cohort of pioneering artists who created their own organizations in the late 1950s through the1970s in response to a lack of existing opportunities for pursuing their creative work. Many of these artists adopted the nonprofit model that was gaining ground during that period in order to improve their access to philanthropic resources. The seminal organizations they founded–like the Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, Studio Museum in Harlem, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Negro Ensemble Company, among others–received sustained support from private foundations early in their history, and the legacies of those organizations play an important role today both in the cultural life of their communities and more broadly.

Negro Ensemble Company National Tour, 1968 (source)

The Prosperity vision lives on in several more recent institutions, including the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, set to open this September in Washington, DC. It is worth noting that, like many of their predecessors, both of these institutions came to be thanks to a collaboration between one or more artists or advocates of color and a white champion or champions. The August Wilson Center materialized when Pittsburgh mayor Thomas J. Murphy, Jr. accepted a challenge from the local NAACP president, Tim Stevens, to organize a funding drive for the new institution that Stevens had dreamed up. Representative John Lewis (D-GA) introduced legislation for an African American Smithsonian museum and tried for many years to get it through Congress; it finally passed because of support from a new Smithsonian head, Lawrence M. Small. This pattern of community leaders of different races forming alliances to celebrate artists of color is highly characteristic of the Prosperity vision.

Vision Three: Redistribution

Eurocentric aesthetic products continue to be viewed as superior to those of people of color and poor white communities. Funders from both the public and private agencies have historically invested in institutions and art forms that reflect their assumed superiority; they have consistently under resourced and underfunded the art forms that they consider marginal, ethnic, folk, etc.

–Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, president and founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, in a 2016 online conversation posted to the Center’s website.

Diversity and Prosperity both embrace the standard market dynamics of the nonprofit arts sector, in which a small number of high-profile institutions dominate. By contrast, the Redistribution vision favors a larger pool of recipients for contributed income, particularly from grantmakers. Advocates of Redistribution argue that people of color, rural communities, LGBT communities, and others are socially and economically marginalized by our society and therefore have less access to wealth to support their work in the arts. The cultural contributions of these communities have likewise been devalued by arts funders historically. An equitable distribution–a redistribution–of funds towards organizations originating in and serving marginalized communities is the best way to address this imbalance. For advocates of Redistribution, therefore, a shift in the funding paradigm is what’s most urgently needed to achieve cultural equity.

The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute was founded in New York City in 1976 by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, pictured here third from the left. (Source)

Unlike Prosperity’s institution-centric frame, Redistribution focuses on the full ecosystem of individuals and institutions that comprise a community. A core belief of Redistribution is that all participants–from large institutions to one-person operations–should be afforded the opportunity to succeed. (Advocates of Redistribution don’t have a problem with large institutions that celebrate artists of color, as long as smaller organizations are able to share in the wealth.) Beyond the inherent justice in giving funds to oppressed groups, advocates point to the country’s changing demographics as additional justification for Redistribution. For advocates of Redistribution, it is more efficient to accomplish the goals of cultural equity by redirecting resources to organizations with already diverse staff and audiences rather than to put effort into diversifying mainstream organizations.

Redistribution gained a significant boost of attention from the publication of Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change,” which is perhaps best known for a much-cited statistic that just 2% of arts organizations in the United States receive more than half of total contributed income. Many of the most difficult conversations about arts policy in America in the past several years have centered on the future of longstanding public and private funding streams supporting those institutions in the proverbial 2%. That’s because many of those streams were set up following the logic that the size of an organization’s budget is its own justification for the amount of funding it receives.

For example, in the Denver region, small arts groups make up 90% of the organizations funded by the local Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, but share only 16% of the pie. These so-called “Tier III” organizations demanded a more equitable distribution of resources last year, arguing the current distribution was unfair and biased toward Denver’s big cultural institutions. (Redistribution advocates mostly lost that particular battle.) Another conflagration erupted in San Francisco in 2014, after the city released a damning study on the allocations to organizations serving communities of color through its Grants for the Arts (GFTA) agency. Cultural equity activists asked that resources be redirected from GFTA to the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, eventually winning a commitment of more than $2 million in new funds from Mayor Ed Lee. Major sources of operating support to arts organizations in New York City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and beyond operate in a similar tiered or graduated system.

Vision Four: Self-Determination

We finally determined that self-sustainability is not how many memberships or season subscriptions you have or any of those things. It’s if we lost our funding, if there was a global downturn, if the ferry stopped running, if any of these things happened, who’s going to keep the doors to the Debaj Creation Centre open? Who’s going to be standing there with us when the funding is gone? Oh, our neighbors, our friends, our families, the people around us, that’s who this matters to, that’s who our sustainability is linked to. No one else… It’s right here, it’s the people right around us. So our absolute priority has got to be the relationships with those closest to us…

–Figuring the Plural, The Debajehmujig Creation Centre case study, published in 2014

You may have noticed that each successive vision on this list represents a further rejection of the status quo. Self-Determination, in many ways, is the most radical departure of all. The Self-Determination theory of cultural equity calls for full participation in and expression of cultural life for communities of color through models that are organic to those communities, and that look beyond established nonprofit arts funding and advocacy tactics.

At its zenith, Self-Determination seeks nothing less than wholesale societal and cultural transformation. With Self-Determination, ownership of cultural decisions is located within the community: it’s the community members themselves who get to shape cultural life. Advocates of Self-Determination view the current nonprofit and funding system in the United States with heavy skepticism. To them, its legacy of racism and class hegemony is still very much alive today, and will remain so as long as it continues to be largely controlled by the same wealthy, white elite class that founded it.

Because of this history, Self-Determination questions the notion that people of color could ever feel truly welcome engaging with mainstream nonprofit organizations, regardless of changes to programming or diversification of staff, as imagined in Diversity. Furthermore, working within the system to grow nonprofits led by artists of color, as imagined in Prosperity, validates and perpetuates white capitalist models of success, and often takes decision-making power out of the hands of the community. Finally, as these disparities of access are the direct result of global white supremacy, resolving them will require moving beyond Redistribution to dismantling the inherently racist elements of the system and/or creating alternative elements outside of it. This thinking naturally leads to an emphasis on the application of art towards social justice goals, and a de-emphasis of the traditional nonprofit model — though advocates do agree that subsidy for arts projects and organizations remains important.

“Protest” by flickr user S Pakhrin

Self-Determination sees the battleground for cultural equity extending well beyond the nonprofit arts sector as conventionally conceived. For many, devaluing of non-European culture starts in the education system. Communities of color have unequal access to quality public education in general, including arts education. What arts education they do receive tends to emphasize European art forms and works by white artists. Advocates argue that the valuable contributions that members of oppressed communities have made to society should be validated by the prestigious label of “art” in curricula.

Advocates of this vision also note that a large portion of opportunities to participate in the arts exist outside of the nonprofit sector, and argue this is especially true for people of color. Many organizations outside of the professional nonprofit arts sector play an important role in the cultural life of communities of color: churches, social service agencies, businesses, small volunteer nonprofits, and unincorporated community groups. Self-Determination argues that these organizations should also be eligible for arts subsidy, and that distribution of that subsidy should honor the goals and approaches of those organizations rather than prescribing measures of success or activities that are not generated by the community.

Fault Lines

The above list of visions represents a distillation, though we hope not too much an oversimplification, of the efforts, thinking and successes of many different advocates over many years. It’s important to acknowledge that these visions are not mutually exclusive, nor are their advocates. They exist in dialogue with each other, and it’s not unusual to hear a single person endorse aspects of different visions at different points in the same conversation. Yet that should not blind us to the reality that in practice, the tensions between these ideas can be a source of great confusion if they are not called out explicitly.

In particular, we perceive five key fault lines running across and through these visions as we’ve laid them out:

The Role of Race
Cultural equity is a conversation that is rooted in, but not exclusively about, race. While race is undeniably important to all four visions of success, they each incorporate other aspects of identity and community infrastructure in subtly distinct ways. Diversity often starts from a reference point of race, but advocates for Diversity frequently encounter pressure to include measures of social difference such as age, class, and disability status. Prosperity tends to be squarely focused on artists of color, but the Redistribution and Self-Determination visions are more directly aligned with the social justice movement, and thus consider LGBT, rural and other frames alongside race (albeit from an intersectional perspective). Because Redistribution and Self-Determination consider community to be defined by heritage, they often treat marginalized white ethnic communities as part of the same conversation as communities of color. Finally, Self-Determination is particularly sensitive to class considerations, given its skeptical orientation towards capitalism.

The Value (and Cost) of Integration
Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” the Diversity vision is in love with the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, the expectation to share and share alike implied by this utopian, color-blind harmony ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own. The Prosperity, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination visions all incorporate elements of ownership based on common heritage and identity, with no explicit obligation to be inclusive toward other cultures within those contexts.

The Centrality of Institutions
There are stark differences between the visions in how they value (or don’t value) institutions and the traditional ways of growing and running them. Diversity and Prosperity see institutions as vital infrastructure with enormous potential for community benefit. Redistribution sees value in institutions too, but is also keenly aware of how institutional values (e.g., prioritizing financial growth, sustainability, and formal structures) have historically been biased against communities of color. Self-Determination thinks institutional values are a corrupting influence and rejects the idea of institutions being the only model of health, questioning even bedrock institutions like the nonprofit sector itself.

Cultural Norms
Implicitly, Diversity and Prosperity embrace several core elements of dominant American culture that Redistribution and Self-Determination tend to be wary of. One of the most important of these norms involves using an individual rather than group lens to talk about benefits and harm. The difference can be seen in how Diversity and Prosperity very often celebrate or cultivate specific people of color, LGBT individuals, etc., whereas Redistribution and Self-Determination more frequently speak of impacts on, and seek to represent, whole communities. Redistribution and Self-Determination also tend to see culture as defined more by heritage than creativity, placing a relatively higher value on elders, ancestors, and tradition, and critiquing Diversity and Prosperity’s emphasis on originality and individual expression in the context of judging artistic merit. Finally, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination see social consciousness as an important element of artistic work, and are less excited about purely abstract expressions.

The Money
The Redistribution vision sees a lack of access to financial capital as the principal (or at least most immediate) source of problems and restored access to foundation and government funding as the solution. Like Diversity and Prosperity, Redistribution thus implicitly buys into a capitalist framework. The Self-Determination vision, on the other hand, sees capitalism as a white supremacist institution and is more interested in creating spaces and contexts for communities of color to have full control over their circumstances, even if that means leaving money on the table.

Examining real-life debates in the context of these fault lines can be instructive. We noted earlier that many cultural-equity-themed battles in recent years have involved Redistribution trying to chip away at funding streams that disproportionately favor mainstream institutions. Often in response, mainstream institutions will seek to highlight their Diversity bona fides. In a 2011 forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts inviting responses to Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change,” the president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, Jesse Rosen, pointed out that the majority of concerts presented by his organization’s membership “are specifically dedicated to education or community engagement,” highlighting efforts such as “the South Dakota Symphony’s recent tour of their state to perform on three Lakota reservations with a newly commissioned orchestral work by a Lakota composer.” But in a post in the same forum the next day (trenchantly titled “So What’s New?”), Marta Moreno Vega described efforts at diversification by organizations rooted in a Western European tradition as “patronizing.”

A conflict between Prosperity and Redistribution was at the root of reactions to a controversial report issued by the DeVos Institute of Arts Management in 2015. The report investigated the financial and management challenges facing higher-budget black and Latino arts organizations, and concluded the field would be better served if funders provided larger grants to a smaller pool of promising organizations, even if that meant cutting funding to smaller organizations within communities of color. “It’s not politically easy or palatable, but it’s a potential solution that does need to be considered,” suggested DeVos Institute chair Michael Kaiser in defense of the report’s recommendations. This argument provoked a firestorm of criticism: Grantmakers in the Arts released a statement charging that the report “lacks the real understanding of the barriers faced by many of these organizations to surviving and thriving in the nonprofit marketplace,” while Jason Tseng’s widely circulated editorial cartoon highlighted the absurdity of suggesting that black and Latino organizations duke it out Hunger Games-style. In many ways, reactions like these surfaced the reality that, although Prosperity was once considered a daring and progressive vision, it is now increasingly seen as retrograde absent the additional value of Redistribution.

Finally, an especially instructive case study is the institutional arc of El Museo del Barrio, in New York City, which surfaced tensions between the ideals of Prosperity and the goals of Self-Determination. Founded by Puerto Rican activists and educators in 1969 with funding from the New York State Board of Regents, the museum originally had the mission of increasing representation for Puerto Rican culture. After losing much of its funding in the 1970s, El Museo broadened its mission to encompass art by all Latin American artists, transitioned leadership on the board from community members to individuals with traditional gallery and art world experience, and eventually relocated to the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. While these changes allowed the museum to increase revenue and attract new supporters, it also resulted in significant pushback from community members, who noted that the many changes had decreased opportunities for local Puerto Rican artists at the museum. Pressure to undertake mainstream model expansion resulted in a museum that, while successful by capitalist markers, failed to stay true to its original vision.

El Museo del Barrio’s Three Kings Day Parade, 2016 (source)

We can also use the four visions to help us understand the ramifications of new policy ideas intended to advance cultural equity. One proposal that has come up from time to time is to tie funding levels directly to the diversity of organizations. While many private funders in the United States ask questions about staff and board diversity and incorporate such information into funding decisions informally, the most assertive stands on this front are currently being staked out by other countries. In December 2014, Arts Council England announced that it would hold organizations accountable for promoting and developing diversity throughout their work across leadership, workforce, programming and audiences–or risk the loss of critical ACE funding. Meanwhile, the Canada Council for the Arts will now reduce funding for organizations that do not share a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of [their] geographic community or region.”

What reactions could we expect if the National Endowment for the Arts proposed to weigh diversity equally against its current review criteria of artistic excellence and artistic merit? Certainly, the Prosperity and Redistribution visions would see much to celebrate in such a proposal, given the increased access to different forms of capital it would represent. Supporters of the status quo, naturally, would resist. Perhaps the most interesting question is how such a policy move would sit with Self-Determination. While ostensibly a step in the direction of justice and thus unlikely to be opposed, it could be seen as giving too much emphasis to the goals of Diversity at the expense of broader social change. To maintain funding levels, mainstream institutions could shake up the composition of their staffs and boards, but the arts activities that take place through small organizations, churches, and informal collectives outside of the NEA’s reach might not realize much benefit. Moreover, the move would still leave control of resources firmly within the dominant system–resources that could disappear as soon as priorities shift, as has happened historically with NEA and state government funding.

Cultural Equity in a Healthy Arts Ecosystem

“Change is not a uniform process…the goal of building participation in the arts requires that leaders and organizations rethink the meaning of success.”

– Diane Grams and Betty Farrell, writing in Entering Cultural Communities, 2008

Createquity’s own vision of success is that every opportunity is taken to make people’s lives better through the arts. Clearly, in order to understand how to do that, we need to make sense of cultural equity in the context of our own work. Although this project started out as an investigation of the history of cultural equity activism, we soon realized we would provide more value both to ourselves and the field if we made an attempt to untangle the unnamed assumptions that so often confuse or complicate conversations about cultural equity.

As a first step, we set ourselves the task of writing arguments in favor of each of the four visions articulated above in the context of Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, in which each individual (now and in the future) has the opportunity to participate in the arts at a level suited to that person’s interest and skill. Because Createquity has identified specific outcomes that we believe characterize a healthy arts ecosystem, many of these arguments diverge a bit from the language that activists use (e.g., “institutions rooted in communities of color will hire more artists of color than mainstream institutions would and pay them a market wage, thus distributing very scarce opportunities to participate in the arts more equitably”). However, we tried our best throughout the exercise to make an authentic translation between each of the visions and our own.

Next, we took the arguments for each of the visions and attempted to articulate the fact-based assumptions undergirding each of them, staying as close to the healthy arts ecosystem definition as possible. (You can see these assumptions in the same document linked above.) To establish a preliminary sense of where we were as an organization, we asked our editorial team to rate each of the resulting fifty-odd assumptions on a scale of one (“I am very confident this is not true”) to five (“I am very confident this is true.”) The assumptions were presented at face value, without the context of a vision, and in no particular order. Ten Createquity team members participated.

In developing these arguments and assumptions, we wanted to acknowledge that one reason why cultural equity initiatives fall short is because they often face resistance from parties who argue against any change to the status quo. As a thought exercise, we included “Status Quo” as a fifth vision for success, developing as many arguments in its favor as we could think of. While Status Quo arguments in practice often take an institution- or discipline-centric frame that is at odds with Createquity’s concern for the entire ecosystem, we did manage to come up with a few rationales that could be consistent with the idea of making people’s lives better through the arts. For example, one could argue that mainstream institutions are crucial to artistic professions where it is difficult, though possible, to make a living as an artist (such as ballet dancer or orchestra musician). Perhaps it is the case that the Eurocentric programming presented by mainstream institutions is inherently expensive to produce, and thus it is natural and expected for institutions that offer this programming to receive a disproportionate amount of subsidy. Status Quo advocates frequently seek to avoid setting up the choice between maintaining subsidy or supporting smaller organizations as an either/or; they argue that mainstream institutions deliver a lot of benefits to their communities by operating at scale, which allows them to serve many more people and–importantly–to bring in tourism dollars. They may also argue that most donors to mainstream arts organizations would not have considered contributing to smaller organizations anyway.

“Museum Mile” by flickr user MichelinStar

On the whole, our team did not find the assumptions underlying the pro-Status Quo arguments particularly compelling, with one exception: we agreed that mainstream institutions could likely serve as an anchor for tourism, regardless of efforts to diversify. The remaining ratings did not yield an unambiguous endorsement of any vision in particular. That said, the following assumptions received high ratings across the board, and we presently consider these to be our “working assumptions” in the context of our work on cultural equity:

• At a basic level, we agree that mainstream institutions grew out of a white, racist system, and continue to disproportionately serve white people and certain other demographics.
• There is further agreement that funding disproportionately flows to these mainstream institutions.
• We agree that a lack of diverse cultural programming, either from mainstream institutions or those that receive some other form of validation from the broader culture, is problematic for the wellbeing of people of color.
• There is a general trust that people of color, whether in the context of mainstream institutions or institutions of color, will be more likely to provide programming opportunities to artists of color.
• And finally, there is agreement that many of the dominant organizing logics within the current nonprofit sector provide disproportionate control over individual institutions to those with wealth and influence.

It’s important to note that these are working assumptions, which means they could change in response to new information or data. But for now, the combination of these views means that Createquity sees the concentration of resources within mainstream institutions as likely problematic absent meaningful diversification of those institutions. It also offers an endorsement of involving more people of color in programming decisions, whether through mainstream institutions or some other means.

We are much less clear as a group on how resources should be optimally distributed than we are on the idea that the current arrangement is probably not for the best. That outcome is not terribly surprising; after all, little is known about many of the assumptions that distinguish the Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution and Self-Determination visions from one another. We see this as a crucial opportunity for future research in the sector. In our own efforts, we plan to prioritize the following questions going forward:

VALUABLE CULTURAL EXPERIENCES
What are the ingredients of a cultural experience that people find valuable? Are those ingredients consistent across demographics? Are the demographics of the staff (artistic, programming, and administrative) and board at arts and cultural organizations predictive of a) the demographics of their participants and b) the quality of experience that participants have?

THE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF SCALE
What effect does the scale of an arts organization (or an organization with arts programming) have on its ability to create specific benefits for artists, audiences, and communities of color? How do networks of larger and smaller organizations perform relative to each other in facilitating these benefits? Does the influence of wealthy donors, funders, and customers tend to promote or harm an organization’s ability to deliver these benefits?

ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Are arts activities designed to combat racism and other forms of oppression effective in that goal? How do they compare to other anti-oppression strategies, and do they make those strategies more effective when used in combination?

In the United States, we have data showing the distribution of funding to different kinds of arts organizations, including those primarily serving communities of color. We have data on the demographics of arts audiences, of artists, and increasingly of the cultural workforce. And there’s more research on these topics being commissioned all the time. Isn’t that enough?

We would argue that it’s not. Knowledge of this nature can only ever establish that there might be a problem; it gives us very little insight on what we should do about it. We might each have intuitions about the right path forward, but as this article amply demonstrates, reasonable people are coming to different conclusions about where those paths lead. So long as that remains the case, we suspect the fight for cultural equity will continue to be a long, slow, uncertain slog.

At Createquity, we’ve embraced the framework of wellbeing–which groups the various components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella–as a way of binding together the outcomes of a healthy arts ecosystem holistically. While there are many ways of conceptualizing and measuring wellbeing, one of the most common involves simply asking people how satisfied they are with their lives–which sounds pretty self-determining to us. Pursuing future inquiry through a wellbeing or quality-of-life lens may be an effective tactic for building bridges between visions and the ideologies they represent, by enabling the relative value of components of each vision to be understood as part of an integrated whole. We can all agree, hopefully, that the goals of cultural equity are compatible with the goal of a happier and more meaningful life for all. We hope our work here can be one small step towards creating that better future.

A full bibliography for this piece as well as several endnotes can be found here. Createquity would like to thank Plural (Mina Matlon, Ingrid van Haastrecht, and Kaitlyn Wittig Mengüç), Andrea Louie, and Marc Vogl for their invaluable feedback in the course of developing this article.

“People of color(s)” by darwin bell

Title: Shaping a triple-bottom line for nonprofit arts organizations: Micro-, macro-, and meta-policy influences

Author: Wyszomirski, Margaret Jane

Publisher: Cultural Trends

Year: December 2013

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09548963.2013.817645#.VuRi_fkrLIU

What it says: The article provides a recounting of the evolution of NEA policies since its founding in 1965 and those policies’ impacts on the nonprofit arts sector. Wyszormirski describes how major NEA policies were conceived and implemented by NEA Chairs in response to political or societal pressures as well as perceived deficiencies in the U.S. arts ecosystem. As these agency-wide policies were gradually integrated into the grant making culture of the NEA and the work of arts organizations, a standard set of metrics for organizational performance emerged: a triple bottom line including financial sustainability, artistic vitality, and recognized public value. The author notes that the original NEA legislation did refer to each of these “bottom line” metrics but the integration of these metrics into the arts nonprofit system was a result of the priorities and improvisations of each NEA chair, as opposed to an overarching plan.

The author states that wide adoption of each of these three metrics happened in an ad hoc and incremental manner, with matching grants and peer panel review as the instruments. As a result of interactions between grantees, panel members, NEA staff, and other funders, these metrics became standard for all arts NGOs, whether or not they were grantees of the NEA. The author also notes that policies combining multiple goals exist in other arenas, and specifically mentions terminology of the “triple-bottom line” of profit-making, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability described in business management literature. On financial sustainability, Wyszomirski puts the NEA at the center of the gradual consolidation of standards. Wyszomirski recounts how the NEA’s understanding of its financial role changed over time from providing direct support, such as a 1966 emergency grant to the American Ballet Theater, to funding that encouraged the ability of nonprofit arts organizations to maintain financial stability. Wyszomirski says that this evolution resulted in the financial sustainability “bottom line” for the arts sector.

Wyszomirski describes three different evolutions of the NEA’s position on artistic merit. In the first phrase, the NEA innovated by departing from an elitist definition of excellence to welcoming a broader range of art forms. Subsequently, the NEA pursued policies that emphasized promoting experimental work by being the funder of last resort. Lastly, the culture wars period from 1989 to 1997 put pressure on the ideal of experimental work. The result was a move by the NEA to link community “buy-in” to the concept of artistic value.

The article notes that the public benefit “bottom line” was present in the NEA’s founding legislation but evolved to become more important and more prominent over time. Wyszomirski says the NEA had always valued both the intrinsic and the instrumental benefits of the arts but describes a shift toward instrumentalism in arts policy in response “to threatened funding reductions and the culture wars” following the 1980s. The study goes through the history of NEA work in arts education and more recently “creative placemaking” activities. Wyszomirski stresses that, after the late 1990s, NEA chairs have pushed instrumental arts activities that produce visible public benefits – activities that enable advocacy efforts of the NEA and the larger arts advocacy community.

What I think about it: The study explains the interplay of different mechanisms that create and disseminate arts policy through the NEA and arts nonprofits in a persuasive way. The assertion that the evolution of standards was driven by ad hoc policy responses, rather than as part of a policy master plan or theory of change, remains important to bear in mind for those who seek to shape arts policy in the future. The aphorism “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” springs to mind. The study includes an assertion that when the NEA chair did not lead on overall policy development for the arts sector, outside actors, such as foundations, took the lead and drove policy. Wyszomirski states that, with the beginnings of the culture wars, “the NEA…was in no position to articulate macro-policy” and “the next reframing of this [financial sustainability] bottom line as a search for sustainability came from private foundations outside the NEA.” However, the study provides less texture on influences and competing or complimentary ideas from these other actors. This paper leaves open the potentially vital question of how private foundations and other non-governmental actors have formed arts sector policy.

What it all means: There is an underlying implication in the study that the arts community ultimately got to the right overall mix of these three bottom lines, even if Wyszomirski stresses that the exact balance will remain in flux. In the future, however, debates over the instrumental versus intrinsic value of the arts, the diversity in the arts, and the mix of nonprofit versus for-profit arts may impact the definitions of financial sustainability, artistic vitality, and recognized public value. Further analysis and research is needed on how other actors, especially private grant makers, are shaping the benchmarks for success in the arts ecosystem in the U.S. Understanding the mechanism for defining success in the arts remains important to Createquity’s investigation on the capacity to create change.

Artist at Work – photo by flickr user Graeme Rattray

As part of its 50th anniversary, the National Endowment for the Arts has launched Creativity Connects, a threefold leadership initiative designed to show “how the arts contribute to the nation’s creative ecosystem, investigate the ways in which the support systems for the artists are changing, and explore how the arts can connect with other sectors that want and utilize creativity.”  As part of Creativity Connects, the Center for Cultural Innovation and Helicon Collaborative are working on an infrastructure report that will examine the changes artists have experienced in the last decade and how to strengthen the landscape of support. The initiative will also produce an interactive digital graphic that maps how the arts intersects with other industries. Finally, the NEA has set up a pilot grant program to support partnerships with organizations from outside the arts. Creativity Connects is likely to be the major contribution of Jane Chu’s term as Chairman as the nation prepares for a change of administrations next year. To get involved, join the conversation at creativz.us, a new online platform to house the initiative that is currently making a push to ask what artists in the United States need to sustain and strengthen their careers. (If you’re feeling in the survey-taking or -distributing mood, the Mellon Foundation also has a survey out seeking “a better understanding of the current health and well-being among artists living and working in the United States.”)

New directions for the Barr Foundation. In May 2014, Jim Canales, former president and CEO of The James Irvine Foundation in California, moved East to join Boston’s Barr Foundation as its first ever president. Canales was tasked with developing a new strategic direction of the foundation, which was established in 1987 by Amos and Barbara Hostetter and is the largest funder in Boston, having given out some $710 million to date. Earlier this year, the foundation announced its new strategy, which doesn’t look like much of a departure on the surface: Barr remains committed to its three core issue areas—education, arts, and climate change, and plans to continue its concentration on the Boston area. At the edges, however, the signs of a funder that has vastly increased the scope of its ambition are apparent. With a fast-growing endowment and staff, Barr plans to increase its regional funding presence throughout Massachusetts and even make targeted grants nationally. Under the leadership of San San Wong, the foundation’s renamed Arts & Creativity program has been given a sharper focus, that of “elevating the arts and enabling creative expression to engage and inspire a dynamic, thriving Commonwealth.“  The foundation plans to pursue this goal through three strategies: advancing the field’s capacity to adapt, take risks, and engage changing audiences in new ways; fostering opportunities to connect the arts to other disciplines and sectors; and activating public support for the arts. The Barr Foundation is at the forefront of an exciting period of growth for the arts in Boston, what with Mayor Walsh’s Boston Creates, the Barr Klarman Arts Capacity Building Initiative, ArtPlace America initiatives and a new artist-in-residence program announced this month which will embed local artists inside city departments to promote creative thinking about municipal government.

Cannes and Ford Foundation tackle inequity. The Cannes Film Market, the business counterpart of the Cannes Film Festival launched in 1959, and the Ford Foundation’s five-year old JustFilms, a film financing, social awareness and education program, announced a two-year partnership this month to boost the profile, market networking and distribution of social justice documentary features at Cannes. The partnership will play out in several ways. First, Cannes Film Market’s “Doc Corner” will be significantly scaled up for the upcoming May 2016 festival, and both parties will increase their efforts to bring docu filmmakers, especially those from the world’s global south, to Cannes. Second, for the first time ever, Cannes Film Festival marquee events will focus on the docu-feature sector. For Cannes, this partnership is yet another example of the festival’s diversifying its offerings. For Ford, which announced last year that it would direct all of its resources to curbing global inequity, the partnership is a significant step towards this goal, and a logical next step for JustFilms, which has already supported some 80 films since its inception.

A Bechdel Test for race? In the years since Alison Bechdel coined the Bechdel-Wallace test in a 1985 comic strip from her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, “The Test” has become a yardstick for measuring gender equality in a work of fiction. For a work to pass, it must 1) have at least two women in it, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something other than a man. (Some add that the female characters need be named.) Although some argue that the test is too simple to accurately assess gender parity, its widespread adoption is important. Having a quantitative metric for narrative diversity has proven useful, especially when so many works fail the test. This month, Manohla Dargis, chief film critic for The New York Times, took the Bechdel test one step further, proposing what she calls the “DuVernay test,” in honor of Ava DuVernay, the celebrated director of Selma. The racial analogue to the Bechdel test, the DuVernay test seeks to offer a simple, widely-applicable metric for examining the way we treat characters of color in film and media. While the proposal might need some further definition (Dargis’s metric of “fully realized lives” is quite a bit harder to implement in practice than Bechdel’s simple checklist), the idea has been well received, including by DuVernay herself. Though it has yet to be applied extensively, at least one channel is set up to pass with flying colors: the All Nations Network—a cable channel featuring TV programming created for and by native peoples–is set to launch soon in the United States.

And the nominee (for Librarian of Congress) is…President Obama nominated Carla Hayden to be the next  Librarian of Congress this month. If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Hayden would be the 14th Librarian of Congress in the institution’s 214-year history. She would also be the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position, milestones that Obama has called “long overdue.” Hayden, who has led the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore since 1993, would also be just the third professional librarian to serve in the position. Hayden would succeed James Billington, who was appointed by President Reagan and served as Librarian of Congress for nearly three decades. Billington stepped down from his post on January 1 of this year amid criticism of library mismanagement and “digital neglect”. In response, last year President Obama signed into a law a ten year term limit for Librarians of Congress–though there is the option for renewal. The next Librarian of Congress will assume some serious responsibility, such as modernizing the Library’s digital infrastructure, and in her position overseeing the Copyright Office, could significantly shift the copyright conversation.

MUSICAL  CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Channing Dungey has been named president of ABC Entertainment Group, becoming the first African American to lead a major broadcast network.
• Betsy Fader, a leader in the philanthropic and social enterprise sectors, has been named Vice President of Programs at the Surdna Foundation.
• Dan Cardinali, currently president of Communities in Schools, has been appointed CEO of Independent Sector, a coalition of charities and foundations.
• In a surprise cabinet reshuffle, Audrey Azoulay, currently President François Hollande’s cultural advisor, has replaced Fleur Pellerin as France’s culture minister.
• Kelly Lee has been appointed Philadelphia’s Chief Cultural Officer, joining an office that was re-established by Mayor Michael Nutter in 2008.
• After working at Creative Time for eight years, Katie Hollander has been promoted to Executive Director.
• Lisa Lucas has been named executive director of the National Book Foundation.
• Two long-serving vice presidents were promoted at Slover Linett this month. Sarah Lee has been named president, taking over from the firm’s founder, Cheryl Slover-Linett, and Chloe Chittick Patton has been named chief operating officer, a newly created position.
• Malcolm White, who was executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission from 2005-2012, will return as executive director this year after three years as the state’s tourism chief.
• Gimlet Media is hiring an Associate Producer, Family History Show. Posted February 16; no closing date.
• Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is hiring a Center Specialist in the visual arts. Posted February 24; no closing date.
• DataArts (formerly the Cultural Data Project) is hiring a Senior Research Advisor. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• In light of this month’s contested Academy Awards, two new studies shed some light on the issue of diversity in the film industry. While a review from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University found a significant rise in the number of women featured as protagonists in films in 2015, a wide-ranging study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism gave a failing diversity grade to every movie studio and most TV makers.
• Several reports out this month looked at philanthropic trends. One study looked at 24 countries and found there is no significant correlation between charitable giving, levels of taxation & government spending within a given country. Another report from the Atlas of Giving found that US charitable giving increased 4.6% in 2015, and is expected to grow 2.6% in 2016. A third suggested that US nonprofits missed out on some $6.5 billion due to mobile incompatibility in 2015. Related, a report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy finds that grantees think information about the substance of a foundation’s work is more important than disclosures about its finances or governance.
• “Art Under Threat,” released this month by Freemuse, shows that wordlwide attacks on artistic freedom almost doubled in 2015, and that most attacks were either politically or religiously motivated.
• Research out of Johns Hopkins University suggests that it’s not how much your practice, but how you practice that makes all the difference.
• The National Endowment for the Arts brought seventy experts together to talk about the role of the arts in healthy aging.
• The US and Britain released several studies looking at the economic impact of the arts. One study conducted a detailed empirical examination of the connection between arts organizations and key measures of neighborhood diversity and economic advantage or disadvantage in NYC. Britain commissioned a study of the arts’ contributions to the national GDP.  And looking ahead, beginning on 2016, the US Dept of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis will being to “produce statistics showing the role of arts and culture in the economies of all 50 states.” Related, a report out of Australia finds that producers struggle to find affordable venues as the Sydney’s expensive theaters remain underutilized, and a report from England found that London organizations receive almost twice as much arts funding as the rest of England combined, despite accounting for just a third of the country’s cultural offering.
• Researcher Orian Brook looked at the extent to which living near a cultural venue influences whether or not one attends, and found that indeed, proximity was very strongly positively associated with the likelihood of attendance.
• How happy is your state? A report released this month by the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index ranks wellbeing in the USA by state.