The New York Times Building, photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

One hot August day last summer, my Facebook news feed suddenly blew up with frustration directed at New York Times fact-checkers, editors, and writers over the geekiest of subjects: data quality. The complaints were coming from friends of mine associated with the Future of Music Coalition, frequent commentators on policy affecting musicians in particular and creators of all kinds. These are two brands that I respect enormously – the Times website gets multiple visits from my browser a day, and FMC puts out some of the best policy analysis out there – so of course I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.

Remember the fierce debates that gripped the music industry when pirated MP3s started popping up on filesharing sites like Napster and Audiogalaxy? On one side, copyright defenders fought these sites tooth and nail, even to the point of suing individual users, in an unsuccessful effort to stem the tide. On the other, copyright reformists and anarchists embraced filesharing as a way of bypassing traditional gatekeepers. To bolster their position, the old guard frequently adopted doomsday-like language predicting the death of the music industry and the loss of artistic vitality. The new guard argued the opposite, contending that piracy was essentially free marketing for artists, and that if anything the increased exposure and attention would facilitate connections (and transactions) that would not have previously been possible.

So who was right? A cover story published last year in the New York Times Magazine by noted business and technology writer Steven Johnson would have you believe that piracy has turned out to be no biggie for artists and society. The article, entitled “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,” attempts to explore how “today’s creative class [is] faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago.” (Johnson and his editors at the Times annoyingly use a different definition of “creative class” than Richard Florida, who originated the term—they specifically mean people who work in entertainment industries.) To do this, Johnson examined a raft of secondary data sources to assess everything from the size of the industry to average incomes to aesthetic quality.

Despite evidence that Napster and its successors have indeed undermined the value that consumers place on recorded music (annual revenues have declined from $60 billion to $15 billion worldwide), Johnson’s analysis finds that musicians, along with writers, directors, and other performers, don’t seem to have suffered greatly as a result. To support his contention, Johnson cites data from three sources that collectively show creative industry jobs, businesses, and incomes growing in relation to the rest of the economy between the turn of the millennium and 2014. He considers possible macro explanations for the trend, including declining costs of production and distribution and increased revenue from live music performances. He even attempts to address the quality of different disciplines over the time period, concluding that TV is in a golden age and that film and books are arguably no worse off than they were before. Far from harming the diversity of artists’ voices, according to Johnson, technological change has enabled it.

The article immediately provoked an intense backlash from artists and industry representatives alike, many of whom didn’t see their story represented in the data. The most thoughtful broadsides came from Future of Music Coalition, which pointed out that the case that artists and musicians have not suffered economically over the past 15 years relies heavily on the data from the federal government’s Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) and Economic Census, both of which turn out to be compromised. By the government’s own admission, OES is not an ideal data source for making comparisons over time, and some sleuthing by FMC and Thomas Lumley pinpointed a definitional change that appears to account for all of the growth reported in the number of musicians and then some. Meanwhile, according to Patrick Wang, general definitional fuzziness may be distorting the numbers of all creatives as well, with coaches, scouts and public relations specialists accounting for much of the growth seen in those statistics. Johnson’s article also neglects to mention that the number of artists employed by businesses, as reported in the Economic Census, has dropped—even though the number of businesses employing artists has grown. And there are a number of reasons why some of the more secondary elements of “Creative Apocalypse” (e.g., the analysis of the growth of live touring revenues) need to be taken with a grain of salt as well.

These are significant flaws, and it’s perplexing that Johnson’s editor at the Times, Jake Silverstein, persisted in calling the article “excellent” and “thoroughly researched” even after they were brought to his attention. That said, when a data source turns out to be suspect, it doesn’t always mean that the conclusion you were drawing from it is wrong. In November, the research team at the National Endowment for the Arts took another look at the issue through the lens of an entirely different data source: the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Unlike the OES statistics, the CPS is set up to be analyzed longitudinally, and there are no changes in how “musicians, singers, and related workers” have been defined over the past 15 years to muck up the analysis, making it a much better data source for this purpose.

The CPS data shows that the percentage of musicians in the workforce has remained largely stable over the time period, splitting the difference between Johnson’s article and the revised analysis offered by his critics. More importantly, the CPS data shows musicians’ real incomes rising substantially, and faster than overall workers, during the time period in question, albeit with substantial variance from year to year. (This had already been the strongest part of Johnson’s analysis – as he correctly pointed out in a response to one of the critiques, no one has been able to point to a data source that has musicians’ average incomes declining since 1999.)

So it looks like there has been some growth among creative fields, music included, in the past decade and a half. Why, then, does it feel to so many like the profession is in crisis? After all of this analysis, the biggest unanswered question is about the distribution of the growth. When we write a sentence like “musicians’ income has increased,” the mind immediately conjures a picture of a rising tide lifting all boats. But what the data is really saying is that the average of all musicians’ income has increased – which could mean that a few fatcats making a killing are disguising stagnation or worse for everyone else. In the original article, Johnson makes a weak case that this is not happening, using incomplete data on live music tour revenue only; however, in one of his follow-ups, he claims that he looked at median income for musicians, which has—surprise surprise!—outpaced the growth in average income during the years from 2004-2014. But before we get too excited about this, keep in mind that this analysis used the same flawed data set as had been discredited earlier, and the same challenge that skewed the numbers there (dumping a bunch of elementary and secondary schoolteachers into the mix midway through) could quite plausibly have affected the income figures too. Johnson’s rhetoric implies that all artists are sharing in the largesse, but if income inequality is increasing, that would be like touting America’s shared prosperity on the basis of stock market growth since the depths of the recession.

Another clue to explain the reaction to the article comes from the NEA’s response, which pulled the figures on real investment in new music between 1999 and 2014 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In contrast to movies, television programs, and books, which have seen steady or increasing investment over that time period, annual investment in new musical intellectual property products has declined an astounding 28% in inflation-adjusted dollars. The decline in recorded music revenues likely has a lot to do with that.

Overall, the picture being painted in the data (that we can trust, that is) is one of the same number or fewer people identifying as full-time professional musicians, but making more money on average. But as anyone who follows the music industry knows, that misses a significant part of the story. Thanks to technological changes that have made the means of music production and distribution cheaper and more accessible, it seems like a good bet that there are lots more people who are pursuing public identities as musicians today than there were in 1999. If that’s the case, but yet there are not more people able to make a living as a musician, it would mean that a data set that captured all aspiring musicians might well show average incomes going down.

So, back to Johnson’s premise: are we better off than we were pre-Napster? It depends on your perspective. There is still plenty of money to be made in the creative industries, and Americans are still as willing to pay for entertainment as ever, although the specific mix of goods and services is changing. But if you’re a creator who works primarily in music, it does seem like opportunity might be shrinking. So far, it doesn’t look like the decline in recorded music revenues due to streaming and piracy has spread to other industries and genres, but it’s unclear whether film and TV are being buoyed by shifting audience preferences or have simply managed to stave off a similar collapse that is coming soon.

Meanwhile, we’re left with the plight of the artist. In recent decades, researchers have found that one of the surest paths to unhappiness is to have expectations that go unfulfilled; Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow of a study that showed that “measured by life satisfaction 20 years later, the least promising goal that a young person could have was ‘becoming accomplished in a performing art.'” It’s tempting to interpret the increase in access that technology has provided to aspiring artists of all kinds as an unqualified boon for society. But to the extent that the opportunity to have a public identity as an artist has translated to expectation of public success as an artist, we may be looking at a system that, in the aggregate, punishes people for pursuing their dreams – a creator’s curse of sorts. If true, that issue goes way beyond how Pandora and Spotify divvy up their royalties and whether Apple Music gives sweetheart deals to Taylor Swift. And part of the answer may lie in helping aspiring artists make more informed decisions about how much of themselves they’re really willing to give up for art.

Related reading:

• What am I worth to you?
• Artists not alone in steep climb to the top

• The IRS has proposed a new Form 1023-EZ, which would allow some smaller organizations to apply for tax-exempt status with much less hassle. The National Association of State Charity Officials has objected out of a belief that completing the longer form is an important educational experience and a fear that applications could skyrocket.
• A report from the R Street Institute argues that copyright terms, which have ballooned while patent terms have barely inflated, are so long that they are not only stifling to creativity but actually unconstitutional.
• With the recent passing of Cornelius Gurlitt, hoarder of over 1,000 works of art suspected to be looted from Nazis, the official investigation into the provenance of the artworks in his collection ended. Unexpectedly, Gurlitt bequeathed his trove to the Kunstmuseum Bern, reopening legal and ethical questions surrounding the new acquisitions.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• MacArthur President Robert L. Gallucci will step down when his term expires on July 1. Julia Stasch, VP for US programs, will act as interim president while the board searches for a replacement.
• Jarl Mohn, chairman of Southern California Public Media and former MTV executive, is the new head of National Public Radio. Mr. Mohn has the enviable charge of pulling NPR out of its deficit, sowing harmony among member stations, and figuring out how to fundraise in the post-pledge drive era.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Knight Foundation has awarded Theaster Gates $3.5 million to transform an office space on the south side of Chicago into an incubator “where neighborhood residents will come together with artists, designers and urban planners to work on revitalization projects through art.”
• Reflecting on the Hewlett Foundation’s recent announcement of the end of its Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative, Tony Proscio wonders whether the funder pulled the plug too soon. Meanwhile, in another frank self-assessment, Hewlett undertook a field scan of evaluation spending and found room for improvement in its own practice, particularly regarding embedding evaluation strategies in the early life of programs. As a result, the foundation plans to up its evaluation spending from roughly 1.2 percent to 2.3 of its overall grant budget.
• Bad news for “cultured professionals” looking to buy art at auctions: the average price for fine art has doubled over just four years, leaving many to settle on prints. And in other art market news, between 2012 and 2013 online art purchases increased 83 percent. Total sales have finally exceeded $1 billion.
• Angie Kim summarizes the origins and history of the 5 percent payout rule for foundations and argues a variable payout rate, based on a foundation’s performance over 25 years, would better ensure that foundations’ wealth does not grow disproportionately to their support of the greater good.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera’s financial situation is looking up: in the last two weeks, the organization has raised more than $1 million through a crowdfunding campaign and received a $500,000 matching gift challenge – although, in the other column, the city is expected to cut its funding for the opera by $223,000. The Opera’s new board leadership’s desire to save the company now has the vocal support of the members of the San Diego Opera Association and the solo singers’ union. They aren’t out of the woods yet, though, since a 2015 season will still require about $2.7 million in additional funds.
• After seven years, the Seattle Dance Project is shutting down as artistic director Timothy Lynch moves to Ohio’s BalletMet. And the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra‘s next season will be its last after over 100 years of performances in Wisconsin.
• Say what? The Colorado Symphony Orchestra will host a series of bring-your-own marijuana events in collaboration with Edible Events, a pro-pot company, as a way to be more inclusive and raise money for the orchestra.
• We have no idea how much Comcast and Verizon are charging Netflix for more direct access to users’ homes – and that’s not a good thing.
• Some remarkable numbers from the academic field about the extent to which hiring for administrators has outpaced the hiring of professors. A similar dynamic to arts organizations, perhaps?

BIG IDEAS

• As Piketty-mania continues to drive interest in income inequality, a comparison of the prices of various goods in the United States over the last ten years yields grim insights about its effects. While the cost of education and health care — i.e. services that can’t be outsourced — has risen dramatically, the cost of electronics, clothing, and other personal goods has fallen. One commentator sums things up nicely: “Prices are rising on the very things that are essential to climb out of poverty.”
• Mania being what it is, it’s not surprising that some conversations about income inequality have taken an interesting turn, suggesting that the widening gap between rich and poor may be good for artists. As at least one author has pointed out, that argument fails to demonstrate that the arts are “more dynamic under high inequality than… under conditions of low inequality,” and even if great art has been produced in awful social conditions, that by no means justifies those conditions. Add to that mix confusion about the difference between rising wealth creation and wealth inequality, and you’ve got a growing debate on your hands.
• Design methodology is increasingly used to solve unwieldy social problems at a policy level in the European Union, but the US has been slow to catch on. The National Endowment for the Arts contracted the Design Council to organize a webinar addressing how to use design “to create public services around the people who use them, to introduce new methods into the civil service skill set, and as a tool to aid the process of public policy development” as part of the Learning from Abroad series.
• The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has launched Philamplify, a collection of in-depth assessments of the top foundations in the country. Assessments of the Lumina Foundation for Education, William Penn Foundation, and Robert W. Woodruff Foundation are included at the moment, though the site plans to add about one hundred more within the next few months. Website visitors can indicate whether they agree with Philamplify’s recommendations for the foundations and add comments.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Arts marketing specialists LaPlaca Cohen released the sixth edition of their CultureTrack report on participation in cultural events and held a panel discussion about it. The report characterizes American audiences as promiscuous (we range across media) and social (we hate to go alone, and personal recommendations and invitations are among the main drivers of participation). The verdict on attendance is mixed: more people are attending museums, musical theater, and classical music each year (though not straight plays, theater, or opera), but overall they are going less often.
• A new study by researchers at the London School of Economics concludes that engaging in the arts makes people happy – as happy as if you paid them $100-150 per month. Michael Rushton, as is his wont, argues caution.
• The NEA has an update on three current projects that aim to support continuous learning in the field: 1) an assessment of the artistic excellence of grantees’ work products, 2) a pilot survey of grantee organizations’ audiences, meant to measure the extent to which they were engaged and moved by arts experiences, 3) a new evaluation by the Urban Institute of the the NEA’s Arts & Livability Indicators.
• inBloom, a massive educational data collection effort supported by the Gates Foundation, is shutting down following mounting concerns voiced by parents regarding their children’s privacy. Besides serving as a cautionary tale of how philanthropic efforts can stumble when they lack appropriate buy-in, the example may portend a backlash against collecting data on children — and arts audiences of all types.
• Of 7,000 Victorian novels, only a few dozen are read today. How does an author pass the test of time? Salon interviews cultural historian Franco Moretti, who uses big data to analyze bad books.
• Speaking of not getting read today, do you ever feel like posting reports online is adding to a virtual wasteland of PDFs that will never be opened? You’re probably right. The World Bank decided to test that feeling by running analytics on its website and discovered that a whopping one-third of its research reports have never, ever been downloaded. Only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times.

ETC.

• Positive reviews on sites like Yelp and Amazon translate into real money for businesses – even though as many as a third of reviewers may be fake and the real ones may not be representative of customers.
• The Gray Lady suddenly appears to find itself in the business of hiring actors, thanks to a new “Verbatim” series that features “recreations of actual events from the halls of law and government” by “transform[ing]… legal transcripts into dramatic, and often comedic performances.” The first one comes courtesy of a 2010 lawsuit involving photocopying public records. It has to be seen to be believed.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Never afraid to speak his mind, Rocco Landesman shares a few more words about his experience as NEA head, this time with the Public Theater’s Public Forum Podcast.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Ken Corbin, a 27-year IRS veteran, will take over as acting head of the IRS’s exempt organizations division amid the recent controversies at the agency.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Knight and Gates Foundations are now teaming up to fund the Media Impact Project, which will develop tools for measuring the impact of online media.
• Controversy over public-private partnerships is as hot as ever, this time appearing in the provision of public space. The Atlantic discusses the equity, efficiency, and quantity implications.
• Former hedge funder John Arnold and wife Laura have opened a controversial, highly data-driven foundation in Houston with promising results already in the areas of hunger and criminal justice, Philanthropy News Digest reports.
• Andy Warhol’s eponymous foundation is struggling with a serious institutional crisis in which leaders created perverse incentives for their art authenticators and salespeople, according to Richard Dorment’s crackerjack reporting for the New York Review of Books.
• A new fund to help young London theater producers is making a big splash, the Guardian reports.

IN THE FIELD

• Ever wonder how arts therapy works for victims of trauma? ARTSblog has a fantastic pithy explanation in their article on the use of art therapy with members of America’s armed forces. More on arts and the military from Americans for the Arts can be found here.
• In an evolving sharing culture, copyright has become a major challenge for museums attempting to make social connections with audiences. Carolina A. Miranda explains how this works today in a detailed article for ARTnews.
• Curation is an evolving artform. Erin Roos-Brown, a Program Manager for the Creative Campus Initiative at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, argues in her article on the topic that curation used to require an insulated academic and is now quickly becoming a social, entrepreneurial role.
• A fascinating New York Times report on using art to launder money explains how the culture around buying famous artworks makes it one of the best ways to hide your tracks–if you’re a criminal.
• Vancouver theater producer Caleb McMullen is boldly offering a guarantee on the price of the ticket for his company’s production of Proof. The Globe and Mail lays out the whys, hows, and whos.
• A judge has allowed composer Nathan Currier’s lawsuit against the Brooklyn Philharmonic to proceed, thus extending the saga of the most bizarre concert experience ever experienced into its 10th year. -IDM

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• The Australian breaks down the takeaways from the Aspen Institute’s meeting on the future of museums in a new brief summary.

BIG IDEAS

• Createquity’s Talia Gibas has a brief summary at ARTSBlog covering how to get into the weeds of what the STEM to STEAM movement is really trying to accomplish.
• Fast Company’s always enterprising online outfit FastCoLabs has been experimenting with a new part-long form, part-live blog format that has (thus far) had a remarkably positive impact on their analytics.
• The Atlantic’s Emily Badger challenges the virtues of the advancing personalization of Google Maps in her piece The Potential Problem With Personalized Google Maps. Her argument speaks to the potential for idiosyncratic exposure to reduce quality of life.
• Students all over the country are being told to purse their passion, but what if they don’t have one? Economists try to answer this question in this piece by Planet Money’s Chana-Joffey Walt.
• Artful improvisation is a useful tool for managers. Keith Sawyer explains what leaders should glean from jazz improv in particular in his review of Yes to the Mess by Frank J. Barrett.
• Congratulations to the lucky dozen who made the Barry’s Blog Dinner-vention guest list! The event will be held September 6 at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and will be recorded for posterity. -IDM

RESEARCH CORNER

• Arts Education Partnership has released Preparing Students for the Next America, a new report in which they detail how arts education improves work readiness and enriches the lives of community members.
• D5, a coalition of funders, community activists, and thought leaders, have a new report on diversity in the philanthropy sector, how to improve it, and why it matters.
• The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University has a new report out on the use of program-related investments (PRIs) as a philanthropic tool over the past twenty years.
• Foundations still have a long way to go on the road to transparency, according to a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and the President and CEO of the James Irvine Foundation adds his thoughts on how to make transparency a priority in the boardroom.
• A new model of concert attendance published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing provides evidence for a number of counter-intuitive findings, including an indifference point in terms of attendance between contemporary and less-known romantic-period works.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Three perspectives on the fiscal cliff deal: from Nonprofit Quarterly; from Americans for the Arts; from the Performing Arts Alliance.
• Musicians vs. airlines – and government security. One wonders if the more cello-friendly attitude musicians report encountering in days of yore has anything to do with declining rates of arts education?
• A window into the Turnaround Arts initiative, a high-stakes gambit to amp up arts programming in a few select low-performing schools around the country.
• Rocco offers Barry’s Blog some last words on his way out the door.
• Exotic dance = art? Judith Lynne Hanna makes the case (and part 2).

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Senior program officer Lynn Stern is leaving the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Arts and Cultures program.
• The New York Times‘s veteran culture editor Jonathan Landman has accepted a buyout from the Gray Lady.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Mark Zuckerberg has committed half a billion dollars to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. This is interesting in that community foundations have been increasingly seen as a relic of past generations of donors, with new millionaires and billionaires choosing to distribute their philanthropy with the help of private wealth advisors instead. This gift, coming as it does from one of the scions of the technology world, could change that in a big way. Dan Lyons reluctantly gives Zuck the slow clap.
  
• Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center may be plenty controversial, tearing up as it did significant chunks of the neighborhood, but one thing that’s pretty great about it is that none of the concessions stands are operated by national chains. Instead, “you can get barbecue from Williamsburg’s Fatty ’Cue; Cuban sandwiches from Fort Greene’s Habana Outpost; pizza from Gravesend’s Spumoni Gardens; and, in an inspired old-school-new-school mashup, a confection called a concrete that combines Junior’s black-and-white cookies with ice cream from Blue Marble.” Here’s hoping other developers take the hint and start buying local.

IN THE FIELD

• After a period of impressive growth, Ovation, the only cable channel exclusively devoted to the arts (as traditionally defined), is being dropped by Time Warner Cable. The story is well worth a read, as it is an object lesson on what happens in the commercial marketplace for culture when profit maximization is the goal. Despite costing Time Warner a mere seven cents per subscriber, it (along with other low-rated networks) is being shed to help pay for major increases in the network’s most expensive channels, mostly sports-related. If you’re a Time Warner customer and would like to voice your concern, Ovation has set up a website for the purpose.
• Greg Sandow has been offering an interesting series on “mavericks”/bright spots in classical music, including this profile of the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston.
• More on the mysterious Woodruff Arts Center embezzlement fiasco.
• Crowdfunding French style means helping the Louvre acquire $3 million ivory statuettes.

BIG IDEAS

• Some end-of-year looking back and prognostication: Nonprofit Law Blog recounts the big nonprofit moments of 2012; Thomas Cott crowdsources arts predictions for 2013, and Barry Hessenius says nothin’ much will change this year. (I think Barry’s got it right.) Meanwhile, Tim Mikulski possibly reveals too much in recounting the top posts on AFTA’s ARTSblog in 2012.
  
• Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating interview with Jaron Lanier, an internet pioneer and futurist who has now turned against many of the hacker-derived “information should be free” principles he once embraced. In explaining his change of heart, he cites the music industry as exhibit A of what went wrong.
  

  “I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ “And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

  And then there’s this:

  “To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It’s somebody’s value that’s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it’s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it’s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes—and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.”

  Read the whole thing.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new website called AidGrade might give Createquity fave GiveWell a run for its money. It takes a quantitative approach to aggregating and analyzing randomized controlled trials of various international aid program types (like microfinance, deworming, and bednets), and offers some pretty cool features.
• “It’s all driven by seventh-grade arithmetic and a whole bunch of data.” Rick Lester breaks down patron segmentation and analysis in this podcast from Technology in the Arts.
• Is creativity linked to dishonesty? Keith Sawyer analyzes a new study and finds that the answer may be yes.
• Fascinating interview with Jennifer C. Lena, a sociologist studying cultural economics and the spread of musical taste.
• This was just cool: 2012’s year in maps, from the Atlantic Cities.

ETC.

• Here’s some advice from a pro on live-tweeting events and conferences in an official capacity.
• “My five-year-old could have painted this” is so over. Now it’s, “my pet snake could have painted this!”

But Mr. Bourland, 58, has spent nearly a decade on a monumental task that he hopes will make his a name to remember in the world of movies. He has ranked the greatest films of the 20th century. Sure, the American Film Institute and endless others have generated Top 10 or 100 Greatest lists. But Mr. Bourland goes them — well, one better isn’t even close. He has ranked the 20th century’s 9,200 greatest movies, watching more than 7,000 of them in the process.

Holy cheez-its. I don’t know about you, but according to my Netflix movie rating history, I’ve watched a few hundred movies in 30 years. I would need to watch basically a movie every other day for the next 28 to catch up with Bourland. Which brings me to this question: how many professional movie critics have seen as many movies as he has?

One of the core debates that always pops up around the arts is whether they deserve to be subsidized at all, since there are plenty of things whose worth we are content to let the commercial market decide. The oft-cited rationale for subsidizing art, of course, is that there’s something special about art that isn’t captured by the market. In making that argument, we are essentially claiming that the market–i.e. the masses, broadly defined–isn’t qualified to judge whether something is worthy of support in the present and, by extension, preservation for posterity. But who is qualified? The only reasonable criterion I can think of to distinguish someone who deserves a greater say over another in determining whether a piece of art lives or dies is whether that person is well-informed about the art’s context. Or to put it another way, the special-ness about a work of art lives in its uniqueness, its individual character – does it say something that hasn’t been said before, or in quite the same context, or to quite the same audience? And the only people who really can know whether something is unique or not are people who know that art form backwards and forwards. Which means we’re talking critics, curators, artistic advisors, literary managers, program officers, etc.–and super-fans like this guy.

Shouldn’t we start taking people in that last category seriously?

diacritical
I didn’t realize until recently that Doug McLennan, the brains behind the ArtsJournal empire, also had a blog of his own. Doug’s continual monitoring of over 200 publications might just make him the most informed individual in the arts, so his perspective is uniquely relevant as a crisis in the profession of journalism itself collides with hard times for the arts more generally.

The Hub Review
Thomas Garvey’s blog was one of my first Twitter discoveries: someone pointed me in the direction of his excellent anti-manifesto on the value-destroying properties of the internet, which is one of the most challenging and thoughtful pieces I’ve read all year. The Hub Review has a Boston focus and basically provides a space for this ex-Globe critic to keep up his craft. Garvey’s writing is professional and very, very prolific.

New Voices of Philanthropy
This promisingly-named blog is run by Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice. As you might imagine, Trista writes mostly about issues of generational change in the social sector, and frequently invites guest bloggers to contribute to the conversation (there was a whole raft of them for the recent Council on Foundations conference in Atlanta). Few things are closer to my heart at the moment than the need for a coherent cross-generational pipeline in philanthropy, so I am very grateful that Trista is leading the charge in that department.

New York Times Arts section
Yeah, you’d kinda think that I would have subscribed to this one by now. Yet surprisingly, I was never a regular reader of the Times arts pages until quite recently, despite their huge importance in driving the national discussion. I simply didn’t feel the need to, what with ArtsJournal and other aggregators picking up the bulk of the good stuff. Some food for thought for what the web is doing to original content generators. I’ve given you the link for everything, but you can filter down by discipline here as well. Better take advantage of it while you still can.