“Confederate Statue” | by Flickr user Paul Sableman via Creative Commons

A deadly protest in Charlottesville, VA on August 12 against the removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee fomented an immediate national uproar that only intensified after President Trump’s equivocal statements refusing to concentrate blame for the violence on the white nationalist demonstrators who organized the event. (Angry responses from the arts community included Kennedy Center honorees bowing out from the awards’ festivities, which Trump subsequently cancelled plans to attend, and the mass resignation of the entire President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which had in recent years promoted national initiatives and research in arts education.) But amid the controversy focusing on the specific people involved, a parallel maelstrom has formed over the broader relationship between Confederate iconography, bigotry, and hate speech. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, both elected officials and vigilante activists in numerous U.S. cities took quick action to remove monuments lauding the Confederacy. Others took a more cautious approach, perhaps concerned that taking down Confederate relics may diminish the role art can play in processing and contextualizing that history. The mayor of Louisville, KY initiated a review of public art in the city to determine which pieces could be interpreted as “honoring racism” in an effort to create a public dialogue around the monuments’ potential removal; this type of citizen-engaged process was strongly favored in a statement from Americans for the Arts. Meanwhile, corporations around the country took steps to distance themselves from white supremacist culture and the organizations at the center of the Charlottesville protest, with Spotify taking action to ban racist music from its platform. Too often, arts advocates speak of the arts as if all that humans create is virtuous; the events of this past month offer a sobering reminder to the contrary.

Disney splits from Netflix in the streaming race. Disney has announced it will not renew its licensing agreement with Netflix in 2019, with plans to launch a new Disney-owned streaming service. Given that Disney owns not just its self-branded properties like Mickey Mouse but also Pixar, ESPN, and the Star Wars and Marvel Comics franchises, this is no small matter. Netflix appears to have braced for the change by continuing to produce original content at a ferocious rate, signing ABC/Disney producer Shonda Rhimes and acquiring the Scottish comic book company Millarworld. Netflix seems to be banking on continued success despite debts tipping the $20 billion mark. Up to now Netflix has outpaced its streaming rivals, anticipating the shift from licensing to original content and growing steadily in subscribers despite an ever-shrinking library of licensed titles. In essence, Netflix is a platform that has become a network; while Disney is late to the streaming game, it’s also the biggest and perhaps most recognizable company to attempt what Netflix has already done, in reverse.

Big News starts competing for nonprofit cash. Yet another one bites the dust: New York City’s famed Village Voice finally ceased its print operations, a trend among struggling alt-weeklies. With advertising revenues failing to keep up across the board, a new dot-org has been created for the U.S. arm of the Guardian to raise money from donors and organizations committed to independent journalism. Others don’t appear to be far behind; The Atlantic’s new majority stakeholder is Emerson Collective (which is run by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs and expected to have full ownership of the publication within five years), and longtime New York Times newsroom manager Janet Elder will be in charge of building a similar philanthropic arm at that media behemoth. While the Times has explored revenue incentives such as limiting online views for non-subscribers to 10 clicks-per-month, the Guardian has resisted a paywall, opting instead for Wikipedia-style box ads requesting donations at the end of each article. These nonprofit inroads by major media outlets will likely place further pressure on the few foundations that already support journalism (many of which support the arts as well), which could be bad news for smaller media sources like the Voice that are already feeling the squeeze.

Hurricane Harvey lashes the Houston arts scene. Catastrophic flooding in the Houston’s major performing arts venues and municipal parking garages throughout the local theater district have brought the city’s major dance, theater and opera companies’ fall season openers to a halt. Arts advocates have quickly banded together to provide aid for Houstonians and fellow arts organizations, some of which had only recently finished multi-million dollar renovations addressing damage from 2001’s Hurricane Allison, and the National Endowment for the Humanities committed $1 million to the effort. As the waters recede from the largest storm Texas has ever recorded, the region faces daunting and costly recovery efforts potentially lasting several years, just as Hurricane Irma barrels toward Miami and the Southeastern United States.

Venezuelan President freezes out Dudamel and the National Youth Orchestra. Superstar Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, pressured for years to speak up about deteriorating conditions in his native Venezuela, now finds himself ensnared in exactly the sort of political controversy he had hoped to avoid. Dudamel has recently become increasingly vocal about the political strife in his home country, and is rumored to have assisted a musician who was arrested and allegedly beaten for participating in anti-government protests. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro openly criticized Dudamel on television, and shortly after the remarks it was announced that a government-sponsored tour in which Dudamel was to conduct the National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela – with stops in Illinois, California and Virginia – would be cancelled. Though it’s likely a move of political retaliation, no official reason has been provided by the government.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• The hunt for a new leader of Grantmakers in the Arts is over: Eddie Torres will be the organization’s new CEO starting this fall. Torres comes to GIA from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, where he has been Deputy Commissioner. And in another twist, GIA is moving its offices from Seattle to New York, likely spurring additional turnover.
• Dianne S. Harris has joined the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a senior program officer in the humanities and higher education division.
• Cinematographer John Bailey is the newly appointed president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
• The Mid-America Arts Alliance has acquired local arts service organization Artists INC; the latter’s head, Lisa Cordes, has joined MAAA as director of artists’ services.
• The arts community has suffered two untimely deaths in recent months: first, Ebony McKinney, program officer at the San Francisco Art Commission, passed away July 29 at age 41; and Dr. James Catterall, author and founder of the Centers for Research on Creativity (CRoC) and professor emeritus at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, passed away August 23 at age 69.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• Ten to 12 minutes of mindfulness is enough to boost creativity, according to an experiment conducted by Erasmus University.
• Employment in the UK culture sector is up 20% in past five years, according to the Creative Industries Federation.
• UK research suggests people who engage with the arts as a participant or observer are more likely to be charitable with their time and dollars. And arts patrons who buy their tickets online are most likely to add a donation, compared to walk-up and phone buyers.
• Dancing rewires the brain, improving multi-tasking ability, says research from the Universities of Houston and Maryland.
• A new report from IFACCA shares key findings on the governance and operation of national arts councils and cultural ministries.
• An article published the Center for Effective Philanthropy points to research debunking myths about differences between “new” and “established” funders.
• Rutgers scientists have created technology that makes art – and study participants prefer these paintings over works shown at Art Basel.
• Atlantic Media Strategies has synthesized research predicting trends in media consumption over the next few years.
• How is print is surviving in the digital age? Just fine. Fine, that is, for current affairs or news publications in the UK.
• TV dramas with diverse characters and storylines have been linked to improved tolerance and changed attitudes among those who watch. A new study suggests this effect holds true specifically for transgender rights.
• The Guardian reports that binge-watching and on-demand television services have all but ended family TV time. Meanwhile 100,000 Canadians cancelled TV service in the first half of 2017 – a figure that’s down 22% from last year’s pace.
• Google queries about suicide rose by 20% in the days after 13 Reasons Why – a show about teen suicide – hit Netflix, according to research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
• An analysis of BBC’s “culture poll” suggests male and female film critics find different things funny in comedies. And a USC study finds that movies are still dominated by men, on- and off-screen.
• A report from a summit co-organized by the National Endowment for the Arts and the International Documentary Association explores issues related to the sustainability of the documentary film industry.
• Arts engagement can ease economic, cultural and political divisions, says research coordinated by the University of Kent based on survey data from more than 20,000 UK respondents.
• Economists say college educations, long thought to be a neutralizer of inequality, do not provide equal access to upward mobility for students from low socioeconomic households.
• Multiple studies cite the varied benefits of snapping photos. Taking pictures can increase enjoyment and enhances memory of certain experiences, provided you’re documenting moments by choice.
• A study on the listening habits of millennials shows they hold high regard for public radio, particularly local coverage, but wish it would go further with reporting.
• A study by Music Reports claims one key to landing a song on the Billboard Top 10 is working with a team of collaborators.
• One in three respondents think classical music is “aloof” and needs to “lighten up” in order to survive, according to a YouGov poll in the UK.
• Economists have evaluated the impact of the European Capital of Culture program on GDP. Various European cities selected to participate in the year-long arts and culture program have seen a boost of nearly 5%, with residual positive effects lasting years.
• A survey commissioned by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation reveals gaps in diversity among professionals holding leadership roles in university libraries.
• The arts are key to building belonging among communities, according to research conducted in Canada, which advocates for improvements to facilities and programs committed to community arts engagement.
• The UK Labour Party conducted an inquiry on class-related gaps in arts participation, citing cost as a barrier, and reporting suggestions and recommendations.
• A new survey reveals details about Russia’s book piracy problems. And books contain far more naughty words than they used to, but some say, “who f*)&ing cares?”

“Netflix” by flickr user Jenny Cestnik.

This month, Netflix moved one step closer to media domination, launching its streaming service in 130 countries, bringing the total number of countries-where-one-can-watch-Netflix to 190, including India and Russia. (Notably missing: Indonesia, which banned the service because of its “unfiltered content.”) With some 70 million users and dozens of award-winning original series, the streaming giant is causing some in Hollywood to freak out. (Cable, meanwhile, is already in full-fledged panic mode with cord-cutting numbers rising dramatically.) But Netflix is only part of the story: Amazon, which closed 2015 with more US subscribers than Netflix, and earned serious accolades for its original series Mozart in the Jungle, Transparent, and Man In The High Castle, is now elbowing its way into film distribution. At Sundance this month, Amazon outbid Sony Pictures Classics, Universal, Fox Searchlight and Lionsgate to nab the Matt Damon-produced drama Manchester by the Sea. This is part of a larger trend of streaming services outbidding traditional theatrical distributors and is a major reversal from last year, when both Amazon and Netflix were shut out of the Sundance bidding, indicating streaming services are gaining ground not just with the casual watcher at home, but with directors, producers and actors on the international stage.

Canada Council commits to diversity regulations with teeth. Last June, the Canada Council for the Arts announced a major restructuring of its grant making programs, with plans to reduce its 147 separate programs–each with its own guidelines, deadlines and reporting–to six. The model will go live in April 2017, in honor of the Council’s 60th anniversary. Details of the plan emerged this past month, and the most interesting–and perhaps even radical–of them is the fact that the Council has decided to include diversity among the list of criteria considered when making recommendations of grants and grant amounts. For institutions with revenue of more than $2 million, the diversity of the arts “on stage” as well as that of the team “behind the curtain” will be judged. If your institution does not demonstrate a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of your organization’s geographic community or region,” this will now affect the size of grant received from the federal arts council. If the liberal government keeps its campaign promise, the Council’s annual budget will grow to $360 million over the next two years–enough for the Council to have a real impact on the diversity of the country’s arts organizations. The Council’s decision follows that of Arts Council England, which made a similar shift to towards increasing diversity in December 2014 (though organizations there have until 2018 to get in line.) The United States is not quite there yet, but the nation’s two largest cities seem to be laying groundwork in place: in New York, a survey by the Department of Cultural Affairs released this month indicated that by and large the city’s arts organizations do not reflect the city’s diversity, and Los Angeles County recently formed an advisory committee to examine “proposals that would lead to more diverse arts boards, staff, audience members, and programming at appropriate arts institutions.”

#OscarsStillSoWhite…but not for long? In what the LA Times described as “another embarrassing Hollywood sequel,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced for the second year in a row a roster of all-white acting nominees (and no best picture nominations for films focusing on minority populations despite various viable options). This prompted a resurgence of the 2015 hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (and the birth of its offspring #OscarsStillSoWhite), with actors such as Will Smith pledging to boycott the February 28 awards ceremony or calling for host Chris Rock to step aside. The Academy’s board and President Cheryl Boone Isaacs responded with an emergency meeting that resulted in a unanimous vote for “radical changes” with the goal of doubling the number of female and minority members by 2020. These include plans for reviewing and possibly revoking the voting status of the (94% white) lifelong members who are less active in the motion picture industry to make way for more diverse voters; an “ambitious, global” recruitment campaign (as opposed to the old small group nomination system); and the addition of three new board seats (to hopefully be filled by members of color). Though this year’s still-so-white Oscars announcement, and the Academy’s sweeping response, provoked a flurry of media attention (even a statement by President Obama), as we documented in our 2015 annual news roundup, Hollywood has been slowly waking up to the need to do something about its diversity problem over the past year. Despite grumbles from some established Academy members, the overall 2016 public and institutional reaction is in sharp contrast to Jesse Jackson’s failed 1996 protest against a similarly homogenous Oscars lineup. While the effectiveness of the Academy’s latest measures remains to be seen, one can be sure that the organization’s diversity efforts will receive some red-carpet-worthy scrutiny.

Philadelphia Media Network donated to the Philadelphia Foundation. In October, as part of a larger story on alt-weeklies and their perhaps dubious future, we noted that Philadelphia’s beloved City Paper had published its last edition. Philadelphia journalism captures our attention once again this month, but for much better reason. In a surprise move, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, the sole owner of the Philadelphia Media Network, gifted the PMN, which runs The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com website, to the Institute for Journalism in New Media, a subsidiary of the Philadelphia Foundation. It’s the first time a major local newspaper has gone “nonprofit” since the advent of the internet, and the structure is certainly complicated. While unique and untested, the new alignment has the promise to preserve and enhance public-interest reporting while new electronic distribution methods are developed. The nonprofit status is not yet a done deal (the IRS has yet to weigh in), and the new format won’t necessarily solve outright the newspapers’ varied struggles. However, with newspapers continuing to struggle across the board, if this unusual structure is successful, it’s possible other papers will follow suit.

New directions at the Irvine Foundation. For the past year, James Irvine Foundation president Don Howard has been leading his staff in an deep exploration of what the foundation might change or do better. (You can read many of the responses to this question here and here, and Diane Ragsdale’s response, which pushes back against the foundation’s perspective that arts engagement is the most important issue facing the arts, here.) The foundation, which is the largest funder of the arts in California, has in recent years focused its resources on three areas, (1) engaging in the arts; (2) advancing democracy in California; and (3) preparing youth for success. Now, the foundation has announced an evolving focus: “expanding economic and political opportunity for families and young adults who are working but struggling with poverty.” This new direction seems squarely focused on two of those three areas, with the arts notably absent. The foundation has made assurances that it will remain committed to current grantees for the time being, and work continues apace on several existing programs, including the Arts Regional Initiative which just published a new report. In the long term, however, the arts’ role seems much murkier; a response to an inquiry about continuing arts support promises only that the foundation is “excited to explore how new initiatives focused on creative expression and the arts can be part of new initiatives aligned with our evolving focus.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Bruce W. Davis has been named President and CEO of ArtsKC, Kansas City’s regional arts council.
• Charles Thomas, an experienced social entrepreneur and civic innovator, will join the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as a program director based in Charlotte.
• The School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, invites applications for a full-time lecturer faculty position in the area of arts management. Posted January 23; no closing date.
• The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage hiring a Senior Visual Arts Specialist. Posted January 26; no closing date.
• ArtsKC is hiring a Director of Programs and Grants to replace the retiring Paul Tyler. Closing date February 26.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A research article published in AERA Open this month lends new evidence to argument for the benefits of arts engagement at an early age.
• Ingenuity’s third State of the Arts in Chicago Public Schools released this month details the arts assets available to CPS students in the 2014-15 school year.
• A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies released this month suggests implementing diversity training programs does not actually increase diversity. On the flip side, a report published by Stanford Graduate School of Education found that at-risk high school students benefit from taking ethnic studies classes, which introduce a diversity of perspectives and may better align with personal cultural experience.
• New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman’s office sheds light on widespread abuses in ticketing industry in New York.
• A white paper from the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University examines the distinguishing characteristics of arts organizations that primarily serve communities of color, in a response to the widely discussed (and criticized) report from the DeVos Institute on the same topic last year.
• Move over TV: Repucom, which researches sports and entertainment markets, surveyed adults between 13 and 34 in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States and found that music is the top leisure interest for the millennial generation.
• Linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer analyzed all the dialogue from the Disney princess franchise and found that even in movies where the princess is the protagonist, male roles speak more than female roles.
• A few studies this month looked at art through a city lens. One, published in the academic journal Economic Development Quarterly, looks at the links between big performing arts organizations (those with budgets over $2 million) and the change in what Richard Florida defines at the ‘creative class’. A report commissioned by the Boston Foundation shows Boston trails other cities in institutional arts funding, and the Three-City Arts Study, released by Partners for Sacred Spaces, provides a scalable, replicable model for matching small to mid-size dance and theater companies having space needs with historic sacred places that have available space.
• Two reports this month looked at the contemporary art market. One, released by economics professors at the University of Luxembourg suggests that the international art market is overheating, creating the potential for a “severe correction” in the postwar and contemporary and American segments. Another looks at what kind of person who opens a private contemporary art museum.
• And finally, looking to the international stage, UNESCO released a report on the impact of the “Convention on Protection & Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions,” and the 2016 Global NGO Online Technology Report provided insight into the global NGO sector and its use of online technology.

Lincoln Center (photo by flickr user Peter Miller)

Raising money is tough, and raising money for the arts can be particularly so. And yet, at this moment in New York, sixteen arts institutions in Manhattan alone are in the process of raising a whopping $3.47 billion for ambitious capital projects–from a revamped building for the New York Philharmonic (price tag: $500 million) to the long-awaited new home for the Irish Arts Center (price tag: $60 million). While there’s no one way to raise this kind of dollar, the New York Times has a compelling explanation of the various strategies cultural institutions are using to bring home the bacon. Lurking underneath all the glitz and ambition, however, is an unasked question: is this all a good idea? After all, cultural equity and disparities of wealth among cultural institutions is an issue with increasing resonance both in New York City and nationally, and in many ways the current administration’s proposed cultural plan has been seen as a step towards addressing those issues. Will this giant slate of capital projects claim resources that might otherwise have been available to a broader constituency? And given the dim results of past research on the long-term effects of building projects, are these decisions that even the institutions themselves will come to regret?

Violence Threatens Free Expression in the Internet Age. On October 26, SXSW Interactive, the annual media festival held in Austin, Texas every March, canceled two sessions for its 2016 event, citing threats of violence. The panels–”SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games“– were seen as #Gamergate panels, though the movement was not specifically invoked by either. The decision drew outrage from various corners of the internet world; media heavy-hitters BuzzFeed and Vox threatened to withdraw altogether from the conference if the panels were not reinstated. In response to the backlash, SXSW was forced to develop a full day’s worth of programming, an online harassment summit, which will include a significantly expanded list of panelists such as Congresswoman Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts) and former Texas senator Wendy Davis. Threats of violence are terrible enough, but on the Indian subcontinent this month intellectuals are increasingly victims of the real thing. Two Bangledeshi publishers were stabbed to death purportedly for having printed the work of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism. (Roy was himself assassinated in February of this year.) This comes amidst a protest among many of India’s most prominent writers in response to prime minister Narendra Modi’s failure to condemn recent violence by Hindu nationalists in that country.

Colorado’s Small Arts Organizations Lose the Resource Equity Battle. The Denver area’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, which oversees the distribution of some $50 million in sales tax subsidies to some 300 arts organizations, is up for a third reauthorization in 2016. In May, the SCFD proposed a plan for the next decade that would keep shares of arts funds close to what they are now. Small arts groups–especially the 270 organizations in “Tier III” who under the proposed plan would split a mere 15.7% of the pie–revolted, arguing the distribution is unfair and biased toward Denver’s big cultural institutions. In response, a group called the Friends of Arts and Cultural Equity presented a plan with a more equitable distribution of resources. This month, the SCFD rejected calls for a redistribution, reaffirming its own funding recommendations to the legislature. The question now becomes: will the legislature send the reauthorization to ballot, or take control of funding measures themselves?

Nonprofits Crowd In On the Crowdfunding Pie. Since it first launched in 2008, Indiegogo–and hundreds of similar crowdfunding platforms–have revolutionized how and for what individuals raise money (Greek bailout, anyone?). This month, Indiegogo launched Generosity, an Indiegogo spinoff where nonprofit organizations can host campaigns–for free. Unlike its competitors, such as Razoo and FirstGiving, the only fees collected on Generosity by Indiegogo will go to the credit card processor. The demand is there: in the last five years, Indiegogo has hosted some 15,000 nonprofit fundraisers. Indiegogo’s main competitor, Kickstarter, doesn’t allow fundraising for charity, but that hasn’t stopped the company from making its own recent moves towards the altruism bandwagon, having announced its reformation as a public benefit corporation and raised money for Syrian refugees at the request of the Obama administration. Crowdfunding won’t replace grants and major individual giving any time soon, but as anyone who’s put in time on the development side of the nonprofit world knows, every little bit counts.

Not All Is Lost: An Alt-Weekly Newspaper Revival. We’ve heard it before: “print is dead” and especially so when it comes to newspaper print. Alt-weeklies, the scrappy punk siblings of the Times and Chronicles of the world, have been hit especially hard, and October witnessed the demise of yet another one: Philadelphia’s much loved City Paper. Yet in an interesting twist, this same month New York City’s storied Village Voice was essentially rescued by Pennsylvania newspaper man, Peter Barbey. Barbey, president of the Reading Eagle Company, a family-owned media company that has published newspapers in Pennsylvania for more than 200 years, bought the paper from Voice Media Group, and has already announced big plans for the sixty-year old circular, including an increase in cultural coverage.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Poet, essayist, playwright, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander was named director of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program.
• Terry Carbone has been appointed director of the Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art program. She succeeds Ellen Holtzman, who served in the role for 23 years.
• Veteran art museum curator and director Maxwell Anderson was named Director of Grant Programs for the New Cities Foundation.
• Lynne McCormack, longtime Director of Providence’s Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, is leaving to become the national program director for creative placemaking at LISC.
• Reynold Levy, who was president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts from 2002–2014, has been appointed president of the Robin Hood Foundation in New York.
• After 14 years, Susan Patterson has announced she will retire from her position as director of the Charlotte program at The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation at the end of 2015.
• MK Wegmann has announced she will retire from her position of President and CEO of the New Orleans-based National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network in January 2016. A search for her replacement is underway; deadline December 1, salary $125-130k.
• The Arts Consulting Group, Inc. seeks Vice Presidents for its expanded Canada office. Posted October 5; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A study conducted at the University Hospital Erlangen in Germany and published in journal PLoS One suggests that actively participating in art-making keeps the brain healthy.
• Michigan State University analyzed several data sources, and found that Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85x more likely than average scientists to have a significant artistic hobby.
• A new report by the University of Maryland’s DeVos Institute of Arts Management, “Diversity in the Arts,” reviews the economic picture of African American and Latino nonprofit museums and performing arts companies and suggests some controversial solutions.
• The Creative Diversity report, published this month by Creative Industries Federation in partnership with Music of Black Origin, suggests that theater is significantly less ethnically diverse than other creative industries.
• Two studies published this month looked into the question of music consumption. The first, by two Irish psychologists, looks at the many reasons why people choose to listen to music. The second, published in the journal Poetics, examines what your musical tastes say about you.
• Columbia Law School program and the Urban Institute released preliminary findings that, despite rapid increase in the number of 501(c)3 organizations–in 2014 the rate of newly formed entities nearly tripled– states are doing little to hire new regulators to police charities.
• A survey conducted in the UK this month reveals that “one in four performing arts careers are halted by parenthood.”

• As you know, there was an election last week, and Barack Obama won it. Thankfully this means that Barry Hessenius’s worst fears about the NEA likely won’t be realized, but Barry does have some useful advocacy advice that is worth a read regardless of the outcome. Ted Johnson has a helpful pre-election analysis of issues relevant to Hollywood in the election. Americans for the Arts has been active too: Jay Dick offers a post-election advocacy to-do list, and the Arts Action Fund offers a thorough roundup of the election results and their implications. Among the lesser-known developments include the fact that many moderate Republican legislators in Kansas who stood up for arts funding in that state lost their primaries to more conservative challengers; similarly, several pro-arts Republicans in Congress have either retired or lost their seats, further polarizing the parties in their orientation toward arts funding. On the plus side, two cities – Portland, OR and Austin, TX – passed pro-arts ballot measures.
• The final version of the Chicago Cultural Plan has been released – with a new arts education plan for Chicago Public Schools to boot.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• RIP Walter Carsen, one of Canada’s most prominent arts philanthropists.
• This is a truly thorough overview of the arts funding ecosystem in metropolitan Atlanta, both past and present. A must-read if you have any plans to work in the arts there.
• The Knight Foundation is stepping up its commitment in Detroit with a $20 million round of grantmaking.
• If you work for an arts funder and you’re reading this, can you do me and the entire world a giant favor and make sure your organization is giving the Foundation Center your grants data? They are making it easier and easier to participate, and it ultimately helps researchers like me make sense of the arts funding landscape. You can help them refine their grants taxonomy as well.

IN THE FIELD

• Orchestral musician labor disputes are in the news again, and nowhere is the hotbed hotter than in freezing Minnesota, where both the Minnesota and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras face work stoppages. Eric Nilsson says neither side is fully accepting reality, and even the Minneapolis City Council is getting involved. Both groups have canceled performances through the end of 2012, and musicians are starting to look for jobs elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Spokane (WA) Symphony is on strike and canceling performances.
• I’m intrigued by this announcement of SphinxCon, a new diversity summit organized by Sphinx, a Detroit-based organization dedicated to cultivating more musicians of color in classical music. Aaron Dworkin and company have managed to pull together a pretty incredible speaker list pairing (mostly white) arts service organization leaders with a largely non-white group of artists, academics, and other perspectives. Who knows if it’ll lead to anything, but it seems like the ingredients for a real conversation are there.

BIG IDEAS

• I can’t emphasize enough how important this 282-word blog post from Adam Thurman is. Adam has a gift for concision, and his three-part distinction between making art, making money doing art, and making a living from art is essential for artists and policymakers alike. And speaking of Adam’s genius, this post on arts marketing (featuring the memorable quotes, “[Y]ou are probably ok with whatever you did last night.  Maybe you watched TV, maybe you read a book, maybe you got drunk and did lines of cocaine.  Whatever you did, you were ok with it.” and “The reality is that if these [new] audiences never come your way they will be fine.  You, on the other hand, will be in serious trouble.”) is well worth a read too.
• Stephanie N. Stallings thinks jazz could use some binders full of women and speculates that hip-hop has overtaken it as America’s greatest cultural diplomacy tool.
• Over at Next American City, Neeraj Mehta considers the “who” of creative placemaking (as in, “who benefits?”).
• So Google’s getting into the virtual museum business now?
• Online higher education banned in Minnesota, then reinstated.
• Chad Bauman writes eloquently on the symbiosis between an arts community and its local newspaper – and what it means that so many of those newspapers seem to be hanging on by a thread.
• Eric Booth submits a lengthy dispatch from the first international Teaching Artist Conference in Oslo.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new report from Emerson College’s Center for the Theater Commons, authored by Diane Ragsdale, examines the relationship between nonprofit and commercial theater.
• Chorus America has released its Choral Operations Survey Report for 2012.
• I’m looking forward to seeing the results of what looks like a very strong study being undertaken by the LA Philharmonic, USC, and Heart of Los Angeles to investigate the impact of early childhood music training. Meanwhile, a just-released report from Carnegie Hall and WolfBrown examines the potential for music to make a difference in the juvenile justice system.
• If you’ve ever doubted me that logic models matter, check out this analysis of the difficulties faced by One Laptop Per Child, a hugely ambitious, billion-dollar initiative to develop and distribute low-cost laptops to schoolchildren in developing countries. The passage below is an eloquent depiction of how failing to think through the details of a strategy can mean its doom:
  

  Doing an end-run around lousy infrastructure and poorly-trained teachers might actually work with the right support to guide the child’s learning. Unfortunately, Negroponte has also stated that you actually can give a kid a laptop and walk away.

  According to Jeff Patzer, a former OLPC intern, that’s precisely what they did in Peru. Hardware degraded faster than expected, and OLPC allowed Peru to build its own branch of the system software that was incompatible with patches. Interns were not prepared to educate teachers, and teachers were not prepared to use the XO to teach students.

  “The only thing that happens is the laptops get opened, turned on, kids and teachers get frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don’t understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner.” Patzer explained.

ETC.

• Joe Queenan on having read more than 6000 books. My favorite part of this column is the fact that, because it’s in the Wall Street Journal, his offhand mention of Williams Sonoma is accompanied by its latest stock quote.

OK, back to regularly scheduled programming…

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Kickstarter got a whole bunch of press mileage last week out of the idea that it “gives out” more money to the arts than the NEA. Tim Mikulski explains why that’s comparing apples to oranges.
• Mike Boehm explains how the State of California’s recent withdrawal of support for city redevelopment agencies has hurt the arts.
• An inside look at the in-progress Chicago Cultural Plan, led by Lord Cultural Resources.
• The UK is creating a national youth dance company in response to concerns about holes in the country’s arts education system.

ON PHILANTHROPY

• Rob Stephany is the new director of the Economic and Community Development program for the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh. The program will coordinate with each of the Endowments’ program areas – including arts and culture – on place-based investments.
• Outgoing Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest offers a rundown of outcome-oriented philanthropy’s growth in the decade he has spent at the top of the one of the nation’s largest funders.
• What good has organized (i.e., foundation) philanthropy accomplished in 100 years? GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky analyzes a hundred case studies from Joel Fleishman’s book The Foundation: A Great American Secret to find out.

IN THE FIELD

• The Chicago News Cooperative, a nonprofit news site launched with major support from the MacArthur Foundation, is suspending operations, at least in part because the IRS apparently isn’t sure that newspapers can be nonprofits. Or at least that’s the reason given by MacArthur, whose legal counsel wasn’t satisfied with the fiscal sponsor relationship that CNC had with local public television station WTTW. Regardless, there’s some egg on the face of MacArthur, who invested $1 million in what is currently looking like a failed experiment. Meanwhile, a lot of us are anxiously awaiting the IRS’s long-anticipated arrival into the 21st century, in which real journalism will hopefully be recognized as a genuine public good.
• The Metropolitan Opera is the latest arts institution to adopt dynamic pricing.
• Following up on our post about bad public art, John Metcalfe shines a light on a European conceptual public artist whose prankster aesthetic seems to involve annoying as many people as possible.
• Brandon Reynolds takes an in-depth look at Kansas City’s jazz district, a creative placemaking initiative that hasn’t been very successful thus far.
• Some good news for a change: Hawaii’s symphony orchestra is back from the dead. And there’s a new “fire arts” festival in Pittsburgh.

RESEARCH CORNER

• It’s been a big couple of weeks for Big Data. First, the New York Times ran an article trumpeting the increasing importance of statistics and number-crunching in daily life (and the opportunities that abound for those fluent in such matters), to which Fractured Atlas’s Adam Huttler responded with a post about FA’s data initiatives in the arts. Michael Rohd had an interesting post on the artist as data scientist, making the point (which I completely agree with) that stories and emotions are data too. Joe Patti comments on the creepy side of Big Data, especially when the subject is us. And bringing it all back to the Grey Lady, their data artist in residence (yes, that’s his actual title), Jer Thorp, gave a well-reviewed speech at TEDxVancouver that is worth a watch.
• Great article on Data Without Borders, a startup nonprofit that connects data scientists with nonprofits in need, founded by yet another New York Times staffer. They’ve been getting a lot of (well-deserved) attention, and while still very young, could end up being the most significant fieldbuilding organization since GiveWell.
• Theatre Bay Area and its indefatigable Director of Marketing and Communications, Clayton Lord, are out with a new book on intrinsic impact in live theater. The anthology’s centerpiece is a study commissioned by TBA from WolfBrown of theatrical performances in six cities, using WolfBrown’s unique methodology for understanding intrinsic impact (basically, the emotional or cognitive effects that arts experiences have on individual participants). There are also four original essays and a number of interviews with leaders in the theater field. While the book is only available for purchase, the folks at TBA are rolling out a series of excerpts and supplementary material that can be consumed for free; check out this interview excerpt with Diane Ragsdale as an example.
• A new study purports to demonstrate a positive impact on test scores for Chicago public school children receiving arts education.
• Helicon Collaborative is out with a new paper looking at the characteristics of arts organization “bright spots” in the Pacific Northwest.
• Adrian Ellis revives the supply & demand conversation in a big way with this expansive article for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader.
• The NEA hosted a roundtable on arts education standards and assessment last month; you can read a brief report here or watch the webcast here.
• Welcome Joanna Woronkowicz, new program analysis officer at the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Kevin Bolduc writes about the progress of the Charting Impact project, which asks nonprofits to fill out a simple form describing their intended and actual results.
• Cogent article from the Foundation Center’s VP for Research Larry McGill on the value of being transparent about limitations in data quality.
• Interesting field experiment attempting to measure the effect of social pressure on charitable giving. Cool research design, although as several commenters point out, it would have benefited from a more sophisticated control.
• There’s a Journal of Art Crime?

[T]he growing influence of blogs, chat rooms and message boards devoted to the arts has given the local professional critic a slew of competitors….Many arts institutions even allow their audience members to write their own critiques on the organizational website.

This is a scary trend.

He goes on to add:

Anyone can write a blog or leave a review in a chat room. The fact that someone writes about theater or ballet or music does not mean they have expert judgment.

But it is difficult to distinguish the professional critic from the amateur as one reads on-line reviews and critiques.

No one critic should be deemed the arbiter of good taste in any market and it is wonderful that people now have an opportunity to express their feelings about a work of art. But great art must not be measured by a popularity contest. Otherwise the art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best.

Responses are all over the original post and the blogosphere; Andy Horwitz has one of the best over at Culturebot. You don’t need to think too hard to guess at my reaction; after all, I’m on record as saying that I think citizen critics (though I prefer the term “curators”) are the potential saviors of the artistic marketplace. However, that’s not to say that everyone’s opinion matters equally in every context. I believe in experts, I just think that newspaper editors shouldn’t be the only ones who get to decide who the experts are. Much more on all of this here and here, but in the meantime try the short version below:

What we need…is a way of broadening out the selection and adjudication process to a greater number of people without sacrificing the qualities and expertise that make professional program officers [or critics -IDM] special. To do this, we’ll still want to access the crowd, but rather than treat everyone the same, we’ll need to differentiate between good members of the crowd – the ones who are generous with their time, consider differing viewpoints thoughtfully, and demonstrate personal integrity – and bad members of the crowd – “one-issue” voters, poorly informed fly-by commenters, and vendetta-carriers. Put another way, we want to give anybody the opportunity to participate meaningfully without having to give that opportunity to everybody.

In other words, we need to curate the curators – something that, gee whiz, it turns out the internet is pretty good at.

Many have already pointed out the irony that Kaiser wrote his commentary on a website, the Huffington Post, that relies for much of its content on unpaid bloggers (of which Kaiser is one, I can only assume). But I also found it ironic that Kaiser’s post drew an approving two–part response from Rocco Landesman, who cites the NEA’s recent collaborative grant program with the Knight Foundation as a positive example of bucking the trend. Rocco writes:

Very often there is no one even vestigiall­y qualified as an expert and what little opinion we get is from “cost effective” freelancer­s or a gaggle of blog posts. […]

Here at the NEA we are trying to do something about this. In partnershi­p with the Knight Foundation­, whose domain is both journalism and the arts, we have made grants in our new Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge. Each of the winning grantees (in Charlotte, Miami, Detroit, Philadelph­ia and San Jose) has presented a sustainabl­e business model for a new way of delivering arts criticism.

And yet one of the projects (out of five) awarded a grant in the first round of the program is the Detroit iCritic van, which parks outside of arts events and offers exiting audience members the opportunity to record a video about their experience and share it with the world. Several of the other initiatives also afford citizen journalists a prominent role, with few restrictions on access. If this isn’t the democratization of arts criticism, I’m not sure what is.

Following the field dialogue on participation is so interesting. I really do think people want it both ways: they want the good things that can come from decentralizing power, access, and speech (thoughtful praise and constructive criticism, freeloading on volunteer labor, the moral high ground of inclusiveness) without having to accept the accompanying challenges (mindless or malicious attacks, declining revenues, having to listen to people you didn’t really want to invite to the table).

That particular drama has played out for centuries, really – it speaks to the fundamental dilemmas of collectivism. But the difference now is the way in which recent communications technologies, and the cultures that have built up around it, make everything more open by default. The social web connects strangers to each other around shared interests and foments dialogue, dialogue that filters down into everyday practice and informs collective actions that previously took place in isolation. And so you have these formerly untouchable institutions who are all of the sudden the ones asking for a place at the table…because the conversation is happening, and the world is moving on, with or without them.

I think what sometimes gets missed by those who lament our shifting reality is the inexorable fact that there’s no going back. There just isn’t. Newspapers are never again going to be a dominant force in our lives, and the bizarre economics that briefly made it possible to subsidize full-time professional arts critics via want ads and real estate listings are not likely to return. It’s like complaining about the oversupply of artists – y’all had better get used to it, because it’s not going away. I’m confident that our emerging content delivery systems will figure out ways to match up the opinions of smart people with the consumers who demand them. But I doubt very much that it will look anything like the models of the past. I suggest that rather than pine for the good old days, we instead consider what kinds of systems and structures can accept these new voices as a necessary input and still produce meaningful guidance for consumer and society alike.

ARTSBLOG
Who knew? It seems I’m a little late to the party, but apparently DC-based advocacy organization Americans for the Arts has been running this quite lively group blog with a dizzying array of volunteer contributors since 2007. With so many authors, you’d expect the quality to be a little uneven, but it’s been quite high in the short time I’ve been following it.

Clay Shirky
The celebrated author of Here Comes Everybody received widespread attention recently for his post on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. As of today, Shirky has published exactly four entries in four months, and I have yet to see another blog with this kind of comments-to-posts ratio — the above-linked entry has 955 of them alone. You can also follow Shirky on Twitter at the handle @cshirky.

Perspectives from the Pipeline
Rosetta Thurman is all about next-generation leaders, and she lets you know it. Boasting an amazing story about how she got to where she is (I thought mine was pretty decent, but hers puts it to shame), she provides a welcome counterbalance to the predominantly white, privileged backgrounds of most prominent nonprofit bloggers. And prominent she is: today she announced her 3000th follower on Twitter.

smArts & Culture
Published by social media consultant MaryAnn Devine, smArts & Culture is a slick-looking blog covering marketing and web strategies for arts organizations. Devine also occasionally ventures into arts policy territory, which is how I found her in the first place about a month ago. Her consistently informative and entertaining posts are something to look forward to.

Up on Capitol Hill, the Obama stimulus package has passed both the House and the Senate — but there’s just one problem: the Senate version doesn’t include the $50 million for the NEA that was in the original design of the bill (and that made it through the House). Americans for the Arts has set up another trusty tool to email your Congresscritters here. If you have any time at all, I strongly urge you to use it — few would debate that what the arts need most right now is cold, hard cash, and $50 million is less than one ten-thousandth of the package that Congress is about to dump on America.

Here are some other news and notes from around the web:

• Veteran staffer and Yale Drama School grad Patrice Walker Powell has been named Acting Chairwoman of the NEA.
• Matthew Guerrieri calculates how much of a bailout the arts really deserve in the stimulus package, using the assistance afforded to the auto industry late last year as a benchmark. How does 12.4 billion smackers sound to you, America?
• Robin Pogrebin in the NY Times has a round-up of recent arts-related developments on Capitol Hill and names some other possibilities for NEA Chair, including Wynton Marsalis, Agnes Gund, Richard J. Cohen, and Bill Ivey. Musical America’s Susan Elliott gives the inside story of the meeting between the arts service organization lobby and the Obama transition team earlier this month.
• That pesky Secretary for the Arts business gets some more bad press. Isaac rebuts.
• Andrew Taylor talks about perverse incentives in the arts.
• Mayor Mike was the leading individual donor in the US last year, handing out $235 million to recipients including a ton of arts organizations in NYC. Not all of the top donations by individuals last year took the form of money, however. According to the Slate 60, the Harvard Art Museum received a gift of $45 million from Emily Rauh Pulitzer along with 31 works of art that, according to the museum, were worth four times as much as the cash, bringing the total value of the gift into the $225 million range.
• Via Tactical Philanthropy, the Chronicle of Philanthropy has a new Innovations column highlighting new and interesting funding models for nonprofits. It’s normally available by subscription only, but the first one is free. Also, Bill Gates on the role of foundations.
• Lucy Bernholz is the latest blogger to get on the twitter bandwagon.
  

  I’ve been invited to comment on people’s books, slide shows, and discussions, been offered condolences by people I’ve never met, had poems sent to me from friends in other countries, songs recommended to me, and conferences brought to my attention. I’ve been asked to participate in a radio program and a speakers bureau, invited to judge a business plan competition, and discovered that communicating with direct messages in twitter beats email hands-down for some conversations. I’ve also found that folks too hesitant about their writing to comment on blogs will opine away in twitter – being confined to 140 characters puts the Ralph Ellisons among us on the same footing as those who find pain in writing grocery lists. Because twitter feeds into my facebook page I’ve also reconnected with three friends from high school.

  I haven’t joined yet…I’m kind of scared. Anyone out there have experiences to share?

• The guru of the aforementioned Yale Ivestments Office, David Swensen, co-wrote an op-ed in the Times this week arguing that it’s time for newspapers to move to a nonprofit model. It’s almost like he’s been reading my blog:
  

  If we can agree that journalism does provide an indispensable public good, in the form of in-depth, factual information not available anywhere else, I can’t help but see it gravitating toward a contributed income model in the coming years. No matter what steps the current industry giants take to shore up revenue streams, whether it be the Washington Post buying Kaplan or the New York Times Co. grabbing a piece of New England Sports Ventures, their core journalism operations will remain loss leaders, and thus vulnerable to cost-cutting pressures. Absent a significant change in industry dynamics, I would not be surprised if nonprofit journalism models become more common in coming years.

  Seriously, though, I do think that nonprofit status represents the most plausible, if not the only, path to salvation for our nation’s most respected news operations. (To be clear, this is not about saving the newspaper as a form, as if that were any more important than saving microfiche. This is about saving the concept of a news-gathering institution with the infrastructure to conduct the kind of original investigative and large-scale journalism that blogs and citizen reporters, even the best of them, can’t replicate on anything like a consistent basis.) Of course, this is still a very controversial idea, provoking responses like this one from Allison Fine: “Times Editorial = Downright Stupid.” I’ll let you be the judge:

  So, newspapers are a sacred trust that now require tax exempt status to survive according to the authors, David Swensen and Michael Schmidt, neither of whom are journalists or nonprofit professionals. Instead one manages the financial portfolio at Yale that lost nearly 30% of it’s value last year and the other is a “financial analyst” whatever that means. [….] I am not a journalist or an expert on that subject

  Aside from pot calling kettle black, Swensen and Schmidt are in fact nonprofit professionals, given that they work for Yale University, which last I checked is a nonprofit organization. Furthermore, it’s hard to see the endowment losing 30% of its value as some kind of indictment when the rest of the market has lost 40% over the same period. Fine does have a point that raising money to support a $5 billion endowment is probably a pipe dream, but I think Swensen’s point was more that we have endowments that are bigger than that already, so it’s not like the idea is completely absurd.

• Sometimes the intersection of politics and the creative industries can be unintentionally hilarious. (see pic at the top of this post)
• Other times, intentionally so (and poignant, too). Well done, Bronx Zoo.

The Flanagan report confirms that labor costs at the nation’s top symphony orchestras have, indeed, risen faster than earned income, and this has some people upset. They seem to think that the report is a Chicken Little doomsday speech pushed by a cadre of orchestra managers in a conspiracy to build a public case for breaking the musicians’ union. While I can’t speak for the motivations behind the report’s origin, the report itself doesn’t say anything of the sort. On the contrary, it states on page 87 that,

The trend in total performance plus nonperformance revenue (regression 8) is modestly higher than the trend in total expenses (regression 9), so the overall financial balance improves slightly over time, after controlling for the effect of general economic conditions.

So orchestras (or at least the 63 relatively wealthy ones that were a part of the study) have successfully compensated for their increased labor costs by a combination of raising prices and seeking more donations—exactly what Baumol and Bowen’s model predicts. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with raised prices and more donations, assuming the market can bear it. And when combined with increased price discrimination, such as in the case of college financial aid programs, the social effects can be quite positive as access is increased rather than limited. However, an increasing reliance on contributed rather than earned income still feels scary, because contributed income just seems less stable. How can we count on people to just keep giving money away, against all rational instinct? Although orchestras have managed to stay afloat these past few decades, with some experiencing genuine financial success, I don’t see these issues going away anytime soon. The entire model is extremely dependent on the orchestra’s ability to find new donors and convince existing donors to give more and more for essentially the same experience. If the bottom were to suddenly drop out of that revenue stream, orchestras would find themselves incredibly exposed.

Now, what does this have to do with newspapers? Well, in addition to my Nonprofits class I’ve also been taking a course called Media Economics and Financing Journalism, taught by a member of the family that used to own the Boston Globe. As the semester has progressed, I’ve slowly become convinced that newspapers are in almost the exact same boat as symphony orchestras. They also face a Baumol effect in that technology advances have had limited benefits for the efficiency of quality original reporting. Furthermore, the most profitable sections of the newspaper (the sports, travel, and health pages) and the section that provides the most public good (the news division) are not the same. Our guest speaker in class yesterday even remarked that the demographics of his newspaper subscribers and subscribers to the local orchestra are virtually identical: aging, upper-income, and mostly white. However, unlike orchestras, most newspapers have had to rely solely on earned income to compensate for their rising labor costs—and so far, it’s not working. As a result, staff positions are being cut at print publications all around the country, with critics (music, dance, theater, and now even film) some of the first to go. After all, why should a paper pay someone to go see a movie and write about it when so many are willing to do just that for free? Even the educational environment in the two fields invite parallels, with both conservatories and journalism schools churning out new graduates at record rates, giving them the highest quality training for jobs that simply don’t exist.

If we can agree that journalism does provide an indispensable public good, in the form of in-depth, factual information not available anywhere else, I can’t help but see it gravitating toward a contributed income model in the coming years. No matter what steps the current industry giants take to shore up revenue streams, whether it be the Washington Post buying Kaplan or the New York Times Co. grabbing a piece of New England Sports Ventures, their core journalism operations will remain loss leaders, and thus vulnerable to cost-cutting pressures. Absent a significant change in industry dynamics, I would not be surprised if nonprofit journalism models become more common in coming years.