As longstanding concerns about cultural equity find voice in policy initiatives like these, administrators at organizations that celebrate European art forms, which are noticeably overrepresented among the biggest-budget nonprofit arts institutions in the United States, are snapping into action. Several years ago American Ballet Theatre, better known to some as the house of Misty, launched Project Plié, “a comprehensive initiative to increase racial and ethnic representation in ballet and to diversify America’s ballet companies.” Chamber Music America released a robust new statement of commitment to racial equity earlier this year. The 2016 League of American Orchestras conference was, for the first time, devoted entirely to the topic of diversity in the field. Hosted by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the choice to convene in a majority-black city and bring in Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson as a keynote speaker did not go unnoticed. Sessions focused on helping orchestras become more reflective of the country, including diversifying boards, audiences, and the players themselves.

In case you may be wondering about the reasons behind such a focus, consider that the proportion of African American and Latino musicians in U.S. orchestras is just 4%, a number that has barely budged since 2002. (The corresponding proportion of the United States population is almost 30%.) And it’s not just musicians. According to the same research, since 2006, the percentage of top executives of color in American orchestras has fluctuated between 5.2% and 1.6%, and the percentage of board members has consistently hovered under 8% people of color during the same period.

The consistency of these numbers over time is striking, given that there are more initiatives in place than ever before to diversify orchestras. The Sphinx Organization was founded in 1996 specifically to increase the percentage of black and Latino musicians in orchestras, and has since won prestigious awards and raised millions of dollars toward that mission. Forty years’ worth of foundation-funded fellowship programs for black and Latino musicians, with the number of such programs increasing dramatically in the past 15 years, have similarly failed to move the needle.

The issue goes far beyond orchestras. According to the most recent figures from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, audiences for classical music, ballet, opera, plays, and musicals are all at least 78% white. Depending on the art form, that figure is a full twelve to seventeen percentage points above the national proportion of white people–a gap that has actually widened since 2002.

Things could still change, of course. Perhaps more time or a different approach is all that’s needed for these diversity initiatives to succeed. But at this point, it’s time to start asking the question hanging over all of this: what is the endgame? What happens if, despite the sincerest of intentions and tireless efforts to integrate, most organizations rooted in European forms of artistic expression never achieve anything close to proportionate representation of the demographics of their communities? What then?

In the wake of the protests following Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra took to the streets to play free concerts in its communities. From the BSO facebook page.

White-ish Institutions

Createquity foresaw this tension in a piece published last year entitled “Making Sense of Cultural Equity.” The basic premise was that conversations about cultural equity (and any number of associated terms and topics) are informed by underlying visions of success that can be wildly divergent, but are rarely articulated explicitly. Based on our review of the literature and our own experiences in the field, we identified four archetypal models of cultural equity that together explain a surprisingly high proportion of the debates and dialogue that occur on the topic. The dilemma described above is at the center of a conflict between the Diversity vision of success (which wants to see fully integrated, large-budget “anchor” institutions providing benefit to entire communities) and the Redistribution vision (which holds that we should be shifting the balance of arts policy and philanthropic resources toward organizations and cultural traditions rooted in historically marginalized communities, including communities of color).

By any reasonable measure, “Making Sense of Cultural Equity” is one of the most successful pieces we’ve ever done. In addition to placing among our top ten most-viewed articles, we’ve been asked to present or write about it by organizations including Americans for the Arts, Grantmakers in the Arts, Independent Sector, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, and Moore College of Art + Design. But despite the positive reception, I do think there’s one area where in retrospect we missed the mark. In the article, we stated that “[t]he one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called ‘mainstream’ institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous.” That link above takes you to our notes page, where we elaborate on the definition of “mainstream”:

Language can be a source of great confusion in conversations about cultural equity, and many commonly-used terms are highly contested. In this article, we employ several key concepts that can benefit from further elaboration. Please consider the following definitions as you read:

Mainstream institutions: In the course of our reading, we came across the term “mainstream” institutions or organizations with some frequency. Although rarely defined explicitly, we infer that this term typically denotes nonprofit organizations that 1) were founded by white people; 2) do not have a focus on an art form or an audience connected with a specific community of color or other oppressed community; 3) receive funding from foundation and government sources; and 4) have some professional staff.

This language did not escape the sharp eyes of Justin Laing, at the time a senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh who had also been a key spark behind Grantmakers in the Arts’s racial equity initiative. On Twitter, Justin shared a number of comments on the article, including the following:

Middle & upper class white America is “a stream” not the “mainstream” of America. Referring to this group as “main” is 2 overrepresent. 5/9

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

Just as referring to ALAANA arts orgs as “specific” is a marginalization or underrepresentation and perpetuates a #WesternCanon center (6/9)

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

As it turns out, we did have extensive internal discussions about the problems with the term “mainstream” as we were preparing the piece, but we ended up using it anyway, largely because it seemed fairly well established in the literature and we were trying to be careful to use the language from our readings rather than invent our own. But Justin’s feedback, and subsequent conversations that I have had with him and others on these topics, have convinced me that we should do more to interrogate the way this term is used.

In the research literature, the term “mainstream” is often contrasted with the language “culturally-specific” (a term that we did avoid), and it is this combination that provokes the fiercest resistance from cultural equity advocates. The logic on researchers’ part is that “culturally-specific” organizations explicitly target a specific demographic population, whereas “mainstream” organizations target everyone. On its face, this seems perfectly reasonable. In practice, though, the dynamic is asymmetric. Organizations celebrating European art forms tend to have been founded earlier than organizations that primarily serve communities of color and benefited from the structural advantages enjoyed by white culture at the time (and since), enabling them to capture much of the sector’s wealth. And yet virtually none of these institutions identify as “culturally-specific,” despite what the statistics shared at the beginning of this article might suggest. Indeed, aficionados of these art forms often wax poetically about their universal appeal, pointing proudly to the way that classical music, for example, has become a national symbol of pride in Venezuela through the famous El Sistema program, the way that it has spread like wildfire in East Asia, and the extensive outreach and education initiatives many American orchestras have undertaken in low-income, black and brown communities. But many cultural equity advocates see orchestral music as unabashedly and irredeemably white: it originated in Europe, the vast majority of composers presented (even by Latin American and Asian orchestras) are European or European-descended, and most of the people who enjoy it are of European origin. To them, when we talk about culturally-specific organizations, that includes symphony orchestras–and ballets, and operas, and encyclopedic art museums. And it’s not at all obvious to them why certain culturally-specific organizations should continue to receive such a disproportionate share of public and philanthropic support compared to other culturally-specific organizations. In fact, they think it’s pretty obvious that the balance is out of whack.

Now, some readers might blanch at the application of so stark a label as “white” to organizations like orchestras, especially at a time when they are trying so hard to attract more diverse audiences and workforces. And truth be told, I share some of these reservations. While I’m generally skeptical of claims to universality, I struggle deeply with the way that essentializing art forms by race, and the organizations that practice those art forms, seemingly erases the people of color who do participate in and have fallen in love with European-derived traditions. According to the NEA’s figures, more than a million African Americans saw a classical music concert at some point in 2012; nearly 600,000 Latinos took in a ballet performance; and the list goes on. That’s a lot of people. Do opera singers of color agree that opera will always be a white art form? Whose place is it to judge whether someone’s choice of profession might be (as I have seen suggested by some) a manifestation of internalized racial inferiority?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, and can’t speak for people of color working in these traditions. That said, even if we stop short of labeling Shakespeare theaters and the like “white,” it seems obvious that they are, and will likely remain for some time, at the very least “white-ish.” In the end, we can’t force people to love Beethoven, Balanchine, Botticelli, Brecht, or anything else, no matter how much educating, exposing, coaxing, and pleading we do. And in today’s United States, it is increasingly art forms that did not originate in Europe that are getting the love: as of this year, the most popular genre of music to listen to is hip-hop. (From that link: “Classical music was in last place with just 1 percent of all music consumption in the year-to-date.”)

Difficult Choices

In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we defined mainstream institutions, in part, as “…founded by white people.” But it may be more helpful to consider mainstream institutions and Eurocentric institutions as two different things. Professional orchestras, ballet companies, and operas not only have a mandate to serve a broad audience, but must do so via a particular art form. Many other large-budget nonprofit organizations–performing arts centers, festivals, and some museums, to name a few–are not necessarily so constrained. It’s somewhat easier to imagine this latter group of institutions transforming in ways that authentically serve an entire community, service that would in fact justify disproportionate subsidy from a local arts agency or an impact-minded philanthropist. Separating our concepts of “mainstream” and “white” could allow us to treat European art forms as just one of many types of cultural expression within a mix of organizations and communities, instead of privileging them as the historical default. Just as importantly, that distinction would make it easier to justify allowing some organizations to continue maintaining a largely white identity when that is the most authentic expression of their mission. The problem arises only when such organizations seek and receive disproportionate philanthropic resources on the pretense of serving or speaking for an entire community that’s much more diverse than they are.

Were the field to adopt this new understanding, an unavoidable question would face every organization celebrating European cultural heritage in the midst of a substantial nonwhite population: is our foremost loyalty to our art form or our local community? In answering, boards and executives would need to realize that true commitment to the latter could mean dramatic changes, changes that would make their organizations unrecognizable to the individuals who founded them. Yet reaffirming a primary commitment to an art form with clear ethnic roots–which, I want to emphasize here, is an equally valid choice under this paradigm–would be a signal to the world that the organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts can only reach so far. And yes, that may make it untenable to go after large sums of money from foundations and government agencies on the premise of being a local “anchor institution.”

Unity in Diversity?

Ultimately, this discussion highlights the importance of clarifying what we really mean by cultural equity, and what we want for our communities and our sector. In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we noted the tension between integration and cultural ownership as one of the central fault lines separating the Diversity vision from other definitions of cultural equity:

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

If we adopt a cultural policy that stereotypes organizations practicing European art forms as hopelessly foreign to anyone who doesn’t share ethnic roots with their founders, we leave behind millions of people of color who want to engage with those art forms and make them a part of their lives. But if we are so committed to providing African Americans and Latinos with opportunities to participate in classical music that we write those expectations into law, does that imply a corresponding expectation that organizations practicing traditions like mariachi and Butoh will likewise reach beyond their immediate communities? As a society, how much do we want our cultural policy to emphasize affirming identity vs. broadening horizons?

Again, I don’t know where that balance should be. But I feel certain that we ignore the question at our peril. Every diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative that fails to grapple with the inherent tensions living within those words risks birthing strategies that sound wonderful on their own terms but work at cross purposes in combination. Until we rise to the challenge of understanding and articulating our goals at the system level, we’re going to keep running into the same issues, and having the same arguments, over and over again.

This piece was adapted and expanded from material originally cut from “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” by Clara Inès Schuhmacher, Katie Ingersoll, Fari Nzinga, and Ian David Moss, as well as from a keynote speech I delivered to the Orchestras Canada conference in May 2017. I’m grateful to Clara, Katie, and Fari along with many others for helping to shape my thinking on this topic, and to Justin Laing for challenging me to dig deeper. Justin and I will be presenting a session exploring these issues in further depth at this year’s Grantmakers in the Arts conference.

National Geographic Magazine covers display – photo by flickr user greyloch

In the world of media, the line in the sand between commercial and nonprofit has long been getting washed away, but this past month’s announcements leave behind even less of a trace. First came the news that premium cable channel HBO had struck a deal with the nonprofit Sesame Workshop to bring first-run episodes of “Sesame Street” exclusively to its network and streaming outlets starting in the fall. The deal will allow Sesame Street to double the number of episodes it produces, and alleviates a number of financial pressures. Although new episodes will eventually be available on (free) PBS–the show’s home for the last 45 years–the news raised some troubling questions about mission and access. Lest you think of this as a simple story of a media empire benefiting from the public purse, though, know that Denzel Washington also plans to produce adaptations of all ten of esteemed playwright August Wilson’s works for the network, one per year for the next decade.

As if that weren’t enough, after 127 years, the National Geographic Society, “one of the largest nonprofit scientific and educational institutions in the world,” has sold a 73% stake in its iconic magazine and other media assets to a Murdoch-headed partnership in exchange for $725 million. (The relationship is not a new one: the society first partnered with Fox in 1997 to launch the National Geographic cable channel.) Many were dismayed by the news, citing concerns about the “Foxification” of National Geographic, and the effect of the partnership on the magazine’s standards of reporting. Others are more positive: the new joint venture (and a newly bolstered endowment) will give the National Geographic Society the “scale and reach to continue to fulfill [its] mission long into the future,” and allow it to double spending on research, science and other projects.

Cultural Colonialism or Sound Business Strategy? Vivendi to Open Venues in Africa. This month, French media group Vivendi announced it will build ten performance venues in Africa to “enhance access to culture and entertainment in countries frequently lacking such facilities.” The venues will be built in Cotonou (Benin), Brazzaville (Congo), Conakry (Guinea), Dakar (Senegal) and other locations to be determined, and will operate under the name CanalOlympia. These venues, which will serve a concert halls, theaters and cinemas all-in-one, are part of Vivendi’s strategy to reinforce the Group’s presence in high-growth markets, where an emerging middle class is consuming more content. They will also include recording studios and a rehearsal rooms, in support of Vivendi’s strategy of identifying and supporting new talent (key to its growth in international markets,) and will form a network of sites for the organization of tours by Island Africa, an initiative of Universal Music Group.

LA Philharmonic Goes Virtual (Reality). Free concerts in the park. HD screenings in movie theaters . Classical music institutions have long played with innovative and accessible ways to take their performances out of the concert hall and into the community. This month, the venerable Los Angeles Philharmonic took it to the next level: with artistic director Gustavo Dudamel at the helm, the orchestra is going on a virtual reality tour. A bright yellow van, nicknamed (of course) VAN Beethoven and outfitted with Oculus virtual reality goggles, Samsung headsets and half-dozen seats from the Walt Disney Concert Hall, is hitting the road for five weeks, stopping at county fairs, street food festivals, and everywhere in between. Individuals will be invited in to experience four minutes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, complete with Fantasia-like visual effects. For those already in on the VR game, you can watch it at home.

The Islamic State vs Digital Archaeology. In March, the Islamic State’s seemingly endless destruction of Mideast antiquities made our roundup of top arts stories. The destruction has continued in recent months, and if anything, is accelerating. In May, ISIS militants occupied the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra–a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In June, they blew up a tomb. In July, they attacked a dozen ancient statues. In August, they leveled two more temples of great cultural significance (and beheaded an expert who was fighting to protect the city’s relics.) As this newsroom “goes to print,” news arrives that the 1,800 year old Arch of Triumph is the latest cultural casualty. The situation is dire, and archaeologists have been galvanized into action, racing to capture Middle East’s historical sites with digital renderings before they’re destroyed. In the coming months, the Institute for Digital Archaeology, a joint venture between Oxford and Harvard universities, plans to distribute thousands of low-cost, high-quality 3D cameras across the Middle East with the help of UNESCO and New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. These cameras will capture 3D renderings of a (for now secret) list of ancient sites and artifacts for preservation and, ultimately, recreation.

Despite Changes at the Helm, Future of Australia Arts Council Remains in Question. Australia made Createquity headlines in May with the news that Arts Minister George Brandis had diverted a whopping $104.8 million from the arts council budget to a newly established policy, the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, managed by his own ministry. The move made many enemies of the Arts Minister among Australia’s cultural sector. This month, the sector celebrated the news that Brandis had been removed from his post. Unfortunately, the celebrations may be premature: although the $104.8 million has not yet been spent, incoming Arts Minister Mitch Fifield has indicated for now that he is planning to move ahead with Brandis’s agenda.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Sharon Alpert, currently the Vice President of and Strategic Initiatives at the Surdna Foundation, has been appointed president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She will be the foundation’s fourth president and first female leader.
• Music coverage at metropolitan dailies took a hit in September: Jim Farber was let go from the Daily News (New York) where he’d been writing since 1990s; longtime music writer Brian Mansfield left USA Today; and the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune dissolved its music department in its entirety.
• H.E. Shaikha Haya bint Mohammad Al-Khalifa has joined the Culture & Archaeology Authority of Bahrain as its new director of Culture & Arts, Dawa Gyeltshen was formally appointed the Cultural Affairs Minister of Bhutan, and Trinidad and Tobago has named Dr. Nyan Gadsby Dolly its new Minister of Community Development, Culture and the Arts.
• The Institute of Museum and Library Services is hiring a Program Analyst. Posted September 14; closing date October 9.
• Grantmakers in the Arts invites consulting firms/individuals through an RFP process to submit a proposal to conduct an audit of GIA with respect to the organization’s goal of racial equity in arts philanthropy. Posted September 22; closing date October 26.
• The Walton Family Foundation seeks an Arts and Culture Program Officer for its Region Program. Closing date October 31.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A new survey conducted by the CECP and Conference Board finds that corporate giving is, and is expected to remain, stable. On the other hand, a report from the consulting group Camber Collective suggests that better meeting donors’ needs and preferences could open up access to quite a bit of additional giving.
• A couple of studies from this past month look into the question of gender gaps. One study suggests that disparity stems from a reflexive tendency to link masculinity & creativity, implying that similar work by women will be deemed less creative simply by being executed by women. The second suggests that the gender imbalance among the highest level positions in some cases may in part be the result of differences in lifestyle preference.
• Recently released research suggests that television has the potential to be used in teaching tolerance, increasing political tolerance, and eliminating racism, sexism, and heterosexism.
• Several studies out of the UK this month bear mention. One suggests that arts participation is strongly correlated not with class, but with education, which paints a slightly different picture from Createquity’s previous research on the topic. A second, from the UK Office for National Statistics has crunched the numbers and found that net financial wealth does correlate with happiness quite well, thank you. The third, a survey of theater goers in the UK reveals that recognizable cast members is the biggest driver of ticket sales. And on the topic of theater, a report published by the Creative Industries Federation suggests that theaters and performing arts organizations are markedly less ethnically diverse than other creative industries.
• Two new studies released this month suggest that music does in fact have the power to influence us, though not always in a good way.
• A survey of social media use in USA published this month shows that Facebook and Twitter usage has plateaued, while Instagram and Pinterest users have doubled.

The Detroit Institute of Arts’s Woodward entrance. (Image courtesy the Detroit Institute of Arts)

After a two-year battle, a federal ruling to approve Detroit’s bankruptcy plan brought to an end the threat to auction off the Detroit Institute of Arts’s collection. The plan includes the “grand bargain,” an $800 million deal that partly consists of a $366 million investment from the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Knight Foundation, and other heavy-hitters. In the bargain, DIA supporters are providing funding to save Detroit’s public pensions, with the caveat that DIA be administered by an independent charitable trust, and not by the City of Detroit, which has owned the museum since 1919. While all hail these developments as positive, DIA still has a tough road to financial stability ahead. As it looks to shore up its finances and secure its future by raising its endowment to $400 million, DIA faces hefty legal bills incurred during the bankruptcy battle, and the daunting task of fundraising from donors whose pockets may have been emptied into the grand bargain. Regardless of what the future holds, the foundations will be keeping a close eye on their investment–the Knight Foundation’s Dennis Scholl has been appointed as an observer of DIA’s board.

Publisher Hachette Wins the Right to Set E-Book Prices from Amazon: In a multi-year agreement, “Big Five” publisher Hachette won the right to set prices for e-books from Amazon, which had attempted to pressure the company to price all e-books at $9.99. The retail giant suffered in the court of public opinion for its strongarm negotiation tactics, including long shipping delays of Hachette books, disallowing advance sales, and steering customers to similar books by other publishers. Some authors are calling for Amazon to be investigated on anti-trust grounds; at the same time, Amazon has questioned the need for traditional publishing houses in the digital era. While all sides seem to be breathing a sigh of relief over the deal, it seems clear that the fight isn’t over–publishers have long had a difficult relationship with digital retailers, and observers are think the next negotiation may be just as acrimonious.

Mid-Term Elections Offer Mixed Results for the Arts: In case you were living under a rock last month, we had some elections and the Democrats lost their shirts. So what does that mean for the arts? With the Republican-majority Congress, Americans for the Arts forecasts the passage of a comprehensive tax reform bill, which will likely impact charitable giving rules. The chairship of the subcommittee that oversees funding for the Arts in Education will change, while Representative Ken Calvert (R-CA) will continue to govern the subcommittee that controls the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Barry Hessenius predicts a possible attack on the NEA’s budget, given its symbolic weight for some in Congress, and recommends that arts leaders work to build stronger relationships with our elected officials. Meanwhile, at the state level, arts-friendly candidates suffered losses in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland. In better news, Rhode Island passed a ballot referendum providing $35 million in bonds to renovate arts facilities in the state, and pro-arts measures passed in Palm Beach County, Salt Lake City, Scottsdale (AZ), and Middlesex County (NJ).

Three Foundations Purchase Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center: The embattled August Wilson Center for African American Culture now rests in the hands of three foundations, which purchased it for $7.9 million from Dollar Bank, its mortgage holder. The Pittsburgh Foundation, Heinz Endowments, and Richard King Mellon Foundation had attempted to close on an $8.49 million deal by October 31, but the sale was torpedoed when a creditor appealed an earlier $200,000 judgment in the Pennsylvania Superior Court, and the foundations refused to proceed until the debt was settled. Dollar Bank was forced to move ahead with a foreclosure auction on November 3, which cleared the Center of its debt and allowed the foundations to complete their purchase.The Center plans to re-open in 2015 under new nonprofit leadership and will continue its mission as a focal point for African American arts and culture.

Obama Says the Internet Should Be Treated as a Public Utility: Net neutrality supporters got an unexpected boost from President Obama this November. The White House released a plan recommending that the Federal Communications Commission reclassify Internet broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which proponents argue would give the FCC the increased regulatory power necessary to protect net neutrality. The president seems to agree with this line of thinking — his administration’s plan also rejects the FCC’s proposed rules to allow for paid prioritization of Internet traffic. Just after the President’s announcement, though, FCC Chairman (and Obama appointee) Tom Wheeler stated that he favored a different approach, one friendlier to the concerns of large Internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner. The Washington Post speculates that Obama’s announcement may merely represent shrewd political positioning, since if the FCC enacts strong rules, and the Republican Congress votes to overturn them, a presidential veto would put Obama and the Democrats squarely in the camp of millions of voters who have asked the FCC for powerful net neutrality protections.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Indonesia has named the U.S.-educated Anies Baswedan as the new Minister of Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education.
• The NEA’s Director of Folk and Traditional Arts Barry Bergey will retire after 29 years of service.
• Chorus America is seeking a new President and CEO. Posted November 22, closing date December 19.
• Kansas City’s Charlotte Street Foundation is looking for a new Director of Artists’ Programs. Posted October 29, no closing date.
• The Foundation Center is hiring for a Director of Community Foundation Services position. Posted November 4, no closing date.
• The Barr Foundation seeks an Arts and Culture Program Assistant. Posted November 20, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A study by the U.S. Trust finds a big bump in charitable giving among wealthy donors in 2014, and projects further growth.
• New research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that nonprofit employment rose during the recession.
• The BFAMFAPhD collective published Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, which asserts that “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.”
• The researchers behind the Crystal Bridges field trip experiment that we reported on back in October have released another study, this time focused on high-quality theater productions.
• A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture looks at how well rural areas with a higher proportion of “creative class” workers fared during the recession.
• Suby Raman takes a deep dive into gender representation in America’s top orchestras.
• New research from Italy indicates that those with a need for “cognitive closure” are less likely to appreciate abstract art.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

• Glenn Beck is at it again: the right-wing broadcaster recently attacked the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture along with the Imagining America initiative on his Internet show, The Blaze. Far from a government agency, the USDAC is a “citizen-powered” art project that hasn’t received any public funding to date. Not one to be deterred by facts, Beck claims the two groups are “America’s newest propaganda machine” attempting to “rewrite our history.”
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has signed a new lease with the city of New York that clarifies the museum is allowed to charge a suggested admissions fee, and added fees for special exhibitions. A lawsuit filed earlier this year alleged that the Met’s previous lease with the city required the museum to be free to the public five days a week.
• Cultural policy researchers in England are crying foul over Arts Council England’s “long-standing bias” toward organizations based in London, which receive a whopping 82% of funding, and asking it be redistributed proportionally to the population across the country.
• A number of theaters in upstate New York are concerned about the possible opening of several casinos in the area and the potential impact on booking major performers and retaining audiences. The advocacy group Upstate Theaters for a Fair Game is seeking protections from the state to “‘establish a fair and reasonable partnership” between the casinos and the local market.

IN THE FIELD

• The Museum of Modern Art sure is committed to staying on top of digital trends in education: it jumped on the MOOC train early, and now has a new partnership with Khan Academy.
• Two Latino theater companies in New York, Pregones Theater and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, are getting set to merge with the help of Time Warner and the Ford Foundation. The two performing ensembles will retain their original names under the new organization, but will share resources.
• The Theater for a New Audience has moved into its first permanent home after spending the last 34 years producing shows in a variety of rented spaces around Manhattan. City planners view the completion of the newly constructed theater as “the capstone” to a downtown Brooklyn cultural district long in the making.
• What’s going on with the Brooklyn Philharmonic? The NYC-area orchestra made a splash back in 2011 with a daring programming strategy focused on marrying classical music with other more widely popular genres as well as local composers and artists. But all the positive press and attention the new direction received apparently wasn’t enough to stanch the organization’s financial bleeding.
• While the debate rages on over whether Spotify is good or bad for musicians, YouTube muscles in on its territory by planning a subscription service that would give users on-demand, ad-free access to music videos on their mobile phones.
• Musicians of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra recently voted to break from their local union chapter of the American Federation of Musicians in an unprecedented industry move. The decision was reportedly motivated in part by the “understanding that to be successful as an orchestra in the future, [they] need more flexibility, they need to be nimble, and…unions sometimes get in the way of that.”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• With 71 percent of projects getting funded (compared to the 43 percent average), the dance community boasts the highest proportion of successful Kickstarter campaigns. Theater clocks in at second place with a 64 percent success rate.  Is this evidence that arts orgs are reaching new supporters – or just swapping money back and forth between their friends?
• Pop quiz: which nonprofit group has successfully  “reduc[ed] its reliance on foundation funding, buil[t] new revenue sources” and is “constantly experimenting and challenging assumptions around who their audience is and what they care about”? Nope, not the arts — nonprofit news outlets.

BIG IDEAS

• Barry Hessenius’s Arts Dinner-vention has wrapped, and the edited video has been posted in seven installments; GIA collects them all on one convenient page. The conversation among some of the leading lights of arts administration explores ideas for the future across three areas: the role of the community, new format and delivery mechanisms, and the artist’s role and artist ecosystems.
• Say you didn’t require a project budget as part of that RFP. What’s the worst that could happen? Michelle Williams calls for grantmakers to trust the artists we work with, and she catalogues some innovative ideas from the GIA 2013 conference.
• Scott Walters has a new blog series examining the history of the regional theater movement by riffing on Todd London’s An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions of a New American Art. London, incidentally, delivered what reads like a doozy of a talk on innovation at the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture.
• Michael Kaiser’s latest book, The Cycle: A Practical Approach to Managing Arts Organizations takes an optimistic look at the difficult and delicate task of building an arts organization that is effective and strong enough to last.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is offering a $30,000 prize for an interactive application that will “make the rich content of the 2012 [Survey of Public Participation in the Arts] more accessible to the public through a series of interactive, visually appealing, and easy-to-use data visualization tools.” Submissions are due February 3.
• A new study by On the Move examines how European cities support “cultural mobility” – the ease with which artists and cultural professionals engage outside their home region.
• In an effort to increase both convenience and access to data on the nonprofit sector, major players Guidestar and the Foundation Center have entered into a strategic partnership meant to “support the field in new and innovative ways.”
• The Whole Schools Initiative in Mississippi reports that 5,000+ students participating in an arts integration program performed significantly better on fourth and fifth grade state assessments than their peers.
• For its Arts, Culture and Audiences week, the American Evaluation Association highlighted assessment practices in arts education with a series of blog posts stressing that assessments can be “hands-on, active learning experiences for students.”
• York University and the National Ballet School in Toronto are partnering to conduct a pilot study with the hopes of providing scientific evidence of the positive mental and physical effects of dance on people with Parkinson’s disease.
• Grantmakers in the Arts’s ongoing research into support for individual artists has generated a crop of admirably detailed case studies of how a nonprofit grantmaker, state agency, private foundation, and family foundation select recipients for their awards to individuals.

• The public has spoken: polling released in late September shows 75% of Detroiters oppose cutting pensions and 78% oppose selling artwork from the Detroit Institute of Arts to ease the city’s financial troubles. Meanwhile, the DIA is pitching a long-shot plan to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder that would direct significant state funding to the museum – possibly in exchange for the city’s relinquishing ownership.
• Is Philly’s status as a world-class cultural city at risk? The Philadelphia Inquirer explores the potential impact of sharp cuts in private and public funding in a city where arts tourists outnumber sports tourists 4:3.
• Washington, DC may be paralyzed over ObamaCare, but you don’t have to to be: Fractured Atlas follows up on its infographic guide to ObamaCare for artists with a similar guide for small business owners. And the Future of Music Coalition has announced a new website designed to be a comprehensive resource on the implications of the Affordable Care Act on artists. There’s even an artist-friendly hotline.
• In an interview in The Atlantic Cities, Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell talks about how the city benefits from – and has to adapt to – the huge festivals that undergrid its cultural economy.
• “Be A Creator” enters California elementary schools later this year as a pilot program designed to teach K-6 graders that sharing other people’s ideas and artwork without permission is stealing. The Center for Copyright Infringement (CCI) prepared the curriculum in conjunction with the California School Library Association and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition to address online piracy by educating the young. Detractors claim the curriculum is just “thinly disguised corporate propaganda.”
• Meanwhile, voluntary agreements held by the entertainment, advertising and internet industries to address issues of content piracy are apparently going well, according to testimony from a recent Congressional hearing. That’s good news following the controversy over the SOPA and PIPA bills last year. However, notably missing from the hearing were independent labels and the artists themselves.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Kansas Arts Foundation, established after Governor Sam Brownback abolished the Kansas Arts Commission in a controversial and unsuccessful attempt to eliminate state art funding, has named Karen Lane Christilles its first Executive Director.
• Lois Lerner, embattled head of the IRS tax-exempt organizations division, has retired after bearing the brunt of the blame for the recent scandal involving targeted investigation of Tea Party-related organizations. A review board that was about to propose she be fired alluded to “neglect of duties” during her 12-year tenure at the agency, which raises an interesting question: is Lerner just a political scapegoat or has the IRS’s nonprofit unit actually been mismanaged for years?

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Copper heiress Huguette Clark’s will established an arts foundation and bequeathed it her $100m California estate to showcase her art, but other aspirants to Clark’s $400m fortune have taken to the courts.

IN THE FIELD

• New York’s 70-year-old City Opera is closing its doors following a decade of deficits, an unsuccessful campaign to avert bankruptcy and, according to Mayor Bloomberg, “a business model [that] doesn’t appear to be working.” Michael Cooper and Robin Pogrebin provide the most in-depth reporting on the institution’s final days and just how precariously it held on to life up to the final act.
• How many stagehands do you need in a new education space? Carnegie Hall’s opening night gala was abruptly canceled in the wake of a union dispute over jurisdiction of Carnegie’s still-under-construction education wing. The feud is raising eyebrows, particularly given that five of Carnegie’s top ten earners are stagehands, each earning more than $300,000 apiece.
• In an interview with Ellen McSweeney, Cynthia Cyrus of the Blair School of Music discusses the role of MOOCs in music education and the challenges posed by murky copyright law.
• Two great examples of museums keeping pace with changes in the education sector: the Museum of Modern Art recently wrapped up its first MOOC on museum teaching strategies, and reflects on how it went. The American Museum of Natural History, meanwhile, graduated its first class of science teachers, thanks to a federal grant that made it the first (and maybe not the last) museum in the nation to offer a full teacher prep program.
• Perhaps not such a great example of a museum keeping up with the times: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art recently offered a Groupon “deal” for an $18 admission voucher. The only problem? Entry to the museum is supposed to be free five days and two nights a week. This bit of deceptive advertising appears to be just another episode in the institution’s shady history of misleading visitors about its pricing structure.
• The now year-long labor dispute at the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra has prompted both celebrated music director Osmo Vänskä and composer Aaron Jay Kernis to resign, dealing a major blow to the future of the organization. The question that remains is whether the board will try to rebuild the 110-year-old orchestra or the musicians will strike out on their own.
• Meanwhile in Germany, the Berlin Philharmonic has led a massive country-wide strike to protest further decreases in job opportunities for orchestral musicians.
• British museums are adjusting to a world with less public funding. The Museums Association recently released its annual review, finding that nearly a third of survey respondents have had to cut staffing, replacing many of the positions with volunteers and interns. Interestingly, museum attendance is at an all time high.

BIG IDEAS

• David B. Pankratz reports out on a few ideas about research generated at Americans for the Arts’s National Convention back in June: better link research to policy, create pathways for young researchers to study the arts, expand the focus of research beyond nonprofit arts, and more speed dating, among others.
• At WorldFuture 2013 (the best-named conference around), Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child project and co-founder of MIT Media Lab, described four different ways to see the future. In this post Elizabeth Merritt applies the theories to attempt to forecast the future of museums.
• Clayton Lord celebrates the recent Arts Dinnervention with a week’s worth of posts from himself and three other participants. Linda Essig joins in the conversation.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Where have all the theater nerds gone? The National Endowment for the Arts’s latest survey of public participation in the arts is out, and reports a nine percent drop in musical theater attendance and twelve percent drop in play attendance since 2008 – but greater participation by the young in arts festivals and by non-white and Hispanic Americans in art performances broadly. 
• Chris Unitt examines a a new report from the UK’s Culture 24  documenting the second phase of its action research project on “understanding and measuring digital engagement” in the cultural sector.
• Also out of the UK, Ticketmaster has released the results of a survey of playgoing among the British, who are more likely to have attended the theatre than a concert or sporting event. Audiences skew younger and more experimental than you might expect – which means audience codes of conduct are shifting, too.
• Last month Capacity Interactive released its Performing Arts Digital Marketing Benchmarking Survey Study with some interesting findings to report. Perhaps not surprisingly, “the biggest obstacle for digital marketing success is lack of budget.”
• Theater Communications Group has released its annual Theater Facts 2012 report, authored by the folks from the National Center for Arts Research. It’s possible to spin the news a few different ways, but what’s clear is that in many key areas, things are starting to look like they did before the recession: revenue is up, subscriptions are up, income from single-ticket sales is up. The full report is here.
• New neuroscience research finds adults with musical training perform better on tricky cognitive tests than those with little to no experience playing an instrument. And creativity in music doesn’t just happen randomly; freedom, flexibility, time and “being in the moment” are the key elements needed, according to a new study led by John Rink, professor of musical performance studies at Cambridge University.

• You probably didn’t know it, but your fancy new mobile device is making it more difficult for your favorite local theater company to keep its wireless microphones. The Federal Communications Commission is considering auctioning off two “safe haven” broadcast channels used by wireless mics to commercial wireless providers. Theatre Communications Group led a Capitol Hill briefing in support of keeping the safe haven channels intact and also has a full write up for those looking to get up to speed on the issue.
• Despite being, arguably, the cultural capital of the United States, New York City lacks a formal cultural plan – unlike, for example, Chicago, Austin, and Roanoke, VA. Two NYC Council members have introduced a bill that would change that, forcing the Department of Cultural Affairs to assess the cultural needs of artists and communities on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.
• The Big Apple is also gearing up to choose a new mayor, and candidates on the right and left have expressed a range of support for the arts. Interestingly, all but one (Republican and Democrat) claim to be favor of increasing arts education spending. Any guesses as to which one? (Related: Guy Yedwab and the League of Independent Theatres have a voter guide for artists.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The federal copyright office’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel stepped down from her position last month. The Future of Music Coalition pays tribute to Espinel’s service.
• The new director of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture, Denise Montgomery, resigned last month after just 44 days in her position stating, “I cannot in good conscience remain part of the Filner administration.” Montgomery was not the first to leave the administration in response to the mayor’s ongoing sexual harassment scandal. By the end of August, Filner himself was forced to resign. His legal troubles continue.
• Farewell to Trevor O’Donnell, who is leaving behind the nonprofit arts – and his lively blog, Marketing the Arts to Death – to focus on his architecture work.

BIG IDEAS

• In advance of the Arts Dinner-vention Project, Devon Smith offers an awesome google-doc-rumination — with a running comment thread — on “a revolution in the arts.” More, please!
• Mark Schubin has created a half-hour video overview of the history of technology solutions in the performing arts, from sound ducts in opera houses to the phonauthograph and beyond.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• “Deaccessioning has always been tricky”: whether it’s public outrage in the UK or legal troubles in Detroit, cashing in on beloved works of art is no easy way out of financial trouble. Meanwhile, the Willem de Kooning Foundation has decided to sell 10 paintings by the late artist to fund a special endowment program. Rather than risk the negative publicity a public sale could garner (see above), the works have been consigned to Gagosian Gallery, who will exhibit the pieces in an upcoming show and whisk them away privately at undisclosed amounts. The Foundation hopes to raise more than $30 million from the sale.
• On the heels of last week’s announcement that Nashville Symphony Orchestra musicians have agreed to a one-year, 15% reduction in salary, Minnesota Orchestra’s union musicians are standing their ground over demands for higher pay. The stalemate could result in the loss of their renowned conductor Osmo Vänskä and cancellations in their concert series this November.

IN THE FIELD

• Barry Hessenius’s annual list of the Fifty Most Powerful and Influential People in Nonprofit Arts is out, with a lot of new names but a conspicuous lack of arts education leaders. Congratulations to all who were mentioned.
• Arts Council Silicon Valley and 1stACT Silicon Valley have merged into a new nonprofit called Silicon Valley Creates. And two of Chicago’s oldest arts education providers, Art Resources in Teaching (A.R.T.) and Urban Gateways, are also merging. A.R.T., which was founded in 1894 — yes, 1894 — was “severely affected by a combination of recession, public policy challenges, and limited philanthropic support,” and its programs will henceforth be considered part of Urban Gateways’s Visual Arts program portfolio.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA and the UMass Arts Extension Service are creating a treasure trove for “research into the history of the field of arts management, with the potential to help influence arts policy on the national level.” The new National Arts Policy Archives and Library (NAPAAL) will be housed at Amherst and made freely available online. Initially, the archive will include key documents from the two partners as well as Americans for the Arts and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, but outreach will continue to make the archives a “comprehensive scholarly resource.”
• Last spring, Americans for the Arts and the Nathan Cummings Foundation held a Funder Exchange on Evaluating Arts & Social Impact. A recently released report summarizes key points of the discussion and a few case studies in innovative evaluation by funders.
• A new study led by Leonid Perlovsky of Harvard University conducted in Quebec documents higher grades among gifted and talented students taking optional music classes; the students increased test performance in all subjects. The research somewhat addresses a common complaint about such studies, which is that the difference in performance might be due to a difference in inherent ability among the students.
• In his “Let’s Turn this Old Barn into a Theater!” series (parts I, II, and III), community development consultant Mike Hickey provides a fascinating and comprehensive summary of the opportunities and challenges for cultural organizations that make the decision to “buy non-cultural facilities and fix them up.” These findings are the result of a case study of so-called “adaptive reuse” for NOCD-NY.
• Researchers in England report that European artists are more satisfied with their jobs than non-artists – despite higher rates of unemployment and lower income levels. Earlier research found a similar effect in the United States. (Interestingly, British artists themselves report about average job satisfaction.)
• Video games for 70-and-80-somethings may become all the rage. Research out of the University of San Francisco indicates that video games can help improve attention and focus in healthy older adults.
• The MacArthur Foundation has released the findings from  its recent review of the MacArthur Fellows Program, claiming the study reaffirms the program’s positive impact on the professional lives of award recipients and the engaged public. The Foundation also announced its decision to increase the fellows’ living stipend, upping it to $625,000 paid out over five years.
• Britain is due for its decennial census next year, but officials are considering two alternatives to the classic Big Data survey: shifting it online or scrapping it entirely and relying on existing data from other sources. The goal is to reduce the $1.10 per person per year cost. Take note: the per-capita cost in the US is almost four times as high.
• The deadline to apply for an NEA Research: ArtWorks grant is coming up November 5, and Program Analyst Melissa Menzer has some helpful tips for potential applicants.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

•  At the end of April, the City of Philadelphia unveiled a free online tool called CultureBlocks for “research, planning, exploration and investment” in creative placemaking. Gary Steuer, the Chief Cultural Officer of the City of Philadelphia, gives an inside look at the tool, and the Philadelphia Inquirer has more on how it can be used.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art is returning two statues to Cambodia, where they were determined to have been looted from. Tess Davis, a researcher on Cambodian antiquities, told the New York Times, “The Met Could have treated Cambodia’s request as an obstacle. Instead, the museum recognized it as an opportunity to set the moral standard for the art world.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jeremy Nowak, the co-founder and former CEO of  The Reinvestment Fund in Philadelphia, was named the interim Director of ArtPlace, a collaboration of organizations focused on creative placemaking.
• Tim Mikulski, the current editor of ARTSblog, is leaving Americans for the Arts, and posted a warm farewell. (ARTSBlog really flourished under Tim’s leadership, and he’ll be missed. -IDM)
• The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council’s new Research and Policy Director David Pankratz, who came to the organization and the city at the beginning of this year, offers his thoughts on Pittsburgh as a dream city for the arts policy enthusiast. Read David’s guest post for Createquity on creative placemaking here.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has announced its 2013 Doris Duke Class of Artists. The Doris Duke grant includes up to $25,000 for audience development and up to $25,000 for personal reserves or creative exploration during retirement.
• New Music USA has announced changes to its grantmaking strategy, uniting five  programs into one flexible fund targeting a wide range of music projects.
• You may have noticed that a new model of TV programming has emerged in the last ten years — dark, gritty shows — but shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are the product of a new model behind the scenes, as well, one that pay networks are better positioned to use, according to a New York Times article last week. YouTube just announced that it is piloting a system in which 30 channels will offer paid subscription access to additional content. I wonder whether these channels will find the same advantage pay networks on TV have, or whether paid YouTube will fizzle as a latecomer competitor to Netflix and Hulu Plus.

IN THE FIELD

• After a 191-day lockout, the musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra finally ratified a three-year contract. However, the Minnesota Orchestra’s season has been canceled, following an ongoing labor dispute.
• Finding ways around traditional funding and production models is also one of the goals motivating a growing movement of a very different kind — public libraries as performance venues. By bringing in artist talks, concerts, and comedy acts in the evening, libraries become more of a community hub, while the performers get a place to share their most expressive works, away from the pressure to bring in big ticket sales that they find at many venues.
• The 9/11 museum has decided to charge a mandatory admission fee when the museum opens next year, citing high security costs and questioning whether a donation-only model would support them after the first year. Not directly in response, but on-topic, Jim Undercofler wonders aloud why contributed revenue is considered less stable or predictable than earned revenue.
• The Rio Theater, a beloved mom-and-pop cinema in Monte Rio, California, recently raised $63,993 in a Kickstarter campaign to switch to digital projection and stay open in the face of rapid technological change.
• “How do you reconcile the desire to be inclusive with the practical imperative to target?” asks Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History director and Museum 2.0 blogger Nina Simon. She’s referring to museum marketing and mission, but it can apply to any organization striving for community relevance. Her answer is “social bridging,” deliberately creating programs that appeal to and “matchmake” unlikely segments of the population.
• The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York recently surpassed 500 members, many of whom are young metropolites. The New York Times provides a style-section type look at who these people are and what goes on at their gatherings.
• A growing number of business colleges and schools are using art as a teaching and learning tool, and some are amassing important collections of modern and contemporary art. Meanwhile, MIT is teaching young people computer programming as a thinking tool, with some artistic results.
• Dayton, Ohio may soon be the home of two separate museums dedicated to funk, leading some to speculate whether it can support two of them.

BIG IDEAS

• In an interview Laura Zabel, director of Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul, talks about the new CSA (Community Supported Art!) supporting health care for artists rather than health insurance for artists, and other projects. She says, “In the work we’ve done in the Central Corridor we have seen that artists can see the opportunity in a challenge… and have nuts-and-bolts skills that can draw people, attention, and dollars to a place.”
• In a new book, Jaron Lanier asks, “Who Owns the Future?” and presents a manifesto for an economy in which the middle class is supported by micropayments for all data we create online, from tweets to purchasing decisions. For a summary, see Evgeny Morozov’s skeptical review in the Washington Post.
• How can foundations become leaders in their communities? The Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society has just published an essay on how the one group has done it,  Changing the Game: Civic Leadership at The Boston Foundation, 2001-2012, authored by the president of The Boston Foundation.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• In New York on May 23, and in Berkeley on June 2, Author Arlene Goldbard will give book talks to launch her two new books: The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, a collection of short essays on the potential for positive social outcomes through art and creativity, and The Wave, a novel set in a future in which the hopes and predictions of The Culture of Possibility have come true. Goldbard presents both books on her blog, and last week, Barry Hessenius interviewed her on his blog (parts I, II).

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s experiments with a tool called Strategy Landscape have drawn to a close (at least for now; they are considering re-releasing it open-source) and Kevin Bolduc shared some lessons learned from the project on their blog.
• The National Center for Arts Research has a short summary of the implications of the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2013 State of the Nonprofit Sector survey.
• The Centre for Economics and Business Research has released a report demonstrating the economic benefits of the arts and culture on the UK.
• The European Expert Network on Culture has released a report on strategies for export and internationalization of cultural and creative industries in the European Union. Find a brief summary here, and the report here.
• Pacific Standard Magazine reports on two studies that suggest musicians — or at least men holding guitars — are more attractive to women than non-musicians. I’d like to see more scientific (and less heteronormative) studies, but it’s an interesting theory.

• One artist’s activism on immigration and visa reform (he’s banned from entering the USA for 10 years because of a paperwork snafu).
• The Obama administration has announced three new members of the National Council on the Arts, the body that oversees the NEA. Here are interviews with Maria Rosario Jackson, Emil Kang and Paul Hodes.
• Google’s chief executive is stumping for an unregulated internet in developing nations, but some musicians in Africa aren’t buying what he’s selling. (I wonder, though, if an internet free from censorship must also be an internet without copyright controls.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Wow: after only two years in the driver’s seat at ArtPlace, Carol Coletta is jumping to the Knight Foundation, as Vice President/Community and National Initiatives. She writes a farewell letter via the ArtPlace blog.
  
• Margaret Hunt is the new director of Colorado Creative Industries.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Pew Charitable Trusts has restructured its culture program to emphasize project grants made through the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. The Pew Cultural Leadership Program, which provides general operating support to Philadelphia-area organizations, will disappear over the next two years.
• Philadelphia arts philanthropist Gerry Lenfest is stepping down from his foundation, which is entering spend-down mode.
  

IN THE FIELD

• The San Francisco Symphony is on strike; here is a great background on the situation from San Francisco Classical Voice.
• A proposed merger between Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the LA County Museum of Art is off the table (for now).
• Linda Essig reports from the Association of Arts Administrators Conference in New Orleans; Steven Tepper offers his perspective on the 3 Million Stories conference in Nashville hosted by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (for which he is research director) and Vanderbilt’s Curb Center.

BIG IDEAS

• Michael Rushton is the newest ArtsJournal blogger and has 15 posts up in five weeks, including ones on dynamic pricing, free admission at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, faux-expensive admission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, price discrimination as seen in the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, price discrimination, price discrimination, and more price discrimination. WHY DOES NO ONE TELL ME THESE THINGS. (Side note: Michael asks why people [incorrectly] think price discrimination is a bad thing. Hint: it’s because of the word “discrimination.”)
• Speaking of ArtsJournal, Doug McLennan has designed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) around the Spring for Music Festival, designed to get people to “listen smarter.” The class lineup looks pretty interesting and manageable (I particularly like the topics “How do you judge an orchestra” and “How does a piece of music become famous”), and the participants all get to sit together if they buy discounted subscription tickets to the festival. Looking forward to hearing how this plays out.
• Not everyone’s psyched about MOOCs though. Steve Lohr warns that the movement toward free online education could mean lots of financial trouble for universities, not to mention the teachers and staff in their employ.
• In fact, we’re getting more and more evidence from all sides that even “successful” cultural products – the likes of Gagnam Style and 50 Shades aside – don’t actually earn creators that much money. Here, Patrick Wensink spills the financial beans on his bestselling novel.
• Kristy Callaway has a helpful cheat sheet for early childhood educators, and Nina Simon considers varying levels of participation and co-design for children.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The McKnight Foundation has some cool visualizations of its research on individual artists; Laura Zabel comments.
• The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University answers the question, “what is it exactly that you DO?”
• Writing for the Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin gleefully makes hay on what he characterizes as an admission of defeat from Richard Florida on the efficacy of his creative class theory, but Florida says not so fast. A lot of it is the usual academic pissing match BS, but the original Florida essay that Kotkin cites is pretty interesting and provides some new fodder for gentrification warriors. The money quote (as it were):
  

  On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits. Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations. While less-skilled service and blue-collar workers also earn more money in knowledge-based metros, those gains disappear once their higher housing costs are taken into account.

  In other words, as this article on the region-wide effects of Silicon Valley new money points out, “in a free market, people with money drive demand, which then drives supply.” Among other things, the article tells of a just-out-of-college startup techie paying almost $3000 a month for a studio in San Francisco, “simply because he didn’t know better.”

(For a quick summary of this post, see “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: the condensed version.”)

Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy” calls for a major overhaul in arts philanthropy in the United States. It is one of a series of reports commissioned by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) as a follow-up to its 2009 Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best:  Benchmarks to Assess and Enhance Grantmaker Impact. NCRP established benchmarks for funders to strive toward in order to “maximize their impact and best serve nonprofits, vulnerable communities and the common good.” Those criteria, along with their associated benchmarks, are as follows:

• Values: at least 50% of grant dollars provided to benefit marginalized communities (defined broadly using 11 categories, which include the economically disadvantaged; racial/ethnic minorities; victims of crime/abuse; single parents; and LGBTQ citizens), and 25% for advocacy and civic engagement
• Effectiveness: providing at least 50% of grant dollars for general operating support and 50% as multiyear grants, and ensuring that application and reporting timelines are aligned to grant size
• Ethics: maintaining a board that serves without compensation and includes representatives from the community it serves
• Commitment: paying out a minimum of 6% of a foundation’s assets annually in grants, and investing at least 25% of those assets in ways that align with its mission.

“Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” examines how current practice in arts funding holds up against the NCRP benchmarks, and calls on the field to refocus its energies and resources in a number of different ways.

Summary

The central argument of “Fusing” is that arts philanthropy, as currently structured, perpetuates inequality across the arts and culture sector, and across society as a whole, by disproportionately funding large institutions that focus on Western European traditions. According to the report, this practice is problematic for a number of reasons:

• It “restricts the expressive lives” of a large swath of our society
• It benefits institutions patronized primarily by the wealthy, and, by extension, benefits the wealthy themselves, flouting justification for the tax-exempt status foundations and arts organizations enjoy
• It ignores emerging practices within the artistic landscape, threatening to render arts philanthropy irrelevant
• It undermines the potential of arts and culture to be tools promoting democracy and social change

This practice is not new. Arts philanthropy, Sidford argues, was from its early days “not motivated by a desire to relieve suffering, help the poor or find systemic solutions to pressing social problems,” but to reinforce an elitist system in which wealthy individuals patronized museums and orchestras to signal their status. Arts and culture philanthropy was firmly divorced from any funding meant to address social inequity. To this day, “early arts patrons’ preference for the European high art canon, and for the institutions that reflect and support social elites, continues to frame funding patterns.” To support this claim, “Fusing” examines Foundation Center data on how many funding allocations for arts and culture are made with the specific intention of benefiting disadvantaged communities:

95% of the foundations analyzed gave grants with a primary or secondary purpose of arts and culture. But only 10% of these arts and culture grant dollars were classified as benefiting one of the 11 underserved populations included in the NCRP’s analysis, and only 4 percent were classified as advancing social justice goals.

Furthermore, the Foundation Center data suggests “the greater a funder’s commitment to the arts, the less likely it is to prioritize marginalized communities or advance social justice in its arts grantmaking… arts funders whose main focus lies outside of the arts appear to value the catalytic role of the arts in serving social justice goals more than funders with larger arts portfolios.”

Sidford cites a number of present-day factors – demographic, aesthetic/artistic, and economic – that she believes make the case for change in philanthropic practice all the more pressing.

Demographics

“Fusing”’s demographic data, mainly drawn from the 2010 U.S. Census, centers on the changing racial and ethnic composition of the United States, the widening gap between the rich and poor, and persistent inequities in education, civic participation and health care.  Each of these inequities, according to Sidford, is currently being addressed in some way by artist-activists and community-based cultural organizations that are not receiving the recognition or support they deserve. Their existence, and the fact that there has been an “enormous increase in the number of cultural organizations in the past two decades,” underscores the “universal desire for arts and culture in every community” – a desire that needs to be acknowledged with broader philanthropic support.

Artistic/Aesthetic

Despite being persistently undervalued and underpaid, artists play a vital role in preserving non-European cultural traditions, contemporizing and blending them to create new ones, and breaking new ground in finding ways to apply the arts toward social justice goals. “Fusing” cites Americans for the Arts’ 2010 “Trend or Tipping Point: Arts and Social Change Grantmaking,” which reports growing funder interest in supporting arts and culture projects that intersect with other social justice goals such as health and education. Many organizations engaged in this type of hybrid work, however, “do not fit the classic model of an arts institutions, operating more on a collectivist or community organizing model” that renders them difficult to assess or to assign to a particular funding category.

Cultural Economics

The report’s final case for change revolves around the distribution of funding, pointing to inherent inequities in large, mid-sized and small organizations’ access to private and public capital. According to data from the Urban Institute, organizations with budgets under $500,000 generated 51% of their revenue from contributions, gifts and grants, while the largest nonprofits with budgets over $5 million reported receiving just over 60% of their revenue from such sources:

The disparities appear even greater when looking at how all contributed revenue is distributed across arts organizations of various budget sizes. Only 18% of all contributions, gifts and grants made to arts nonprofits in 2009 went to organizations with budgets less than $500,000, despite the fact that these organizations represent 84% of the total. By contrast, 55% of contributions, gifts and grants go to organizations with budgets more than $5 million. Put another way, organizations that in number represent only 2% of the nonprofit arts sector receive 55% of public and private subsidy:

Sidford suggests that these disparities are likely mirrored individual donor practice, citing a study by The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University that found more than 70% of highly affluent households gave to the arts in 2009, compared with less than 8% of the general population. Artists and organizations serving marginalized populations, she argues, have more difficulty soliciting individual donations because their constituencies are less able to provide financial contributions. Recent drops in public arts funding  (including a 20% decline in local government expenditures on the arts between 2008 and 2010) make circumstances all the more bleak considering that public funding has traditionally been moreaccessible to cultural groups serving marginalized populations. “Shifts in public sector funding,” Sidford writes, “have both immediate and long-term implications for the cultural ecosystem, particularly for the smaller, newer, edgier parts of that system and the artists and groups serving our least advantaged communities.”

Recommendations for Moving Forward

In light of these trends and challenges, “Fusing” asks that arts and culture-focused foundations “make equity a core principle of [their] grantmaking by paying more attention to the people who will benefit from [their] grants and the processes by which the arts and culture provide those benefits.” To assist in this process Sidford provides questions designed to help funders make equity a greater focus in their work. The questions are grouped under five broad purposes for arts philanthropy:

• Sustaining the canons (defined as “important works from established traditions”)
• Nurturing the new (including new artistic works and new audiences for that work)
• Arts education (including media literacy, art appreciation, and advocacy for equity of access to arts education for all children)
• Arts-based community development (“endeavors and organizations that intertwine artistic and community goals”)
• Arts-based economic development (includes arts incubators, spaces for artists, cultural tourism, etc)

The questions under each category focus primarily on diversity (i.e. “Are we recruiting actively applications from artists and organizations working outside the European canon?” “Are artists from diverse cultural backgrounds involved in the programs we fund?”) and breaking down traditional silos between arts and non-arts funding (i.e. “Are we funding both arts and non-arts organizations doing this work?” “Do we recognize art and social change as a form of artmaking?”) “Fusing” concludes by challenging funders to re-examine longstanding assumptions about the role the arts can and do play in our society,“asking, in an authentic way, ‘What is the purpose of philanthropy in the arts today?’”

Analysis

As noted above, “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change” was written with the intent of applying the NCRP’s criteria for effective grantmaking to the arts. Those criteria generated a good deal of discussion and controversy when they were released. Members of the philanthropic community, such as then William and Flora Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest, questioned whether funders should prioritize reducing poverty and discrimination over other social goals such as addressing climate change, pursuing medical breakthroughs, or supporting – you guessed it – the arts. “Fusing” takes NCRP’s criteria for philanthropy, and their underlying premise that serving disadvantaged populations should be a focus for all grantmaking, as a given.

Like the NCRP report, “Fusing” provoked strong and varied reaction across the arts and funding communities (GIA’s online forum on equity in arts funding provides a good sample) when it was originally released. It also provoked a strong and varied reaction in me. Reading it evoked frustration similar to what I feel when I read arts education reports that draw conclusions affirming my fundamental beliefs (i.e. that the arts are a powerful learning tool for children), without providing clear evidence for those conclusions. I understand and support the arguments the reports are trying to make, but wish they did a better job making them.

“Fusing” contains a number of such arguments – about the role of philanthropy and of art in society – that are more values-driven than data-driven. In many cases those values align with my own. I believe, for example, that the arts provide concrete social benefit beyond simple aesthetic pleasure. I believe that all members of our society do not have equal access to that benefit, and that is a problem the private funding community can and should address.  “Fusing” does a very good job of affirming those beliefs for me, both by calling attention to organizations doing some very compelling work with arts and social change, and by raising important questions about the extent to which entrenched inequities in early arts philanthropy continue to the present day.

Unfortunately, “Fusing” does not provide a clear vision for how funders should redistribute their resources in response. Two questions loom over the report: 1) in which contexts are the arts the most efficient and effective means of addressing social inequity?, and 2) how can private grant resources most efficiently, effectively and sustainably address inequities within the artistic field?

I don’t think we have concrete answers to either question, and the report muddies the waters further by failing to distinguish consistently between the different segments of the arts sector it identifies as disenfranchised. Specifically, it conflates arts organizations (and individuals) pursuing social justice, arts organizations serving specific non-European ethnic communities, small arts organizations, and individual artists. Clearly, some organizations meet all these descriptors – they are culturally-specific, artist-led, justice-seeking and resource-starved. But rather than keeping consistent focus on the intersection of those qualities, the report treats them somewhat interchangeably. This is more confusing than illuminating, since many small arts organizations, individual artists and culturally-specific organizations have little in common beyond being ignored by mainstream institutional funding.

Collapsing together these segments of the arts sector makes it difficult at times to discern what the report is actually arguing for. For one thing, the report’s data doesn’t clearly align with its recommendations. By emphasizing large organizations’ share of foundation giving, for example, the report implies that funding should be redistributed to small organizations – but never specifically recommends this course of action. For another, its bold but largely unsupported assertions about the role of arts and culture in communities (like “these artists and arts organizations are powerful agents in the struggle for greater fairness and equality”) lump all such entities together without acknowledging their varying levels of quality, capacity, relevance, and impact. As a result, it’s difficult to know which practices deserve greater support, or how to identify them.

Below are some specific ways in which these issues manifest.

The 55%/2% statistic

One of the most jarring (and often cited) statistics from the report is that the “richest” 2% of arts organizations receive 55% of all contributions, gifts and grants made for arts and culture – reminiscent of the “99-percenters versus 1-percenters” divide that fueled the Occupy Wall Street protests this time last year. On the surface it doesn’t seem particularly fair that the largest 2% of organizations would receive the lion’s share of arts funding – but those large organizations tend to have large buildings to maintain, a heck of a lot more people to pay and a broader programming scope. Some of them may be incredibly efficient with the resources they are given, and others may be extremely wasteful – but without considering what their large budgets are being used for, it seems premature to jump to the conclusion that funding a large organization perpetuates inequity.

Moreover, redistributing private grant resources might not even make all that much difference.  It’s a common misperception that the 55% number refers just to foundation funding. In fact, it also includes contributions and gifts from individuals, which are actually twice as important as foundation funding for arts organizations in the aggregate. Moreover, according to the report, the proportion of the revenue that large organizations receive from contributions, gifts and grants relative to their budget size (61%) isn’t much different from the proportion received by midsized (59-60%) and even the smallest organizations (51%). Essentially, this statistic is telling us simply that some organizations have larger budgets than others.

That revelation would be more compelling, and provide more cause for alarm, if it were accompanied by findings that culturally-specific organizations tend to receive a proportionally smaller percentage of their grant requests compared to their euro-centric counterparts, or of a substantial inequity in the amount of funding small organizations receive relative to the number of people they serve. But without such context, the most famous number coming out of “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” is not particularly meaningful.

Capacity and need

”Fusing” argues forcefully that past inequities, in arts funding and beyond, have created a caste system in which organizations that serve marginalized populations are at a disadvantage in obtaining capital relative to established institutions. But “Fusing” presents little evidence that small or mid-sized arts organizations are inherently better equipped to advance social justice than large ones – and that they have a concrete need for more funding in the first place.

Some large arts institutions already spend a substantial amount of money presenting, documenting, conserving and protecting works of art and performance from a wide variety of cultures for the benefit of present and future populations. Others, by virtue of the scope of their work, may be in a much better position to examine themes relevant across cultures, foster dialogue and exchange programs with artists in other parts of the country and the world, and so forth.  If funders wanted to influence broad-scale change by reaching a large audience in a short amount of time, large organizations might actually represent an attractive return on investment. A substantial number of them already aim to engage a wide array of audiences, either through targeted outreach activities or by providing free or reduced priced events.  For example, well over half of concerts by American orchestras, many of which were the earliest beneficiaries of “elitist” early arts funding practices, are now specifically performed for community engagement or education.

Many programmatic advantages large organizations enjoy are resource-based, of course, and redirecting funding toward small and midsized organizations would obviously allow them to do similar work. Why, however, should we assume that the small and mid-sized organizations would do a better job of advancing social equality if they had more resources?  Sidford might argue that culturally-specific and social justice-driven organizations, which are mostly small, would advance equality simply by virtue of their very being. But if the need here is for more culturally-specific, social justice-driven organizations, their numbers appear to already be growing without substantial foundation support. Using the example of the Silicon Valley, Sidford writes, “in 2008, 70 percent of the region’s 659 cultural groups were less than 20 years old, and 30 percent of the new organizations were ethnically-specific… While Silicon Valley may be somewhat ahead of the national demographic curve, related changes are occurring in communities across the country.”

If the number of “artists and tradition bearers” is already on the rise as a natural result of demographic shifts, what additional role is there for private philanthropy to play? Should foundations support these artists and organizations to simply continue doing what they are already doing, or instead ask that they expand or shift their scope? How would the strings (justifiably) attached to traditional grantmaking practice affect what the report implies is a naturally occurring growth in artistic expression and exploration? “Fusing” provides few insights on these important but difficult questions.

Sidford writes,

“activist-artists, tradition bearers, and progressive cultural institutions are using their skills to illuminate our increasing cultural diversity, and to challenge our increasing social, economic and educational divides.  They are helping disadvantaged groups give voice to their stories… They are assisting people to exert their political and civil rights… These resources are at every community’s disposal and, with greater philanthropic support, they can be deployed more extensively and effectively” (emphasis mine).

With greater philanthropic support, any resources can be deployed more extensively. Whether or not they are also deployed more effectively, and in particular more effectively than the larger organization down the street, is a different and more complicated question than “Fusing” acknowledges.

None of the issues identified above undermines the assertion that inequities exist within the arts sector. They do, however, raise questions about the extent to which those inequities are problematic, and whether they are problematic for the same reasons that the report identifies.

Implications

“Fusing” does not, in my mind, provide a comprehensive argument for how private grant dollars should be restructured to better address social ills, but where it does succeed is in raising very strong and pointed questions to compel us to think more deeply about how and when the basic notion of equity informs arts funding. What I find to be Sidford’s best and most thought-provoking question isn’t included in “Fusing,” but raised in GIA’s online equity forum: “What if we could start fresh and design a new system of support for arts and culture in this country,” she asks, “with equity as one of its fundamental tenets?”

If “Fusing” had been written as an extended meditation on possible answers to that question, I suspect the resulting essay would envision, among other things, a much greater government investment in the arts. Government institutions in a democratic society are, in theory at least, more naturally aligned toward equitably serving the public, and providing basic services to the disadvantaged, than private institutions. ”Fusing” highlights this point in noting that public arts’ agencies “broad mandate” has historically made their funds more accessible to cultural groups serving marginalized communities. If the demographic and aesthetic statistics in “Fusing” had been applied toward arguing for greater and more stable public investment in the arts, I doubt I would have found as much to quibble with.

Barring a massive reinvestment in public arts funding, which given our current economic and political environment isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, uncertainties remain about how and how much the role of private funders should change. As mentioned earlier, two unanswered questions hover over “Fusing,” both of which have implications for private grantmakers. To revisit them one at a time:

1) In which contexts are the arts are the most efficient and effective means of addressing social inequity? 

This question is one that, as a field, we are only beginning to answer. As the report states, “in the past 100 years, we have made a science of developing nonprofit arts institutions but we are still relative neophytes in understanding the role of the arts in catalyzing individual and community capacity, and sustaining individual and community health.” Private funders are well poised to help us deepen that understanding in two ways: first, as “Fusing” suggests, by seeking out and learning from the higher-quality work undertaken by arts and social change organizations; and second, by supporting systems through which our field can become more systematic and thoughtful in exploring and documenting the impact of arts programming on the general public. This latter strategy could take two forms. The first involves incentivizing/requiring grantees to collect more specific information on who their programs are reaching and how exactly those audiences are being served. (The Cultural Data Project springs to mind here as a potential resource with opportunity for expansion.)

The second involves funding third-party research to study both the intended and unexpected consequences of arts programming in underserved communities. Sidford refers to existing research on the impact of art and social change, and implies that established best practices exist (“documented in a growing body of various resources including books, studies, films and websites”). The report doesn’t delve into either in detail, however, so it’s unclear how many models exist and which could (and should) be brought to larger scale. Increased funding for third-party research would be less burdensome to small organizations, which lack infrastructure to support robust research and data collection. It could also help refine best practices and research tools that could then be applied back to large and midsized organizations.

2) How can private grant resources most efficiently, effectively and sustainably address inequities within the artistic field?

The answer(s) to this question will depend in large part on how those inequities are defined. They include inequity of access to artistic and cultural capital, inequity of access to and preservation of cultural heritage, inequity of access to audience, and so forth. If we focus on inequity of benefit from artistic practice, broadly defined, then I think we could use a better understanding of how newer, more grassroots organizations evolve as they expand their scale and scope, both with and without private funding support. Sidford states that “many [such] organizations do not fit the classic model of an arts institution… their internal structures and more informal than conventional arts institutions, their modus operandi more nimble and opportunistic, and their resources almost never in line with their commitments.” As the aforementioned “science” of building nonprofit arts institutions has taught us, organizations undergo fundamental changes in both their administrative structures and their delivery systems as they build up private grant support. These organizations may not now operate under a “classic model,” but the models they do offer seem like fertile testing grounds for better understanding not just the impact of artist-activism, but the impact of private grant support on that activism.

“Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change” raises compelling questions about inequities in arts and culture funding that demand to be taken seriously. In the end, I cannot dispute the claim that many small and culturally-specific arts organizations deserve to receive more attention and resources than they do.  In order to determine how best to identify and support them, however, our field must identify and pursue learning opportunities that can help arts funders be as efficient and impactful with existing resources as possible. As Sidford notes, shifting arts grantmaking toward a greater focus on equity is a long-term process. Managing that shift well requires care, experimentation, and a lot of trial and error. It also requires our collective willingness to set ideology aside and, without apology, question, examine and clarify the benefit and impact of artistic practice on all communities.

FURTHER READING

• Aaron Dorfman, Funding for the Arts Sometimes Benefits All of Us (HuffingtonPost)
• Grantmakers in the Arts’ Online Forum on Equity in Arts Funding
• Janet Brown, It’s a Complex Cultural Eco-System
• Phil Hall, review of Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best
• Heather Higgins, “The NCRP’s Uncharitable Philanthropic Power” (Forbes.com)
• Niki Jagpal and Kevin Laskowski, “The Philanthropic Landscape: The State of Social Justice Philanthropy”
• Scott Walters, Occupy the Arts
• Diane Ragsdale, The times may be a’changin’ but (no surprise) arts philanthropy ain’t (ArtsJournal)
• Jesse Rosen, New Philanthropy Report Ignores Orchestras’ Service to Communities