I basically retired from conference blogging two years ago, but the opportunity to bring together our hot-off-the-presses editorial team in one place and try out a new medium for us (video) was enough to drag me out of the attic for this go-round. Once you’ve attended any conference for several years in a row, it’s easy to get jaded and start to care more about reconnecting with old friends and making new ones than about the session content. This phenomenon probably reached its peak for me during last year’s conference in, of all places, Miami Beach, where I arrived to discover a hot tub in my room and one of my coworkers got randomly upgraded to a swim-up bungalow. Kind of hard to concentrate on PowerPoint slides in that kind of environment; I remember hanging around the pool with colleagues right after presenting one afternoon, wearing my nametag over a full suit and tie and feeling like a very sweaty idiot. I figured I wouldn’t have quite the same sorts of distractions to contend with in Philly, but still, it was another year of GIA and what promised to be another year of what have become some very familiar conversations.

Many conferences have formal “tracks” corresponding to industries, sectors, topic areas, and so forth, so that if you identify with one of those tracks you can easily navigate your way through the content that is most relevant to you. The GIA Conference essentially has implicit tracks that pop up every year: arts and social justice/cultural equity, arts education, technology, support for individual artists, creative placemaking, and so forth. I’m more invested in some of these topics than others, and it had become my practice at GIA and other conferences to gravitate towards those topics and engage with the kinds of people who get invited to speak on them. Nothing wrong with that, except that over time I found myself learning less and less from these sessions; I was already pretty on top of whatever conversations were going on and had met most of the people there were to meet. I’ve now been to not just GIA but also the Americans for the Arts Convention five times each, and my most positive experience at each conference was my first, in 2009 – when I was new to this corner of the field and everything was fresh.

So this year, I decided to switch it up a bit and deliberately attend some sessions that were outside of my comfort zone. The first of these was the Arts Education pre-conference, which you can hear about in our first video blog if you haven’t watched it yet. I’m going to focus here on two sessions during the main conference that blew my mind for two very different reasons, neither of which I had a chance to talk about much during our in-the-moment recaps.

On Monday, I attended “Invisible » Visible: New Native Voices on the Forefront of Change,” organized by Reuben Roqueni of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. That morning, GIA had unveiled its much-ballyhooed IDEA LAB, a series of TEDx-style short presentations, and the initial round of mini-keynotes were all delivered by artists or curators. While some of these talks were compelling, most of them ended up being about the artist’s individual work or the importance of art in general without much connection to grantmaking practice or the broader themes of the conference, and felt like tangents as a result. I came to this artist-centric session bracing myself for more of the same, but I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Rulan Tangen of Dancing Earth started things off with a full-group movement and sound exercise which managed to transcend the awkwardness of our windowless hotel room setting. Poet Natalie Diaz followed with two riveting readings from her work, and media artist Cristóbal Martinez demonstrated two of his creations (one live and one via slides). The difference with this session is that not only was the artistic content engaging in its own right, it led seamlessly into a fascinating discussion about how to support, respect, and engage creatively with indigenous communities around the globe. Tangen’s participatory dance workshop helped to bring us closer to the subject matter, Diaz’s poetry laid bare the tensions between ancient traditions and modern realities that make up her daily reality, and Martinez told us of a remarkable installation in a Sydney art gallery that involved cutting out part of the floor to allow voices from the earth to echo through the space. Each of these artistic explorations, in their own way, showed a different side of the clash between Eurocentric and Native worldviews, of the power imbalances inherent in that clash, and of the halting and uncertain efforts to call to account and heal the rift. Because philanthropy itself is at the center of not only the clash but the healing, the artistic connection was not just a feel-good reminder of why we’re all here, but intimately woven in to the conversation itself.

The distance between that session and Tuesday morning’s “Alternate Funding Tools: Program-Related Investments” shows the range of GIA at its best. Deena Epstein and Robert Jacquay of Cleveland’s George Gund Foundation offered a down-to-earth, relentlessly practical, and admirably candid take on their own experiences offering lesser-used tools such as low-interest loans, equity investments, and more to arts groups in their community. The topic wasn’t uncharted territory only for me: session organizer Regina Smith from the Kresge Foundation kicked things off by asking who in the room had direct experience with PRIs; only a couple of hands went up. After a brief review of the history of PRIs, Jacquay described the Gund Foundation’s work with this tool. About 3.5% of the foundation’s investment corpus is held in this asset class, with examples of investments in the arts including a low-interest loan to the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art to help the institution secure a New Markets Tax Credit for a new building, using an equipment purchase as leverage with the landlord of an organization that was at risk of losing its lease, and (my favorite) depositing $25,000 in a local credit union that gives loans to working musicians. Epstein and Jacquay reported that despite a perception of PRIs as risky and unfamiliar on the part of some institutions, their experience has been that the due diligence process is “not a huge mystery.”

The theme of this year’s GIA Conference was “The NEW Creative Community,” and conference organizers made a concerted effort to deliver new thinking to its attendees both in the plenaries and the choice of breakout sessions. That effort wasn’t 100% successful in an absolute sense, as emcee Ben Cameron pointed out on the second day of IDEA LAB – when you try to make room for the new, a lot of times what you get is old ideas in new clothes. But attendees can nevertheless make room for the new in a relative and personal sense by taking a risk and giving unfamiliar topics a chance. I’m following up my GIA experience this week by attending the American Evaluation Association Conference in Washington, DC. This is my first time at this event and it is providing a rush of stimulation due to its dramatic differences from GIA and any other conference I attend regularly: over 3000 attendees from all over the world (I shared an eight-person table on Monday with people from Germany, Brazil and Indonesia), 1000 sessions (sometimes more than 50! at a time), dozens of workshops, and very little arts content. I’m getting a lot out of the experience because I’m stretching myself to learn things I don’t already know. So if you think you’ve seen and heard it all, take it from one who has learned his lesson and consider how you too can make room for the new.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

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

BIG IDEAS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Bob Lynch reports out on the recent activities of the US Travel & Tourism Advisory Board.
• Americans for the Arts was out in force at the Republican national convention, organizing a panel with a Mesa mayor who skipped his own election to be there (he was running unopposed), former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and, uh, “jazz musician” Bernie Williams.
• Future of Music Coalition legal intern Joseph Silver looks into how the first sale doctrine, which affords consumers the right to lend or resell copyrighted works they lawfully purchase, is adapting to the digital age.
• Shannon Litzenberger reflects on her two years as the first ever Metcalf Arts Policy Fellow and describes five models for fundraising and “friendraising” for the arts from the US, Canada, and Australia.
• The Economist hosted a weeklong debate on the topic of “Should government fund the arts?” Such debates pop up at least once a year (I participated in one in May), but this one is notable for its distinctively English flavor and also for a guest appearance by Adam Huttler on day 4.
• Jo Mangan has a substantive report from the first-ever International Culture Summit in Edinburgh.
• Did you know that the mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland is a comedian? As in, a real comedian, not a career politician who does some stand-up on the side?

LIFE EVENTS

• RIP Louise Nippert, heiress (by marriage) of Proctor & Gamble fortune who gave many millions of dollars to the arts in the Cincinnati region over her lifetime.
• Congratulations to Jennifer Ford Reedy, the new president of the Minnesota-based Bush Foundation (no relation to the two US Presidents). Reedy had been chief of staff and vice president of strategy for Minnesota Philanthropy Partners.
• …and to Carolyn Ramo, new executive director of Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue.
• Sadly, arts philanthropy has lost a rising young star in Deepa Gupta, who jumps from program officer for the MacArthur Foundation to director of education initiatives and strategy for the Boeing Company in Chicago. Great news for Deepa, though, and perhaps there will be opportunities for her to be a voice for the arts in her new role.

IN THE FIELD

• Boston’s public television station WGBH has acquired Public Radio International, which produces Ira Glass’s “This American Life” among other programs.
• It’s apparently contract renegotiation season, and the orchestra world is absolutely filled with stories of hardball negotiations between musicians and management. Witness: the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, previously lionized in these pixels for its innovative marketing, slapped musicians with a proposal for 57%-67% cuts (subsequently moderated); the Indianapolis Symphony proposes to cut wages by 45%; the Minnesota Orchestra might be headed for a lockout after offering musicians a 34% cut; San Antonio is on the brink; Philadelphia may be out of bankruptcy, but is not out of the woods. Meanwhile, perhaps inspired by their teacher compatriots, the Chicago Symphony musicians went on strike for three days even though they were offered an increase in base pay in their new contract, because it came with a corresponding increase in health care costs. The CSO players are among the best-compensated in the country. And even museum workers are getting into the act, with employees of San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum and Legion of Honor trotting out the ol’ inflatable rat in front of the grounds. Diane Ragsdale wants to know why can’t we all just get along? Well, I like this approach: the Atlanta Symphony musicians said sure, we’ll take a pay cut, as long as you administrators take one too. And here’s a novel idea: the Milwaukee Symphony just hired its principal trumpeter – and union representative – as its new chief executive.
• For-profit NYC rock venue takes to crowdfunding site, builds audience, avoids bankruptcy. Indie bookstore in Palo Alto converts to hybrid corporate form, raises nearly $1 million. (part 1; part 2; part 3) Are artists and nonprofits about to get a whole lot of fundraising competition from well-loved businesses that can no longer pay the bills?

THE DISMAL SCIENCE

• “Art is what is left over after you have automated everything you can.” Adam Huttler reflects.
• There is consensus among economists that the GOP is full of shit. Or is there?

RESEARCH CORNER

• Here’s some more reaction to the new research report on cultural facilities, “Set in Stone,” from Joe Patti (and again) and Janet Brown.
• Keith Sawyer has another (very lucid) take on last week’s NEA “How Art Works” convening and the accompanying system map.

ETC.

• Starting next year in Kansas City, Google will offer super high speed internet for about what you’re paying Time Warner or Comcast – and basic internet for free.
• I’m sometimes characterized as a “numbers guy” in the arts, but the reality is that I rarely find myself performing mathematical operations more complex than arithmetic. That being the case, I can get on board with this:
  

  ”Why do 50 percent (probably closer to 70%) of engineering and science practitioners seldom, if ever, use mathematics above the elementary algebra/trigonometry level in their practice?” If algebra is the limit for most engineering and science professionals, why does a typical citizen need algebra? As Hacker says, much more useful than algebra is quantitative literacy: being able to estimate, judge the reasonableness of numbers, and thereby detect bullshit. Our world offers plenty of practice.

  …and here’s more from Dr. Mahan, on long division:

  I’ll illustrate with an actual example of division. For my environmental-protection lawsuit, now in the Massachusetts Supreme Court, I needed to divide 142,500 by 4655. Here is the long-division calculation, my first use of the method in 30 years: [snip] The calculation took me a few minutes with paper and pencil, some of the time to reconstruct the algorithm details and to get the bookkeeping straight — even though I already knew the answer quite accurately. I knew the answer because I had already applied a more enjoyable method: skillful lying.

The IRS and Treasury Department are finally starting to bring some clarity to program related investments, releasing a rule that represents the first update in 40 years to the language describing how these financial instruments can be used. Unfortunately, the one arts example in the mix describes a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization, rather than the more standard 501(c)(3) nonprofit. This is a little worrisome given that the arts aren’t actually mentioned as one of the categories in the tax code that qualify for tax-exempt status, and 501(c)(4)s are not able to provide a tax deduction to donors.

Elizabeth Quaglieri describes the Obama administration’s Turnaround Arts Initiative, a pilot program spearheaded by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Turnaround Arts Initiative provides arts curriculum resources and the attention of celebrity artists to eight struggling “turnaround schools” across the country. The arts materials are designed to be thoroughly integrated into the schools’ turnaround effort, and the whole shebang will be evaluated by Booz Allen Hamilton after a two-year trial.

STATE

Obviously, the big news of the month was Kansas getting its arts council back, reported here on Friday. Elsewhere, the news is mostly decent. New Hampshire arts advocates were successful in turning back a threat to the state’s Department of Cultural Resources and public art fund by mobilizing more than 100 business leaders, artists, teachers, economic development officials, and others to attend a public hearing, impressive for a small state. A somewhat controversial plan in Connecticut to replace line item funding for arts organizations with a competitive pool also ended up going nowhere. I have mixed feelings about this one – I get that you don’t want to expose institutions to major financial risk on short notice, but as a general practice I think line items for specific arts organizations are pretty undemocratic (because the organizations with the resources to procure them tend to be on the richer side anyway) and bad policy (because the line items are not subject to any kind of centralized performance review by industry professionals who know what they’re doing).

This is slightly old news, but the New York State Council on the Arts reversed the trend of the past four years and came out of the latest budget process with a $4 million increase, to $35.6 million. NYSCA remains the best-funded state arts council in the nation.

LOCAL

The Washington, DC city council has given preliminary approval to an increase in the budget of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities from $3.9 million to $11.9 million. That sounds a lot better than it actually is; the increase just partially makes up for a combined loss of over $16 million from the DCCAH and the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs program over the past couple of years.

INTERNATIONAL

England cut funding to arts groups two years ago, and the Brits apparently aren’t missing it too much. A survey reports that support for public funding for the arts has dropped from 52% to 44% since 2009. Meanwhile, Scotland’s arts council is moving many of its arts groups to short-term, project funding in an effort to get more mileage out of its shrinking budget.

The Australia Council for the Arts has just completed a five-month review process, its first in two decades, and the results are making some waves. The review advocates that the Council reform its “rigid” structure that silos arts grantmaking by discipline, and also put up much more of its funds for competition as opposed to guaranteeing money to specific institutions. Interestingly, it puts this move under the rubric of emphasizing “excellence,” whereas in the United States that word is typically code for the larger, established organizations.

Turkey has become the latest battleground for the arts and government censorship, with conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan taking a hostile stance to Turkey’s theatrical community after performances of a Chilean play sparked controversy in Istanbul. The events led to Istanbul’s Islamist mayor taking over decision-making for the city-funded theater troupe that staged the play. Supporting that move, Erdogan also threatened to cut off state funding to Turkey’s theater companies in response to protests and resignations by artists pushing for freedom of speech. The bad vibes apparently date back at least to a performance of a different play when Erdogan’s daughter found herself the involuntary recipient of an onstage actor’s attention during an improvised scene and subsequently walked out of the show. That incident led to the actor, who claimed he didn’t know that the young woman in the front row wearing a headscarf was Erdogan’s daughter, being suspended and brought before the country’s minister of culture to explain himself.

Under United States law, a private foundation (i.e., one that relies primarily on an endowment rather than raising its own money from public sources) is required to distribute 5% of its assets each year to charitable causes in order to remain tax-exempt. While most meet this requirement through grantmaking, a growing number of foundations are experimenting with program-related investments as a way to meet the distribution requirement. A few make PRIs a centerpiece of their resource allocation strategy; for example, the F. B. Heron Foundation invests about 10% of its assets in PRIs and nearly half in what it calls “mission-related investments” (market-rate but with substantial social benefit), seeing the strategy as a way to dramatically increase its impact.

The Artspace PRI will primarily be used for pre-development activities (such as hiring architects) for up to a dozen artist housing projects and arts centers across the United States. A list of Artspace’s current developments is available here. Artspace will pay back the debt over ten years at an interest rate of 1%.

Is this the first example of a program-related investment in an arts organization? While it is not uncommon to see PRIs used to support small businesses in economically disadvantaged areas, low-income housing, and the like, I have not previously heard of the tool being applied directly to the arts. (Some predicted that the L3C legal form would be a boon to the arts in the form of providing foundations with a more formalized way of making program-related investments in hybrid businesses, but that promise has yet to materialize in any real way and faces practical roadblocks so long as the IRS fails to give preferential treatment to the L3C.)

[UPDATE: I’ve received several comments in the past couple of weeks indicating that, though PRIs to the arts are not common, this is by no means the first example. Please click through to read them if you’re interested.]

• More beating the drum for a high-level arts policy director position in the federal government. The arts policy document I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is now up at change.gov. Isaac offers a cogent vision for cross-departmental government arts support, and Adam responds.
• A new resource center for program-related investments debuts at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship. Hitting a number of themes discussed during the recently concluded Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference, the center “will work to expand the field of mission investing through the sharing of tools, best practices, lessons learned, and ideas for products and services that could move the field forward,” according to its press release.
• I missed this one the first time around, but the Chronicle of Philanthropy posted a list of its most widely-read articles from the past year. One of these was a screed by Mark J. Drozdowski about bad fundraisers who keep getting hired again and again and again. A few observations:

This is definitely a real problem, not just with development directors but with executive directors as well. It’s all too easy for people to “fail upwards” in the arts (as in other industries as well).

I can’t help but feel that this is what happens when the availability of development positions outpaces the kind of proven, reliable talent that organizations usually seek. The explosion of nonprofit organizations and the expansion of development departments at the nonprofits that already exist worry me for this and other reasons.

Fixing this problem is probably going to take some drastic changes in the field. Probably the easiest, and the one that already has the most momentum behind it, is for organizations to place more trust in emerging leaders (i.e., millennials and young Gen-Xers who are still in their first decade of experience in the field). They come cheap and often full of idealism, and as the Obama campaign proved, can be extremely effective despite their inexperience if organized properly.

I don’t think that’s going to be enough though. Grantmaking organizations are going to have to work aggressively together to simplify the application process and make it less resource-intensive for organizations to run fundraising operations. Funders could help to stem the tide by taking more responsibility for the financial success of the programs that they sponsor; that is, by either (a) being open to fully funding program costs if it is within their budget to do so, or (b) playing an active role in facilitating funding coalitions with peer organizations on the program’s behalf. Either approach would take some pressure off of grantee organizations’ own fundraising operations, which in certain cases could be beneficial.

Finally, infrastructure to allow organizations to share fundraising staff and back-office operations, an extension of what some theater and dance companies are doing with office space, could open up some economies of scale and make fundraising more affordable and efficient.

• Community Arts Network has two recent postings of interest: a history of arts-related public works projects from the Great Depression forwards, and a syllabus for a course at Goucher College in Baltimore called Cultural Ecosystem: The Arts in Community.
• Finally, via PhilanTopic, an online directory of fiscal sponsors from the San Francisco Study Center has debuted. Learn more about fiscal sponsorship here.