More than nine months after former chair Rocco Landesman announced he was stepping down, the search for a new National Endowment for the Arts chairperson has stalled – just in time for the fall budget debates to ramp up in earnest. Sphinx Organization founder and president Aaron Dworkin confirms in the article that he was one of the candidates considered for the position earlier this year. Former NEA Senior Research Officer Joanna Woronkowicz tells us not to worry about the delay. Meanwhile, remember that kerfuffle last year about how Kickstarter was on track to provide more funding for the arts than the NEA? Well, not that this is a surprise, but by now it’s actually happened.

The United States cut off its support of Unesco in 2011 after the international cultural agency recognized the Palestinian Authority as a member nation. The measure was required by U.S. law, but was never supported by the Obama administration, which is now trying its darndest to be supportive of Unesco anyway.

STATE AND LOCAL

At long last, we have had a good year for state arts agency funding. With the economy rebounding and the pall of uncertainty lifting over state budgets, a number of arts councils have managed to claw back a measure of compensation for the dramatic cuts endured over the last four years, though there is still a long way to go. State arts budgets in the aggregate are up nearly 11% or $30 million, the largest nominal dollar increase in over 13 years. Notable success stories from this fiscal cycle include:

• Texas, whose Commission on the Arts got nearly double its appropriation from last year;
• Delaware, which received $1.6 million for a new Arts Trust Fund to provide general operating support for large institutions;
• Arizona, which eked out $1 million in general fund appropriations for its Commission on the Arts for the first time in three years;
• Florida, continuing its climb back to relevance with $5.7 million in new funding, mostly from line items;
• Michigan, also continuing a remarkable climb back from near-death with the second year in a row of multi-million-dollar increases;
• and South Carolina, whose arts commission defeated a gubernatorial veto for the fourth time in four years and on top of that got a hefty 52.4% increase.

California arts advocates did not succeed in dramatically changing the landscape for the California Arts Council, but at the last moment Assembly Speaker John Perez ensured a nearly $2 million increase to the agency’s coffers, bringing California out of the cellar as the cheapest state supporter of the arts on a per-capita basis. Other states with notable increases included Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Utah, and Vermont.

Not all the news was good for state arts advocates, though. The Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, only a year after coming back from being the first state art agency to be vetoed out of existence, has now been slashed almost entirely to the bone again with a paltry appropriation of $200,000, the lowest in the country. Arts councils in Tennessee, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Connecticut, West Virginia, and Wyoming also endured double-digit cuts.

In other state news, a tale of two tax policies: Rhode Island is eliminating taxes on the sale and purchase of artwork, while North Carolina is introducing a new 4.75% “privilege tax” for “admission charges to any live performance or event, any movie screening, any museum, cultural site, garden, exhibit, art show or guided tour.” The North Carolina tax applies to both nonprofit and commercial groups but carves out a number of confusing exemptions for certain festivals, state-supported museums, etc.; basically it sounds like terrible legislation. With that kind of environment, it will be interesting to see if the state extends its sunsetting film tax credit beyond 2014.

INTERNATIONAL

My goodness, the blows just keep coming for arts funding in England. The cuts to Arts Council England over the past few years were bad enough, but it turns out that local funding for the arts will fall another £124 million next year, even though local government budgets in general are up!  Better to be an artist in Britain than Portugal, however, which eliminated its ministry of culture two years ago and shows what happens when you pull the rug of government funding out from under a society that has no tradition of private philanthropy.

The giganta-budget West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong is running into trouble, with construction costs (surprise!) almost double the amount originally planned. The authority has decided to postpone seeking an additional $3.2 billion (I told you it was giganta-budget) payment from Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, presumably until things are in better shape.

Three profiles of new/new-ish culture heads: in Canada, Shelly Glover is settling into her new role as Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages; in France, embattled French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti presides over $3.2b in government spending on culture, which is down 2.8% from last year. France also has gone ahead and ended the “three strikes” provision of its copyright enforcement policy. Finally, Ines Abdul-Dayem is the new culture minister for Egypt. She has quite a story: earlier this year, she was dismissed from her post as head of the Cairo Opera House along with many other cultural officials by Alaa Abdel-Aziz, the man she is now replacing. In June, though, “artists stormed the Ministry of Culture and began an open-ended sit-in to demand the removal of the [now former] minister and the revocation of his decisions.” Shortly thereafter, following the ouster of president Mohamed Morsi, Abdel-Aziz resigned his position.

• The New York Times reports on the state of Rhode Island’s disastrous investment in former Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios. Little Rhody gave Schilling a $75 million loan as an incentive to locate in the Ocean State, as part of a new Knowledge District in downtown Providence. Just two years later, 38 Studios went bankrupt and the state (for now) is left holding the bag. It’s a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to believe that investing in the creative economy is any kind of magic bullet – as with any investment opportunity, strong leadership and close oversight are paramount.
• The number of nonprofit organizations just continues to spiral out of control, and – wait, what? They actually dropped in 2012, for the second year in a row? Must…resist…pre-existing…narrative….

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• A little late on this one, but attorney and nonprofit executive Melissa Beck is the new CEO at the Educational Foundation of America. EFA has funded creative placemaking efforts around the country for the past few years.
• Barry Hessenius scores an interview with former ArtPlace director – and new Knight Foundation VP – Carol Coletta. I think this exchange encapsulates things well:
  

  Barry: What are your one or two big takeaway lessons from your stint at ArtPlace?

  Carol: …There is a piece of communication wisdom that I believe in deeply: Say one thing. Say it simply. Say it over and over.

  We tried our best to do that. People didn’t always like it, but we stuck to the path we originally carved out.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Great Woodruff Arts Center Million-Dollar Embezzlement Mystery has been solved. Amazingly, the perp was a maintenance worker.
• Dance music acts are getting paid royalties at a lower rate than other genres in the UK, according to The Guardian.
• I found this observation from Michael Kaiser’s weekly column of note: “I do believe that there will need to be some adjustment to cost structures, especially for the highest priced talent like guest soloists, conductors, choreographers, etc. I am already witnessing a softening in the fee demands of all but the most famous artists. (Not coincidentally, these fee reductions are coming at a time when European arts organizations are losing large amounts of their government funding and cannot afford to pay high fees either.)” Kaiser runs DC’s Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s largest performing arts presenters.

IN THE FIELD

• NPR’s All Things Considered ran a three-part series on arts education last week. The first story covers the Presidential Committee on the Arts and Humanities’s Turnaround Arts Initiative; the second examines James Catterall’s efforts to study creativity; and the third reports on Life Pieces, an after-school arts program in Washington, DC.
• National Arts Strategies has a 20-minute “video case study” with Springboard for the Arts regarding the latter’s Irrigate creative placemaking project.
• Boise dance company Trey McIntyre Project has begun selling its creative process to corporate clients. (Note that Pilobolus has been doing similar things for years.)
• Three Chicago performing ensembles are trying out a shared fundraising structure. The new group is called Creative Partners, and will spend a quarter of its time raising money for each constituent group and the last quarter pounding the pavement for the entire collaboration.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• If you missed Theatre Communications Group’s Audience (R)Evolution Learning Convening in Philadelphia earlier this year, Jim O’Quinn has a massive wrap-up for you (with pictures!).
• Steven Dawson shares his notes from the 2013 Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium at American University, and Efrain Gutierrez does the same for the Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy National Conference in Chicago.

RESEARCH CORNER

• I’m not exactly sure why Pacific Standard journalist Tom Jacobs seems to be doing a gigantic literature review of research on music and psychology (maybe he’s prepping for a book?), but I’m grateful for it. Here, he analyzes a study of anxiety and depression rates among college students who listen to heavy metal. In a related item, a Boston College study finds an association between after school arts activities and depression in teenagers. “Further widening the jock-artist divide, the study found that the teens least likely to become depressed are those involved exclusively in sports activities.” The usual causation vs. correlation caveats apply, of course.
• The NEA has announced its latest round of research grants, as well as a book coming out of last May’s arts and economic development convening that was organized in collaboration with the Brookings Institution.
• Grantmakers in the Art’s Janet Brown: “We’ve done an analysis of the financial health of arts groups in the twelve cities where we’ve presented our funders’ capitalization workshop…In some cities, mid-sized and major organizations have, on average, negative liquid net assets. This means, they don’t have a dime to pay the electric bill should money stop coming in the door today.”
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund, which helped GIA initially with its capitalization work, conducts an annual State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey. Rebecca Thomas analyzes the 2013 edition from an arts perspective.
• FSG has published a list of 27 indicators with which to track the project of so-called “backbone” organizations involved with Collective Impact efforts.
• The Ford Foundation has released the results of its 2012 Grantee Perception Report.

Well, it looks like we have before us a case of “ask and ye shall receive.” Five days after my original post, NASAA uploaded this very helpful roundup of major state arts agency budget and restructuring proposals to its website. Not surprisingly, they have better information than I did: in addition to Kansas, Arizona, Texas, Washington, and South Carolina, several other states are facing significant restructuring proposals and/or reductions including Connecticut and Georgia (again). Also, in Texas, apparently the Governor’s budget includes money for the state arts council even though he proposed eliminating it in his State of the State address, so things aren’t quite so dire as might have seemed from news reports.

And now we hear this from the State Arts Action Network, an affiliate of Americans for the Arts:

[A brand new area of our website,] the state arts appropriations update section, officially launching tomorrow (February 24), features a clickable map that will take visitors directly to individual state pages featuring the most recent and proposed budgetary numbers for the arts. In addition, each state page will feature links to your SAAN organization(s), the state arts agency, and to either individual state action alert pages or the Americans for the Arts advocacy alert page.

This project is a high-priority one for Americans for the Arts and we are constantly updating the pages, so if you don’t see the information you are looking for just yet, check back in a day or two and you’ll have plenty of information to take in.

We hope that you find these new tools useful as you continue to advocate on the ground for state budget allocations throughout the country.

The page looks good, and if you click on the page for Kansas, for example, you can see that a House committee voted to override Governor Brownback’s executive order to eliminate the state arts council last week. Not the final word, of course, but at least there’s evidence for legislators fighting back. My only request would be for a news feed on the general, 50-state page that automatically updates with the latest changes to the state pages, so that I don’t have to hunt and peck to keep on top of things. But it’s a great start.

While we’re on the subject of arts advocacy for the 21st century, the general point I was making in calling for these integrated, big-picture resources was that we should be moving in the direction of fostering a sense of shared responsibility among arts advocates in every state for what happens to the arts in every other state. Along those lines, I just loved this note that I got last week from Lisa Carnevale, executive director of Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts. Lisa writes:

Friends:

In the midst of this national fight against severe cuts and possible elimination of funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, we need to you contact your national networks!

As you have heard, Congress is poised to make significant cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts’ budget (as well as National Endowment for the Humanities and a zero out of Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR/PBS) funding).  Yesterday, we heard two members of Congress have introduced amendments that would further cut, or terminate, funding to National Endowment for the Arts for the remainder of FY11.

While normally we would urge you to follow the links to send a letter to Congress, here in Rhode Island, our Congressional delegation already “get it”.  Our most effective call to action would be to help further support our delegation when they stand against these cuts. Let’s reach out through our networks to put pressure on other members of Congress to ensure they stand against this as well!

Forward this email to your friends nationwide and ask them to send a letter or call their Congressional delegation!

You see what she does? She knows that Rhode Island’s two Representatives are already in the tank for arts funding. She could have declined to send any advocacy note at all, or just mechanically passed along the call to action to contact one’s own reps even though it wouldn’t have made any difference. Either choice would have been a total waste of Rhode Island’s advocacy network. Instead, she puts it to use by asking members to notify people in other states about the situation so that they can take action there. Any folks reached by this campaign who might not be already plugged in to their own state or national arts advocacy networks represent a win for arts advocacy. Well played, indeed.

Fortunately, the response in RI has been led by Lisa Carnevale of Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts, who has really done a stellar job marshaling limited resources to provide an effective counterattack. Though her task is made easier by virtue of RI being one of the bluest states in the nation, it’s also one of the states that has been hardest-hit by the recession, and still suffers from the third-highest unemployment in the country.

When I got to the State House a few minutes after the hearing had started, I found that I was too late to get in the door – an overflow crowd had begun to form and officials had set up a TV outside for us to watch the proceedings. Impressively, almost all of the 45-60 in the hallway stayed until the end of the show, over two hours later, sitting through two other agencies’ hearings in the meantime. This crew is serious about arts advocacy!

There were several things I witnessed or read that day that I found intriguing in light of our continuing search for messages and strategies that work:

• There had obviously been a lot of offline communications leading up to the big event. The budget clerk introducing the RISCA case had a big smile on her face the whole time as if acknowledging how ridiculous the whole situation was (I definitely got the sense that the Governor is not popular with the state legislature right now.) The leader of the committee, a Democrat, spoke in knowing terms about the onslaught of panels to come and the extended time they would take, at one point looking at his watch and declaring “well, it looks like we just found 15 more minutes for you.” In any case, it was clear that none of this was coming to the lawmakers as a surprise.
• I’m normally not the biggest fan of matching grant requirements, but I will tell you, the NEA’s State and Local Partnership Agreement specifying that federal funds can only match state appropriations, not supplement them, has proven a fantastically effective bludgeon in fighting against cutbacks in state funding. As Amber Johnson (see below) astutely pointed out, no state wants to be the one state that’s missing something every other state has, and the NEA’s rules, as much as they inflict more pain on states already facing tough times, make that threat credible.
• I really liked this piece of language that closed out the written testimony of Randy Rosenbaum, RISCA’s Executive Director (it was included in a packet handed out to several of the people watching in the hallway). He wrote, “Let me just close by saying how much we appreciate the help and support we receive from the General Assembly, and how much we hope that you and your constituents understand and appreciate what a bargain you have, how inexpensively this tiny agency can help contribute to our state’s economic recovery, educational excellence and extraordinary quality of life.” That’s an argument I don’t hear often enough. The arts are a bargain, particularly when compared to bloated social service and entitlement programs at the state level and defense at the federal level. I find myself continually amazed at how much artists and arts organizations are able to accomplish on largely minuscule budgets, and the state arts agencies that oversee that activity are no exception. Yet there are limits to how far frugality can be stretched before these operations become dangerously unsustainable and crippled beyond salvation.
• I would be remiss if I gave this recap without highlighting how Rhode Island native Amber Rose Johnson, winner of the recent Poetry Out Loud national poetry-reading competition for high school students, completely stole the show. Folks, if you want to grab the attention of the politicians in the room, getting a 16-year-old brimming over with confidence, poise, and stage presence to make your case for you is, umm, not a bad idea. Following a string of dry budget numbers and similar-sounding language of jobs and economic impact, Amber cast all of it aside by articulating the meaning of the arts in her life, and finished off with this hilarious sound bite (and I’ll be paraphrasing here): “In conclusion, the arts are awesome, and we need them so Rhode Island doesn’t fall apart,” followed by “I am ready to receive your questions!” You kind of had to be there, but trust me, it was amazing.

As other state agencies (including New York’s) get ready to make their cases this spring and summer, it would be a good idea to heed the lessons from Rhode Island. Let’s hope things work out the way they should.

• ‘Tis the time of the season when states start figuring out their budget situations, and all early signs are pointing to another tough year for state-level support of the arts. Following the previously-reported proposed cuts to New York’s state arts agency, word comes that the governor of Rhode Island wants to gut the Ocean State’s public art, discretionary grant, and film tax credit programs, amounting to a 58% drop in total appropriations for the arts. Rhode Island Citizens for the Arts is on the case.
• Speaking of government, this is what happens when people don’t value public goods enough to pay for them.
• Drexel arts administration professor and new ArtsJournal blogger James Undercofler has made a splash this week with a broadside against the limitations of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit form for the arts. It’s a familiar complaint in “emerging leader” circles, but it’s notable to me to see someone of Jim’s generation and pedigree come to the same conclusions. The point about the form being equally inappropriate for large institutions is also interesting, though I’m not sure what Undercofler has up his sleeve in terms of alternatives. (Adam Thurman responds and says the problem is not the organizational form, it’s us, and Andrew Taylor agrees. I think there are valuable lessons to be understood from both perspectives.) I know Jim from my days working at the American Music  Center, when he was on the board, and am glad to welcome him to our little pajamas-wearing blogger community.
• Speaking of emerging leaders in the arts, major kudos to the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations for jointly awarding nearly three-quarters of a million bucks to grassroots arts leadership development efforts in California. I especially love that the two foundations clearly coordinated their support with each other for maximum effectiveness. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this in the coming months, I suspect.
• Would love to see more of this: local government holds public meeting about legislation of importance to the arts; arts blogger attends meeting and writes about the experience.
• Scott Walters is just hell-bent on stirring up trouble. With fellow blogger Tom McLoughlin, he’s started yet another blog with a funny acronym, this one called TACT (Theatre Arts Curriculum Transformation). It’s about reforming the broken system of professional training for the theater from the inside, and the Prof’s last two posts are particularly thought-provoking: one examines the geographical breakdown of those auditioning for slots in college theater programs in North Carolina, and the other is a somewhat radical proposal (he likes those) to tie theater professors’ incomes to their students’ subsequent financial success.
• Michael Rushton reports on some new research examining the relationship between choir singing and civic engagement (a topic explored somewhat controversially last year by Chorus America):
  

  In particular, he finds that choirs, through the frequency of rehearsals, and the active participation of members, seem to lead to more opportunities for civic engagement than groups that are expressly formed as politically- and service-oriented groups.

• Intriguing audience development strategy going down in Baltimore: Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony are welcoming amateur musicians for some face time with the starting lineup and charging audiences $10 a pop to see it.
• Look out, Mark Kramer is in the house at Intrepid Philanthropist. If you don’t know Kramer, he’s, uh, only one of the most famous thinkers (along with his Harvard Business School colleague, Michael Porter) in social innovation history [said in best Comic Book Guy voice]. Also this week, Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Vice President Kevin Bolduc is holding forth at the CEP Blog, focusing on qualitative assessment of foundations through grantee comments.
• All hail the new legal models for social entrepreneurship, L3C and B Corp…wait, now there’s an H Corporation too?
• Tim Kane of Growthology surveys leading economics bloggers (including, umm, himself) and finds that the folks who are paid to understand large-scale economic trends yet by and large failed to see the recession coming don’t agree on much, other than hating labor unions.
• Wow, this seems, uh…important: Marginal Revolution passes on word that researchers doing independent checks of 2000 Census data found significant errors in how the survey counted Americans aged 65 and over. And it seems the problem is not just a simple matter of correct and move on, either. This information has formed the backbone of countless studies, policy papers, and political analyses since it was published nearly a decade ago.
• Yeah, what this guy said:

Another tendency I’ve noticed in broader discussions about nonprofits and philanthropy, whether they’re happening online, at conferences, or in the classroom, is that the arts all too often get lost in the shadows. […] That’s why I’m really excited that GreatNonprofits has partnered with Guidestar and Intersection for the Arts to launch the 2010 Arts Appreciation Campaign. It seems the good folks at GreatNonprofits recognized that there weren’t enough arts organizations represented on the site through reviews, and is now specifically reaching out to the arts community to rectify the situation.

• If you’re in New England (or even if you’re not) and at all interested in creative economy issues, you should come to this Connecting New England’s Creative Communities shindig next month in my lovely temporary hometown of Providence, RI. I attended a meeting for this event this evening and there are some really great speakers lined up as well as interesting panel ideas. Plus, registration is a total bargain at $60. I’ll be attending and blogging the conference for Fractured Atlas, so if you show up please say hello!