• A lot of people are talking about the news that Detroit’s emergency fiscal manager is exploring whether the city-owned art on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts (which I visited for the first time just a few weeks ago) can be considered an asset in the event of a municipal bankruptcy. I will be shocked if anything like this actually happens, but in the meantime it’s provoking some rare discussion of deaccessioning in mainstream media space. See Tegan Kehoe’s recent piece on Createquity for more on the ethics and debate around deaccessioning.
• Wondering what to make of the IRS nonprofit oversight controversy? The Nonprofit Law Prof Blog has a good overview of commentary and analysis from lawyerly circles.
• A new paper by Roger Colinvaux examines the US tax deduction for charitable giving and comes to many of the same recommendations for reform as John Carnwath in his article on the subject for Createquity. Speaking of charitable giving deductions, countries in Europe that have similar legislation are finding that they have to extend the benefits to other member nations of the European Union, whether they want to or not.
• Next City takes a look at the record when it comes to the subsidies cities pay to Bass Pro retail stores (over $500 million to date!) in hopes that they will generate jobs. (It’s not good.) I’m kind of mystified as to why there isn’t more of this kind of before-and-after analysis of these kinds of policy interventions – it seems like rather fertile ground.
• The NEA Art Works blog has a nice interview with Maryland governor Martin O’Malley.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Denise Montgomery, the new executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
• Joanna Woronkowicz is moving on from the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts to become an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Public Affairs working under Michael Rushton, and offers a farewell post in which she touts the idea of an interdisciplinary research cabal focusing on cultural policy.

BIG IDEAS

• Dallas is making a big play to put itself on the world cultural map. Led by Maxwell Anderson, who is the head of both the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Arts District, Dallas officials have launched a new network of “global” cultural districts to be managed by Adrian Ellis of AEA Consulting, assembling an advisory board including representation from New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hong Kong…and lots and lots of people from Dallas.
• Congratulations to Mediuum, a digital marketplace for visual art, which has won the first Creative Arts Competition prize as part of MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for student entrepreneurs. The Creative Arts Competition is awarded for the “innovative use of the arts as a core component of business plans.” (h/t Joe Patti)
• Asking funders to be less insular may be a familiar refrain, but no one can articulate the case quite like Arlene Goldbard, and she does so again in a recent doozy of an essay. Meanwhile, Linda Essig has a review of Arlene’s new book, The Culture of Possibility.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• “So, yes, it’s party time in the world of social impact investing.  But it’s a potluck my friends, and you’d better know what dish [you’re] bringing.” Michael Hickey talks turkey about money you have to pay back.
• Corporate giving is back on the rise, according to a new report from the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy.
• The President/CEO of the New York State Health Foundation offers some perspectives on risk taking at the foundation level.
• Real estate in Detroit is so cheap, it only takes $142,000 to save a historic rock venue from being auctioned and get one of its theaters named after you.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Good rule of thumb for aspiring grad students (especially in the humanities): the more specialized your degree, the more useless it is. Sadly, specialization seems to be the prevailing trend. The University of Nottingham is blazing the trail of single-genre music studies with a two-year course in heavy metal studies. By the way, a study from 2004 indicates a negative correlation between a graduate degree and earnings for jazz players.
• Back when it was super popular, I though Myspace would be an incredible data source for researchers on the music industry. Myspace has largely fallen by the wayside in that regard, but two sociologists from the University of Chicago managed to grab a complete dataset back in 2007 and it’s now showing up in Richard Florida’s blogs.
• According to a new study, people of color tend not to move as much as whites and to stay close to home when they do, which perpetuates spatial inequality.
• A new meta-analysis of studies of art therapy on cancer patients indicates that “the benefits tied to creative arts therapies were small, but similar to those of other complementary techniques such as yoga and acupuncture.” And another study says don’t trust those correlations between music education and SAT scores – smarter students are more likely to take music classes, but that doesn’t mean music classes make you smarter.
• The study of diversity in Bay Area theater that Clayton Lord has been blogging about for a while is finally out; an abbreviated version of the executive summary is here. Five-word version: all the stereotypes are true.
• Sentences to ponder: “Voting is just another survey without individual consequence.”
• First there was Dance Your Ph.D., and now we have JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments – “the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing scientific research in a video format.” ArtScience ascendant!

• 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.”

Since I didn’t write out the speech in advance, I don’t have a transcript for it. However, below is a reconstruction of the new material from my notes, so you can get a taste for it if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing right now. (You’ll notice I make a number of generalizations in the speech about the ways in which arts practitioners interact with research. These are based on observation and personal experience, and are best understood as my working hypotheses.)

*

[starting at 26:55]

Why is this integration between data and strategy important? Because research is only valuable insofar as it influences decisions. This is why logic models are awesome – they are a visual depiction of strategy. And there is no such thing as strategy without cause and effect. Think about that for a second. Our lives can be understood as a set of circumstances and decisions. We make decisions to try to improve our circumstances, and sometimes the circumstances of those around us. Every decision you make is based on a prediction, whether explicitly articulated or not, about the results of that decision. Every decision, therefore, carries with it some degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty can be expressed another way: as an assumption about the way the world works and the context in which your decision is being made. These assumptions are distinguished from known facts.

If you can reduce the uncertainty associated with your assumptions, the chances that you will make the right decision will increase. So, how do you reduce that uncertainty? Through research, of course! Studying what has happened in the past can inform what is likely to happen in the future. Studying what has happened in other contexts can inform what is likely to happen in your context. And studying what is happening now can tell you whether your assumptions seem spot on or off by a mile. Alas, research and practice in our field are frequently disconnected in problematic ways. Six issues are preventing us from reaching our potential.

Issue #1: Capacity

Supply and demand apply as much to research as it does to artists. There are far more studies out there than a normal arts professional can possibly fully process. I wish I could tell you how many research reports are published in the arts each year, but nobody knows! To establish a lower bound, I went back over last year’s [2011] “around the horn” posts, which report new research studies that I hear about. I counted at least 41 relevant arts-research-related publications – a tiny fraction, I’m sure, of total output. To make matters worse, research reports are long, and arts professionals are busy. For the Createquity Writing Fellowship program, participants are required to analyze a work of arts research for the Createquity Arts Policy Library. I collect data on how long it takes to do this, and consistently, it requires 30-80 hours to research, analyze and write just one piece! Multiply this by the number of new studies each year, and you can start to see the magnitude of the problem.

Issue #2: Dissemination

Which research reports is an arts practitioner likely to even know about? Certainly not all of them, because there is almost no meaningful connection between the academic research infrastructure and the professional arts ecosystem. Lots of research relevant to the arts is published in academic journals each year, but unless the faculty member was commissioned to do their work by a foundation, we never hear about it. Academic papers are typically behind a pay firewall, and most arts organizations don’t have journal subscriptions. To give an example, after I wrote about Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, Florida pointed me to a study in two parts by two Dutch researchers. It’s one of the best resources I’ve come across for creative class theory, but I’ve never heard anyone even mention either study other than him and me.

Issue #3: Interpretation

Research reports inevitably reflect the researcher’s voice and agenda. This is especially true of executive summaries and press releases, which is often all anyone “reads” of research “reports.” Probably the most common agenda, of course, is to convey that the researcher knows what he/she is talking about. Another common agenda is to ensure repeat business from, or at least a continuing relationship with, the client who commissioned the study. The reality, however, is that research varies widely in quality. There’s no certification process; anyone can call themselves a researcher. But even highly respected professionals can make mistakes, pursue questionable methods, or overlook obvious holes in their logic. And, in my experience, the reality of any given research effort is usually nuanced – some aspects of it are much more valuable than others. Unfortunately, many arts professionals lack expertise to properly evaluate research reports, not having had even basic statistics training.

Issue #4: Objectivity

Research is about uncovering the truth, but sometimes people don’t want to know the truth. Advocacy goals often precede research. How many times have you heard somebody say a version of the following: “We need research to back this up”? That statement suggests a kind of research study that we see all too often: one that is conducted to affirm decisions that have already been made. By contrast, when we create a logic model, we start with the end first: we identify what we are trying to achieve and only then determine the activities necessary to achieve it.

Here are a bunch of bad, but common reasons to do a research project:

• To prove your own value.
• To increase your organization’s prestige.
• To advance an ideological agenda.
• To provide political cover for a decision.

There is only one good reason to do research, and that is to try to find out something you didn’t know before.

Issue #5: Fragmentation

The worst part of the problem I just described is that it drives what research gets done – and what doesn’t get done. There is no common research agenda adopted by the entire field, which is a shame, because collective knowledge is pretty much the definition of a public good: if I increase my own knowledge, it’s very easy for me to increase your knowledge too. The practical consequences of this fragmentation are severe. It results in a concentration of research using readily available data sources (ignoring the fact that the creation of new data sources may be more valuable). It results in a concentration of research in geographies and communities that can afford it, because people don’t often pay for research that’s not about them. And it results in a concentration of research serving narrow interests: discipline-specific, organization-specific, methodology-specific. My biggest pet peeve is that research is almost never intentionally replicated – everybody’s reinventing the wheel, studying the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. A great example of a research study crying out for replication is the Arts Ripple Effect report, which I talked about earlier. The results of that study are now guiding the distribution of millions of dollars in annual arts funding. Are those results universal, or unique to the Greater Cincinnati region? We have no way to know.

Issue #6: Allocating resources

Everyone knows there’s been a trend in recent years towards more and more data collection at the level of the organization or artist. Organizations, especially small ones, complain all the time about being expected to do audience surveys, submit onerous paperwork, and so forth. And you know what, I agree with them! You might be surprised to hear me say that, but when you’re talking about organizations that have small budgets, no expertise to do this kind of work, and the funder who is requesting the information is not providing any assistance to get it…just take a risk! You make a small grant that goes bad, so what? You’re out a few thousand dollars. The sun will rise tomorrow.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I participated in a grant panel recently. I enjoyed the experience, and am glad I did it, but there’s one aspect of the experience that is relevant here. There were seven panelists, and we were all from out of town. Each of us spent, I’d say, roughly 40 hours reviewing applications in advance of the panel itself. Then we all got together for two full days in person to review these grants some more and talk about them and score them. We did this for 64 applications for up to $5,000 each, and in the end, 92% 94% were funded.

So consider this as a research exercise. The decision is who to give grants to, and how much. The data is the grant applications. The researchers are the review panel. What uncertainty is being reduced by this process? How much worse would the outcome have been if we’d just taken all the organizations, put them into Excel, run a random number generator, and distributed the dollars randomly up to $5,000 per organization? And I’m not saying this to make fun of this particular organization or single them out, because honestly it’s not uncommon to take this kind of approach to small-scale grantmaking. And yet if you compare it to ArtPlace’s first round of grants, theoretically they had thousands of projects to choose from, and they gave grants up to $1 million for creative placemaking projects – but there was no [open] review process; they just chose organizations to give grants to. So there’s a bit of a mismatch in the strategies we use to decide how to allocate resources.

There’s a concept called “expected value of information” described in a wonderful book called How to Measure Anything, by Douglas W. Hubbard. It’s a way of taking into account how much information matters to your decision-making process. In the book, Hubbard shares a couple of specific findings from his work as a consultant. He found that most variables have an information value of zero; in other words, we can study them all we want, but whatever the truth is is not going to change what we do, because they don’t matter enough in the grand scheme of things. And he also found that the things that matter the most, the kinds of things that really would change our decisions, often aren’t studied, because they’re perceived as too difficult to measure. So we need to ask ourselves how new information would actually change the decisions we make.

There is so much untapped potential in arts research. But it remains untapped because of all the issues described above. So what can we do about it?

First, we need a major field-building effort for arts research. Connecting researchers with each other through a virtual network/community of practice would help a lot. So would a centralized clearinghouse where all research can live, even if it’s behind a copyright firewall. The good news is that the National Endowment for the Arts has already been making some moves in this direction. The Endowment published a monograph a couple of months ago called “How Art Works,” the major focus of which was a so-called “system map” for the arts. But the document also had a pretty detailed research agenda for the NEA, not for the entire field, that lays out what the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis is going to do over the next five years, and two of the items mentioned are exactly the two things I just talked about: a virtual research network and a centralized clearinghouse for arts research.

This new field that we’re building should be guided by a national research agenda that is collaboratively generated and directly tied to decisions of consequence. The missing piece from the research agenda in “How Art Works” is the tie to actual decisions. Instead it has categories, like cultural participation, and research projects can be sorted under those buckets. But it’s not enough for research to simply be about something – research should serve some purpose. What do we actually need to know in order to do our jobs better?

We should be asking researchers to spend less time generating new research and more time critically evaluating other people’s research. We need to generate lots more discussion about the research that is already produced. That’s the only way it’s going to enter the public consciousness. Each time we fail to do that, we are missing out on opportunities to increase knowledge. It will also raise our collective standards for research if we are engaging in a healthy debate about it. But realistically, in order for this to happen, field incentives are going to have to change – analyzing existing research will need to be seen as equally prestigious and worthy of funding as creating a new study. Of course, I would prefer if people are not evaluating the work of their direct competitors – but I’ll take what I can get at this point!

Every research effort should take into account the expected value of the information it will produce. Consider the risk involved in various types of grants made. What are you trying to achieve by giving out lots of small grants, if that’s what you’re doing? Maybe measure the effectiveness of the overall strategy instead of the success or failure of each grant. This is getting into hypothesis territory, but based on what I’ve seen so far I would guess that research on grant strategy is woefully underfunded, while research on the effectiveness or potential of specific grants is probably overfunded. We probably worry more than we need to about individual grants, but we don’t worry as much as we should about whether the ways in which we’re making decisions about which grants to support are the right ways to do that.

Finally, we should be open-sourcing research and working as a team. I’m talking about sharing not just finished products and final reports, but plans, data, methodologies as well. I’m talking about seeking multiple uses and potential partners at every point for the work we’re doing. This would make our work more effective by allowing us to leverage each other’s strengths – we’re not all experts at everything, after all! And it would cut down on duplicated effort and free up expensive people’s time to do work that moves the field forward.

I thank everyone for their time, and I’d love to take any questions or comments on these thoughts about the state of our research field.

I’m not sure if Florida expected to get away with re-releasing his book without provoking yet another firestorm, but if that was the plan, it hasn’t exactly worked out. The onslaught started with a piece penned by Frank Bures for a new magazine called Thirty Two based in Minneapolis called “The Fall of the Creative Class.” A one-time Florida acolyte, Bures tells of how he became disenchanted with creative class theory via a bad experience living in Madison, Wisconsin, supposedly a creative hub. His direct attack (which is by no means the first of its ilk) scored a response from Florida, which of course just led to another broadside from Bures. In the meantime, despite some positive press, most of the reaction I’ve seen has ranged from catty to apoplectic. Next American City – ironically, the outlet that published Florida’s first defense piece, “Revenge of the Squelchers,” way back in 2004 – has run two different commentaries from Sean Andrew Chen that are mostly skeptical in tone. And then there’s this festival of bile from The Baffler’s Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, which, while mostly sparing Florida by name, attacks the very idea of the arts as an economic engine with ferocity.

In the circles I travel in, it’s become as fashionable to pick on Richard Florida as the oft-derided hipsters with which his “creative class” is sometimes associated. In one sense you can’t blame them: this is a guy who gained an enormous amount of notoriety from scholarship with some obvious flaws. It’s hard to look at the attention his ideas commanded among the mayors and foundations of the country over the past decade, and the cushy lifestyle he now enjoys, and not feel a bit of righteous envy. I get it.

But on the other hand, I sometimes wonder if Florida’s detractors have really read his books – like really read them, front to back. They often accuse him of saying things he didn’t say, or omitting things he talks about at length (like income inequality, which occupied much of a chapter in the original Rise of the Creative Class). Although Bures’s rebuttal to Florida draws more blood, the conceit of his original article seems to be that the author’s own disappointing experience in one “creative class” city and subsequent happiness in another “creative class” city are somehow proof that creative class theory is wrong. Bures also seems to imply, via his invoking of Mel Gray’s study on arts spending in 15 cities, that Florida is explicitly an advocate for public funding of the arts, which he’s never really been (as much as arts advocates have liked to pretend he is).

My view has been that Florida is on to something from a qualitative standpoint, but that his particular way of describing it in research terms – the “3T’s” of Technology, Talent, and Tolerance, as measured at the metropolitan level rather than that of individual neighborhoods – is a limited instrument that prevents him from getting the robust results he’s looking for. As much shadenfreude as we might get from seeing a giant fall back to earth, it’s problematic when the methodological quirks of Florida’s particular approach are used to damn the entire concept of the arts as an economic driver, as we see in Frank’s article. Throughout, Frank seems to spend most of his time arguing against a straw man, the notion that people who are interested in creative class theory or creative placemaking or the economic development potential of the arts believe that these things  are the singular answer to turning around the economy in any community. Frank writes of the “millions” spent on promoting vibrancy in our nation’s cities and suggests that they would be better spent on things like “bridges, railroads, highways,” regulating the financial system, or, my favorite, universal health care. I’m sorry, but I seem to have missed the press release that announced state and local governments were spending more on street festivals and public art than re-routing the interstate or Medicaid. When the “millions” spent on making our cities a little more interesting, attractive, and fun approaches anything like the trillions spent on these other things, we can talk about misallocation of resources, mmkay?

I don’t think many people would argue, not even Richard Florida, that the arts are some kind of silver bullet that can solve all of a community’s problems. But that’s a very different thing than saying that the arts do have the potential to add value economically to communities, that they do form part of the answer to revitalization and shouldn’t be ignored or sidelined like they usually are. I’m still waiting for the conversation to go where it needs to go but hasn’t yet: how can the arts be the irreplaceable catalyst in certain, specific situations in certain kinds of cities? The broad brush with which we insist on painting the picture keeps on covering over its most important details.

(Update: Richard Layman has more.)

• Narric Rome tells us about where the arts fall in the federal government’s new tourism strategy.
• After threatening to cap the tax deduction available to donors as a means of raising revenue, the British government has abandoned the plan.

• Barely two years after changing things up last time, the Kresge Foundation has announced a further evolution of its arts grantmaking. Now, all of its considerable funding will be concentrated under the umbrella of “creative placemaking.”
• Kickstarter may be the big name when it comes to crowdfunding in the arts, but its $99 million in pledges last year is only a small fraction of the $1.5 billion crowdfunding platforms raised across all causes worldwide in 2011. And this interesting article argues that crowdfunding (the investing kind, not the donating kind) could create unaccustomed competition for venture capitalists. One observer notes that if every American set aside an average of 1% of their liquid net worth to invest in new ventures, the available capital for entrepreneurs would jump by a factor of 10.
• McKinsey & Co. has published a white paper on social impact bonds, which are currently being piloted in the United Kingdom.
• Is investing in art an asset class? Not yet, according to Felix Salmon, who picks apart a new “index” of artists’ market value put together by Artnet. It seems to me that the art market is not so different from the real estate market, and that investing in artists is rather like investing in a particular home builder. To make art a real asset class, someone would need to build the equivalent of real estate investment trusts (REITs) that buy up particular artworks and then sell shares in the collection. It would be an interesting experiment, no doubt.
• The Council on Foundations conference, an event that’s only open to grantmaking institutions, is becoming more transparent, with resources from the event becoming available online. One such resource is this report from Katherine Miller.
• The Cultural Data Project and Nonprofit Finance Fund are teaming up to offer a new Financial Health Analysis tool to arts nonprofits. When you submit your financials to CDP through the normal process, you’ll be presented with a report detailing your organization’s financial strengths and weaknesses. Congrats to Kim Cook and the other folks at NFF and CDP for what looks to be a useful resource.

• Next American City’s Diana Lind reports from the CEOs for Cities conference, hosted by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
  

  It’s a nice unfiltered window into how the urban planning community views/engages with the arts: [T]here was…no one at all who left the reception on the lobby floor to explore the upper galleries (which were free to the public, by the way). It was just me and three security guards whose boredom was palpable….I went back downstairs where people drank beer and talked about how to make a better city. Somehow that disconnect, right there in the space, seemed like a perfect metaphor. Hundreds of people came to a contemporary art museum to talk about engaging the city’s art scene but missed all the art.

• FSG (the originators of the “Collective Impact” concept) explains how collective impact is like a symphony orchestra:
  

  “It is Sunday afternoon and the musicians have all convened to play a symphony. Indeed, they’ve even agreed to play a Beethoven symphony. But now imagine the following scenario: they have not actually agreed to which Beethoven symphony. None of them have any sheet music. And there is no conductor! This is the setting of isolated impact: wonderful individual efforts that don’t actually add up to a cohesive whole. A lot of noise, but no symphony…”

• The NEA has announced its first-ever round of research grants.
• Don’t miss this sponsored supplement to the summer 2012 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, featuring reflections on evaluation and strategic philanthropy from five major foundations. And Grantmakers for Effective Organizations has just published a manual called “Four Essentials for Evaluation,” one of the readers for which was Jerome Vielman of Houston Arts Alliance.
• Surprise, surprise: self-publishing is a winner-take-all market too: “a survey of 1,007 self-published writers…found that while a small percentage of authors were bringing in sums of $100,000-plus in 2011, average earnings were just $10,000 a year. This amount, however, is significantly skewed by the top earners, with less than 10% of self-publishing authors earning about 75% of the reported revenue and half of writers earning less than $500.”
• We’ve had a strong sense for a while that walkable neighborhoods are more valuable, but just how much more valuable? A new study from the Brookings Institution looking at the DC area puts the price premium at up to $1200 per month. This will be something important to take into consideration when thinking about research studying the effects of creative placemaking: how can we disentangle the contribution of arts amenities when those amenities tend to cluster in areas with lots of other things that people find valuable as well?
• Richard Florida offers a defense of his economic theories against a critique of him on the Forbes website, which serves double-duty as his latest thinking on the composition of creative cities. At the end, he advocates for a both/and approach, encompassing investments in amenities with business-friendly practices. I’m not sure I buy that that’s “been [his] message all along,” but it does make sense – after all, while the “coolness” of a city’s reputation certainly factors in to many people’s relocation decisions, jobs do too.
• What would it mean to quantify the potential value-add to society of a third grade teacher?

• EMCArts’s Director: Activating Innovation position, which we first posted about in March, is open again. Details here.

Cool Projects

• You simply MUST watch the entirety of this video produced by the fine citizens of Grand Rapids. Organized after an article published on Newsweek’s website named Grand Rapids one of “America’s Top 10 Dying Cities,” the world-record-setting “LipDub” – lip sync video – proves GR’s vitality in inspiring fashion. Theresa Cameron has more of the story over at ARTSBlog.
• Hartford’s iQuilt creative placemaking initiative has received a whopping $400,000 grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
• Andrew Taylor reports on the progress of Panera Bread’s experiment in pay-what-you-can pricing. Most customers are paying the retail price for the food, and only about 20% are taking advantage of the opportunity to pay less than what they would pay for the exact same food elsewhere. It’s an interesting lesson for economists on how social norms or pressures may influence behavior towards arbitrage opportunities. I also can’t help but wonder how much the apparent success of the experiment is made possible by the locations of the stores, which are in Clayton, MO; Dearborn, MI; and the Hollywood district of Portland, OR. None of those cities are poor, they have similar overall demographics (with the exception of the large Arab-American population in Dearborn), and Clayton is a wealthy suburb of St. Louis.
• TCG’s “What If?” series of posts has been well worth reading. Here’s one recent example, an excellent think piece on an organizational model for a group of small artist collectives. Of course, as Michael Kaiser points out, mergers are never easy.

In the Tank

• The same weekend that the Kansas Arts Commission went under, Florida’s governor vetoed state funding for public broadcasting. Meanwhile, Mid-America Arts Alliance director Mary Kennedy McCabe weighs in on Kansas.
• The IRS has announced that 275,000 nonprofits have officially lost their tax-exempt status today, due to a failure to file required forms for three years in a row. This officially reduces the number of nonprofits in this country by 17%. View the full list here, and check to see if any arts organizations in your community have been affected.
• Under continued financial pressure, including a $5 million current-year deficit, NYC Opera is leaving Lincoln Center for a new home – what home that is, no one knows. It’s also laying off 11 employees, and rumor has it that the budget will be reduced next year to $11 million.
• NYCO is leaving Lincoln Center just two years after a $107 million renovation to the theater in which it performs – a renovation that resulted in its being renamed the David H. Koch Theater. Yes, this is the same David H. Koch whose conservative advocacy group supported Governor Sam Brownback’s vendetta against the Kansas Arts Commission.
• This quote from one of the many stories about the NYCO’s recent challenges well illustrates the depressing conflict between commercial and aesthetic incentives at major institutions (emphasis mine):
  

  The [performers’ and stage managers’ union] delegates said they were proud to be part of the company. “Yet we are confused and troubled by the way management is programming the seasons,” they added, calling for productions of more familiar operas, like “Carmen,” “Madama Butterfly,” “La Bohème” and “La Traviata.” “George Steel’s artistic vision may be brilliant,” the union officials said, referring to the current general manager and artistic director, “but it doesn’t fill the seats.”

• NYCO is not the only company in New York suddenly looking for a home. After losing its bid to take over the Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Arts at St. Ann’s is desperately seeking shelter.
• The Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas is going on hiatus.
• Bye bye Florida Stage.
• Tony Kushner, of all people, reports that he doesn’t make his living as a playwright.

Orchestra R/Evolution Revisited

• Sarah Lutman reports from the League of American Orchestras conference.
• A new business model: investing in musical instruments.
• The Detroit Symphony visits the suburbs. And its President fails to take a pay cut.
• Very good thoughts on new music programming from Sam Bergman.

Overseas/North Country Report

• As much as we like to complain about our arts advocacy in the US, other countries haven’t figured it out either. You’ll notice some strikingly familiar language in this rant from England.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber has established a new arts funding program through his foundation. Good thing, since it looks like the city of London is cutting back on its culture funding.
• The Dutch government might make the renowned Netherlands Dans Theater perform in the Dutch suburbs rather than overseas.
• Rio de Janeiro doubles its culture budget.
• Ben Eltham reports on support for the arts in the 2011 federal budget in Australia.
• Shannon Litzenberger reports on capitalization discussions from a Canadian perspective.

Data Tells a Story

• Richard Florida investigates the relationship between corporate business taxes and economic competitiveness at the state level, and finds that there isn’t one. Remember, one of Florida’s main arguments in The Rise of the Creative Class was that economic development strategies aimed at drawing companies through lower taxes don’t work anymore. This analysis provides pretty compelling evidence that he’s right. [A note: I’ve criticized these kinds of cross-sectional comparisons in the past because they are not very good at proving causal relationships. But the topic at hand is a better fit for this method, since what’s being found is actually a lack of a relationship.]
• The UK is embarking on a national effort to measure happiness.
• Analyzing Google’s vast storehouse of published data.
• Amanda Alef looks at how arts majors fare financially relative to others.
• Looking at a barter economy experiment in the arts.

Give it Away, Give it Away Now

• On the heels of the Giving Pledge, Gates, Buffet & company are now spearheading a Hollywood Pledge. And the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has signed up 60 foundations for the “Foundation Pledge” (giving focused on underserved communities).
• These five simple questions represent a really great rubric for self-evaluation on the cheap.
• Adam Huttler offers a two–part analysis of what the L3C means for the arts.

Etc.

• The Future of Music Coalition joins a petition to stop the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
• Cool story featuring interviews of NYC buskers trying out for the great Music Under New York program.

Big News

• The Nonprofit Finance Fund’s founder and CEO, Clara Miller, will be the new head of the F. B. Heron Foundation, one of the pioneers of using a foundation’s endowment investments for mission-related purposes.
• What would the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange be without Liz Lerman? Just the Dance Exchange, apparently.
• Lois Weisberg, longtime head of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, is out amid that agency’s continuing shakeup. Read an interview with her about it here.
• The Washington National Opera and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will merge. (h/t Jonas)

Big Intrigue

• Has the Pepsi Refresh contest been tainted by voters-for-hire from India for the past six to nine months? (Cf. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk being used for spam.)
• Thanks to a Fellowship applicant, I just discovered this year-old, incredibly detailed (and critical) examination of the Richard Florida phenomenon from the perspective of cities who paid for his advice over the past decade. The more I learn, the more I think of RF as a kind of complex and fascinating Rorschach test, someone who reveals more about ourselves by our reactions to him than by anything he says or writes. Hear a recent interview with him by Steve Dahlberg and Mary Alice Long.
• I’m starting to get increasingly freaked out about internet security, and this news that a researcher has developed wifi password hacking software using Amazon Web Services doesn’t help. Says the poster: “Cloud computing makes it easier for hackers to take advantage of weak security networks. There will be some huge and successful attacks this year. The level of preparedness is just not high enough to expect anything else except for some very high profile break-ins.” Uh oh.
• More state arts councils in states run by Republican governors are in trouble. Now it’s Kansas that may be the first to see its arts commission go. Janet Brown, as always, offers wisdom on the role and value of state arts agencies.

Big Projects

• Behold the British versions of Kickstarter and Indiegogo. While we’re on the subject of crowdfunding, Kickstarter’s “best of 2010” list is apparently “super inspiring,” and Brian Newman writes about a really-cool-sounding, Kickstarter-supported restaurant-cum-art-project called What Happens When.
• Awesome map of spoken dialects across North America (via CultureFuture).

Big Data

• The new National Arts Index has been unveiled by Americans for the Arts. You’ll hear a lot about the topline number (97.7, supposedly a 12-year low), but I feel the NAI’s real value is as a compendium for yearly data on 81 separate indicators in one place. I’ll be writing more on this later.
• More Richard Florida: a study on beauty and community satisfaction; the geography of gun deaths. (Curious finding in the latter: McCain vote share was the single variable associated most with gun deaths at the statewide level, more so than poverty, drug use, or possession of guns.)
• Speaking of beauty, here’s Christian Rudder with another stellar stat-porn post on internet dating, this time on female attractiveness and male attention. Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok responds.
• From Helicon Collaborative, a snapshot of arts funding in California. (Also see item at the end of this post.)
• Technology in the Arts surveys tech adoption and implementation among arts organizations.
• In a TEDx talk, Charles Limb describes two neuroscience studies he’s conducted using MRIs of jazz musicians and freestyle rappers improvising.
• Courtesy the Center for Effective Philanthropy, grantees report on their perceptions of foundation evaluation and reporting practices.
• The good news: a majority of Americans oppose cutting government funding for “the arts and sciences” (thanks for the help there, Gallup!). The bad news: Americans are more enthusiastic about cutting arts and science funding than all but one other category the poll asked about.

Big Ideas

• Amid all the hubbub about “emerging” this and that, Michael Kaiser stands up for the old farts. And so does Dan Pallotta (though in his case it’s because he’s about to become one).
• More on the grad school debt racket, this time focusing on law schools. “Solving the J.D. overabundance problem, according to Professor Henderson, will have to involve one very drastic measure: a bunch of lower-tier law schools will need to close.” Gabriel Rossman explains the strong incentives professors and institutions have to feed the unrealistic dreams of their graduate students. Meanwhile, Rosetta Thurman explains why you may not need to go to grad school to accomplish what you’re looking to do.
• Kyle MacMillan on how orchestras need to change in the 21st century, via David H. Thomas. Speaking of David H. and new orchestra practices, here he is, a professional orchestral clarinetist mind you, coming out and saying that he’d actually prefer to see an HD broadcast of a great orchestra rather than a live, local orchestral performance in person. Wow.
• And while we’re on the subject of orchestras, check out the news that Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson will lead the Brooklyn Philharmonic. For those of you who are not new music nerds, know that this represents a very radical hire by the struggling Brooklyn Phil. If it pays off, orchestral music may never be quite the same. (And if it doesn’t, I’d be pretty worried about what’s going to happen to orchestras.) No pressure, Alan.
• Nina Simon on Paul Light on innovation. Great read.
• How’s this for attracting new audiences? Playwrights Horizons is offering babysitting services to theater attendees. Worth a shot, I guess.
• Ciara Pressler has a very deep and provocative post at the Fractured Atlas blog on how we are all marketers. I would go even further than her examples: I think that potentially every action one takes professionally (and, arguably, personally) has repercussions for what one might call “reputation management.” The way in which we manifest ourselves to others both publicly and privately is always, ultimately, marketing, whether we choose to think of it as such or not.
• Amelia Northrup rounds up some arts technology trends to watch in 2011.
• At White Courtesy Telephone, Albert Ruesga offers 24 “theses” about foundations. And if Sean Stannard-Stockton tells me I should read this blog, I’m a-gonna read it.
• Are liberals just predisposed to compromise more than conservatives? And does that give conservatives a lasting competitive advantage?

Big Opportunity

• The California Arts Council is looking for a new director.

• A while back, I pointed folks to Scarlett Swerdlow’s suggestion that the arts community get involved in non-arts advocacy in order to forge alliances with key partners in other sectors. Well, here’s an opportunity to do just that: the Livable Communities Act, which would grant $4 billion to communities for comprehensive planning, faces an uncertain future according to Next American City…and if that money did go forward, there’s a good chance some of it might find its way to the arts.
• Richard Florida on cities with the highest growth in college degrees per square mile over the past decade.
• And yes, it’s true: everyone wants to live in a special place.

On the Chopping Block

• The Honolulu Symphony: liquidated, joining the still-small ranks of high-profile nonprofits felled by the recession. A basket case apparently, but still, the death of an orchestra is no small thing.
• The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, which has lost 29 employees since October. (via GIA News)
• The Washington State Arts Commission: Governor Christine Gregoire has proposed elimination of the state arts agency as its own entity and reducing state funding of the arts to a bare-bones $250,000. Looks like we’ll have yet another “save the arts!” campaign on our hands this year.
• The Arts Council of Northern Ireland will see its appropriation decline by £4.2 million over the next four years.
• Booooo! NYC Transit is ditching the Train of Thought program (successor to Poetry in Motion) in favor of ads touting service improvements, because there’s “not enough space” for both.

Back from the Dead

• Michael Rushton’s fantabulous Arts Admin blog. Thank goodness! Now don’t you run off and leave us again, y’hear?
• The Local Community Radio Act finally passed Congress after 10 years of advocacy work by Future of Music Coalition. Mazel tov!

End-of-Year Reminiscences and Prognostications

• Philanthropy futurist Lucy Bernholz offers 10 predictions for the next decade.
• Tim Berners-Lee (the founder of the World Wide Web) claims that data analysis is the future of journalism. I can’t disagree…particularly since I believe that stories and data are two names for the same thing.
• TCG’s Gus Schulenberg provides a helpful wrap-up of several studies, reports, and articles examining online social engagement in the context of theater or beyond.
• Henry Peyrebrune, guest writing at Adaptistration, shares a brief history of orchestra funding in the United States.
• Jim Undercofler offers 10 “work items” for 2011 for the field on his blog, State of the Art. Here’s the first.
• Rosetta Thurman wonders if we’ll see a new generation of nonprofit organizations in 2011 and provides summaries of two publications and resources on the subject.
• Assets for Artists hilariously recaps the top 10 arts stories you probably didn’t miss in 2010.

New Research & Analysis

• Check out this cool new research report from WolfBrown, Helicon Collaborative, and the East Bay Community and San Francisco Foundations on the motivations of arts donors. Lots of good stuff in the summary, but I was particularly struck by this tidbit:
  

  In comparison to donors to mid-size and large cultural institutions, donors to artists and artists’ projects are more likely to be:

  • Artists themselves (professional or amateur)
  • Young adults or mid-life (18-54), without children, and of diverse cultural backgrounds
  • Interested in social justice and environmentalism
  • Interested in diversity of cultures and points of view
  • Giving less than $5,000 annually to all charitable causes
  • Interested in supporting small projects rather than sustaining institutions

• Here was a useful rainy day project from the Clyde Fitch Report: a rundown of the social media presence of the 56 members of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. More like this please!

‘Twas the Season of Flashmobs

• So, apparently the Thing To Do now if you’re an arts organization is to organize a “spontaneous” bursting into song or dance at a local mall or other public place in close proximity to Christmas. Marcia Adair (aka the Ominicient Mussel) did the yeoman’s work of gathering a bunch of them into one place over at Culture Monster.
• One of said flashmob performances ended up garnering 25.7 million views on YouTube! (update: now up to 29.2 million!)
• And in one case, the secret got out too soon, forcing the closure of an entire mall! (more video candy in the post)

Etc.

• GreatNonprofits is recapping their Arts Appreciation campaign to rate nonprofits in the arts and culture arena. Feel free to hand out some stars to the organizations that you appreciated most in 2010. (via Barry’s Blog)
• Beth Kanter engaged in a pretty badass campaign to get Apple to change its policy regarding charitable donations via the iPhone. She teased the company for weeks with big photos of Android phones on her blog and managed to get a New York Times story out of it. Apple appears to be standing firm, however.
• Does knowledge capital depreciate? Interesting concept from Marginal Revolution.
• Alastair Macaulay revels in the glory of Nutcrackers around the nation. Now if only such a broadly shared experience across communities could be possible with a living artist’s work…

News and announcements

• In what is undoubtedly the highest-profile and most unusual merger of arts organizations since the Great Recession hit, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theatre Workshop will join forces into a new entity known as New York Live Arts. The new organization will be led by a triumvirate of executives from the existing firms.
• A National Creativity Network has launched out of the Creativity World Forum in, of all places, Oklahoma City, with TED talker Sir Ken Robinson as founding chair. Not clear if there’s any funding for it as yet, but the list of participants is pretty interesting.
• The LA Philharmonic will soon be joining the Met Opera on movie screens around the country.

Readings and research

• The NEA’s research department has released a trio of documents of relevance to its initiatives and focus on “creative placemaking.” The first is a white paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa that reviews literature on the role of the arts and creative industries in promoting livability and economic development outcomes in local communities; identifies common themes in successful efforts to use the arts to transform neighborhoods and cities; and presents 15 in-depth case studies to illustrate those themes in action. Here’s Markusen presenting the report at the recent National Council on the Arts meeting. The second is a set of notes from the agency’s convening this past June on defining metrics for livability. And finally, the Endowment has published a research report examining the unique role of outdoor arts festivals in attracting nontraditional audiences and defining the character of a place. (The last one definitely features the best cover photo of any NEA research report past or present.)
• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies is working on an international database of cultural policy profiles. It will be based on the Council of Europe’s Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe, available here.
• UNESCO has been active lately. The international agency for culture has released a summary of its email discussion and symposium on the intriguing topic of “funding culture, managing the risk.” Not sure how new this is, but this is a pretty rad index of cultural industry mapping reports and studies organized by region of the world.
• Animating Democracy has a new research study out mapping the grantmaking landscape for the arts and social change. And AD’s co-founder, Barbara Shaffer Bacon, has written a lovely eulogy for the sadly defunct Community Arts Network, whose trove of resources on community arts is luckily still available in archive form here.
• Rebecca Novick has a very interesting article on the travails of midsize theater organizations in the Theatre Bay Area magazine.
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has published a wide-ranging report on the technology needs and usage patterns of the performing arts field, conducted by Callahan Consulting for the Arts.
• Melanie Beene, head of Community Initiatives, writes about how fiscal sponsorship is maturing as a field in the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader. (If you haven’t already discovered it, the GIA Reader is a great resource for arts policy and funding material, with freely available archives going back over 10 years.)
• Americans for the Arts has published the results of a 2009 survey of 554 self-identifying emerging leaders in the arts. The entire report is only available to AFTA members, but the executive summary as well as this blog post on the subject by the report’s author, Stephanie Evans, are open to the public.

Interviews and Conversations

• With Dennis Scholl, Vice President for Arts at the Knight Foundation, talking about the innovative Knight Arts Challenge in Philadelphia.
• With Edward Clapp, editor of the 20UNDER40 anthology, on Barry’s Blog.
• Between Robert Lynch, Fred Lazarus, and Edgar Arceneaux on the subject of the arts and community change in the current issue of Next American City.

Adventures in advocacy

• Is this idea so crazy it’s brilliant? Barry Hessenius argues that arts organizations should join local Chambers of Commerce en masse, thereby forcing the business community (and the Republican party) to pay attention. Key graph:
  

  There are some 10,000 nonprofit arts organizations in California. If 20% of those arts organizations were to join their local Chambers of Commerce (dues are modest and local chapters welcome arts organizations) and get involved on the statewide committees and move up the ranks to chair some of those efforts – thus moving up the ranks of the organization – in just a couple of years the arts could constitute a formidable bloc within the state Chamber – and in so doing we could begin to seriously impact the policies and positions the Chamber takes. If 40% of all the arts organization would join their local chambers, and work into postions of authority, we could virtually take over the whole structure by 2016.  That’s only five years from now.

• Leonard Jacobs passes along the news that NYS Arts, the main arts advocacy vehicle in the Empire State, is closing down.
• The CBC reports that some prominent artists and administrators in Canada are now backpedaling from an economically-focused arts advocacy strategy. What’s interesting about it is that Kevin Stolarick, who has worked with and for Richard Florida for over a decade, is quoted extensively in the article saying that framing the arts in terms of their economic impact has been a “trap.” Florida, of course, is the great popularizer of this line of thinking, although his focus is much wider than the nonprofit arts specifically.

And so on…

• Another wise post from Brigid Slipka. To paraphrase: if you want to increase high-impact giving, trying to convince the average donor to do their own research is a losing battle. Your audience, instead, should be the gatekeepers to givers: ministers, corporate giving managers (who organize employee donation drives to specific charities), and the like.
• Very good sentences: “when Americans insist on total liberty against external molestation, it motivates both good responses and bad ones.  It supports a libertarian desire for freedom against government abuse, but the same sentiments generate a lot of anti-liberal policies when it comes to immigration, foreign policy, torture, rendition, attitudes toward Muslims, executive power, and most generally treatment of “others.”  An insistence on zero molestation, zero risk, isn’t as pro-liberty as it appears in the isolated context of pat-downs.  It leads us to impose a lot of costs on others, usually without thinking much about their rights.” – Tyler Cowen @ Marginal Revolution
• Academics like to rag on Wikipedia, but a new pilot initiative will make updating and improving the quality of pages part of college students’ required coursework. The democratization of who gets to be an expert continues apace.
• Visualization fun with the budget here and here.
• Guy Yedwab asks, could art survive without alcohol?