The Thinker at the Detroit Institute of Arts – photo by Quick fix

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past twelve months. You can read the previous editions here: 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world. I am grateful to Createquity editorial consultant Daniel Reid for contributing the entry on the arts and the GDP.

This year provided us with a mix of hope and stress. While boasting its share of concrete triumphs and failures, such as the launch of several field-building initiatives and the very high-profile flaming out of the venerable New York City Opera, 2013 was most notable for providing us with markers along the path of longer-term trends. With the struggles of the Great Recession largely behind us, arts stakeholders increasingly turned their attention to non-financial matters, planning for the future and seeking to invest wisely. Yet the specter of fear and dysfunction in Washington, DC hung over the arts field to a degree not seen since at least the Bush years, sapping enthusiasm from even the most passionate of government idealists.

10. Changing of the guard at ArtPlace

As noted in last year’s top stories roundup, creative placemaking was cruising for a bruising in 2012. While a number of factors contributed to the backlash against the signature arts policy push of Rocco Landesman’s tenure as NEA Chairman, by many accounts, the brusque style of ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta didn’t help. Under her leadership, ArtPlace – a private-sector collaboration between 13 of the nation’s largest arts funders initiated by Landesman and the Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker – came under fire for failing to disclose its funders’ geographic restrictions, missing opportunities to thoughtfully measure creative placemaking’s impact, being cavalier about gentrification and other social justice considerations, and supporting a project that alienated the people it was trying to help. In the midst of all this, Coletta decamped for a VP position at the Knight Foundation in March. Her eventual replacement announced in December, following an interim stint by former William Penn Foundation president Jeremy Nowak, was the NEA’s Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, who had ingratiated himself with arts stakeholders across the country in his now-former position and earned widespread admiration in the process. Change is in the air at ArtPlace (the organization is moving with Bennett to New York, for one), and many eyes are watching the fledgling creative placemaking standard-bearer as we head into 2014.

9. City Opera bids farewell

Amidst near-death experiences far and wide, New York City Opera is the biggest and most famous U.S. arts institution yet to actually fail as a result of the Great Recession. The once-mighty company, which had visions of a $60 million annual budget as recently as 2008, had drastically scaled down its ambitions following a disastrous season during which it presented no full productions, lost its (brand new) general director, and managed to draw down or lose the majority of its endowment. By the time George Steel took over in 2009, most of the damage had been done, and City Opera could no longer afford its just-renovated home at Lincoln Center. A last-ditch effort to raise $7 million (including a first-of-its-kind-at-this-scale “save the opera” $1 million Kickstarter campaign) fell short, and the organization announced it was beginning bankruptcy proceedings in October.

8. Arts’ impact on GDP gets counted

Advocates at Americans for the Arts, the NEA, and elsewhere have spent years touting the arts’ economic impact, on the theory that legislators and executives will find this argument singularly compelling and respond by taking their fingers off the “defund” button. This year, their case got official recognition from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which calculates GDP. First, in July, the BEA revised its methodology for calculating GDP to include the money businesses spend to develop intellectual property, including artistic work like music and film; this added 3% to our nation’s economy overnight and underlined the economic importance of investment in creative work. Then, in December, the BEA and the NEA jointly released the first-ever official tally of the value the arts add to the U.S. economy, which they will continue to track annually (note that this does not yet take into account the methodological changes announced in July). The total – $500 billion a year, more than the entire tourism sector – impressed some mainstream news outlets and was promptly put through the spin cycle by a few creative-industry advocates, especially in Hollywood. But the bigger surprise was how little excitement the story seemed to generate in arts circles – perhaps because of the report’s bad news about the arts’ post-recession recovery, the fact that commercial fields accounted for the bulk of the value, or the omission of ancillary spending (such as on dinner before the theater) that often figures prominently in more localized economic impact studies.

7. The arts (start to) get serious about diversity

Yeah, yeah, I know. Talk is cheap, and our field has been dithering about multiculturalism, demographic change, and the need to diversify boards, staffs, and audiences for decades. Looking beneath the surface of the blogosphere debates, however, one does get the sense that momentum for action is growing. 2013 was the year of the inaugural SphinxCon, a convening on (racial) diversity in the performing arts spearheaded by a man who was almost the next Chairman of the NEA (more on that below), and the leaders of numerous relevant service organizations showed up to put their views on the record. One of those service organizations, Theatre Communications Group, is now a year into an extensive and very public “diversity and inclusion” initiative and the conversation is bubbling up at other service organizations as well now that financial survival is no longer everyone’s first priority. Meanwhile, Grantmakers in the Arts had its entire board undergo training by the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond, a leading purveyor of anti-racist thought. These are small steps in the grand scheme of things, and diversity is not the same as justice, but one can’t help but be encouraged watching the organizations charged with leading the field begin to walk and not just talk.

6. The arts research field makes halting progress toward field-building

Last year, I got so frustrated with the state of arts research that I blathered on for more than an hour to the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center about all of its problems and how to fix them. Fortunately, it turns out that I’m not alone in seeing the need and opportunity for reform of our field’s research infrastructure. The first and easiest step toward a better future was always going to be a way for people working in this area to communicate more effectively with each other, and May’s launch of the Cultural Research Network goes a long way toward checking that box. This was also the year that the arts began to flirt in a big way with Big Data. We saw the launch of two immense arts data aggregation initiatives, Philadelphia’s CultureBlocks (building off of the work of Social Impact of the Arts Project researchers Mark Stern and Susan Seifert) and Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (aggregating data from the Cultural Data Project, TRG Arts, and elsewhere). A third project, the Harvard-led Initiative for Sustainable Arts in America, is set to launch in Detroit and the Bay Area in 2014. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Cultural Data Project is taking a look in the mirror with a gigantic, year-long strategic planning process that looks like it will result in major changes for the organization and the field. We’ve got a long, long way to go, but the progress we saw in 2013 toward a smarter, more tech-savvy, and more collaborative knowledge management infrastructure in the arts is highly encouraging.

5. The NEA remains Chairless

When Rocco Landesman left his post as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in December 2012, there was no reason to think that the leadership transition would be anything but smooth. Senior deputy Joan Shigekawa, who had long been rumored to be the one running the agency behind the scenes anyway, became the acting head, and a search for a new director began immediately. Yet as the year dragged on, the process became murkier, and at this point no one seems to be sure when the Obama administration (which is in charge of the search) might get around to formally nominating a new leader. Sphinx Organization founder and National Council on the Arts member Aaron Dworkin is the only individual to have publicly confirmed being a candidate for the gig and was widely seen as the frontrunner for the post until he pulled his name from consideration over the summer; he would have been the Endowment’s first black chairman. NEA fans can take heart at least in the fact that they are not alone; the National Endowment for the Humanities has likewise been without an official leader since May.

4. A roller coaster year for the DIA

My goodness, where to begin? The Detroit Institute of Arts has had more ink spilled on it in the last two years, it seems, than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. It was just last August that the DIA was triumphantly celebrating the passage of a millage, or property tax, in three counties providing the institution with ten years of guaranteed operating support, allowing it to build its endowment and place itself on secure footing for the future. But then in July the City of Detroit announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, placing the DIA’s art collection – much of which is owned by the city – in jeopardy. The city’s state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has reportedly asked the DIA to come up with $500 million to help appease creditors and lead Detroit out of the doldrums, which is about how much the auction house Christie’s has assigned to the value of artworks purchased with city funds. The most interesting potential outcome has the city and the DIA entering into a “grand bargain” involving an effort to raise the $500 million from a consortium of local and national funders, including the Kresge and Ford Foundations, and turn the DIA into a private entity, free from city control. Regardless of how this one turns out, it’s an object lesson in the potential pitfalls of direct government involvement in arts institutions.

3. Edward Snowden shows us we’re not as free as we thought

A 30-year-old former government contractor running off with four laptops and goodness knows how many hard drives’ worth of secret intelligence documents made for a compelling news story, but its connection to the arts wasn’t immediately clear. After all, the initial disclosure – that the United States National Security Agency was working with phone companies to collect metadata (information about calls, though not the calls themselves) en masse – seemed like it might be No Big Deal. It’s helpful for our national security apparatus not to have to wait for days to know who’s called whom, they still have to get a warrant to figure out what was actually said, and it’s all cleared by the Congress and our courts. Right? But as more and more revelations from Snowden’s treasure trove have come to light, the creepier this whole thing has gotten, and the more it’s become apparent that virtually nothing we do online is secret from the government. The NSA has intercepted the fiber-optic cables that carry Internet traffic to collect information on activities without the Internet companies even knowing; the agency “repeatedly broke surveillance rules,” and there have already been cases of “willful misconduct” like stalking love interests. Here’s what’s important to keep in mind from an arts perspective: the United States has always prided itself as a country of free expression. One of the most important ways in which that freedom of expression has been possible is that the government has intentionally held back from giving itself the means to control it, letting social norms and the marketplace have influence instead. There may be little reason to think that Uncle Sam would be interested in some random artist’s work today, but imagine a change in administration, another war, and a widespread movement for social change in which artists play a big role, and all of the sudden 2013 might start to look a lot like 1983.

2. Obamacare gets off to a rocky start

For years, advocating for health care reform was a major priority of a number of arts organizations. Once the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed, several of those organizations (including the one that I work for) took the opportunity to declare victory and go home. Pretty much no one considers Obamacare to be perfect, but the legislation had been widely praised and its rollout highly anticipated in arts circles because of its promise to better serve freelancers, particularly those with modest incomes (due to the subsidy provided). However, when healthcare.gov couldn’t process enrollments to save its life upon its October launch, it all started to look very, very fragile – particularly the already popularity-challenged individual mandate that is, according to economists, the linchpin to the entire system. It looks like the worst fears about Obamacare’s shaky launch have passed, but not before a small business exchange and the employer mandate were delayed for a year and other concessions were made to mollify angry citizens, many of which are arguably bad policy. Make no mistake, the Affordable Care Act is here to stay – but how much it’ll actually end up improving things is perhaps a bit more in question than it seemed a few months ago.

1. Wait, who elected these guys?

When the dust from the 2012 election cleared and Barack Obama was still president, the Senate was still Democratic, and the House was still Republican, we knew we were in for another two years (and most likely four) of divided government. But I don’t think too many people expected it would get this bad. The hyper-partisan environment, political infighting between conservative and establishment Republicans, petty power struggles between branches of government, and the determination to treat even the smallest difference of opinion as a virtual fight to the death all contributed to one of the least productive Congressional years in recorded history and a 16-day government shutdown that earned the ridicule of the world. As much as this sucked for all of us as citizens, it all but put the kibosh on any dreams of transformative arts policy coming from the Obama administration. With so many urgent national priorities getting in line to be ignored or gamed by a Congress that is far more adept at drafting press releases than passing legislation, maintaining the status quo is about the best that arts advocates can hope for in 2014.

Honorable mention:

• Scandal at the IRS
• Darren Walker lands Ford Foundation’s top gig
• The sequester hits federal arts agencies

Happy 2014 to all!

(For a brief summary of this article, check out “How Art Works: the I’m-late-for-work version.”)

With “How Art Works: The National Endowment for the Arts’ Five-Year Research Agenda,” the National Endowment for the Arts is getting proactive. Acknowledging that the NEA’s research efforts have been mostly descriptive in the past, “How Art Works” is intended to usher in a new era of strategic inquiry for the agency and the sector alike.

Released in September 2012, “How Art Works” “stems from a collaborative research inquiry.” Over the course of ten months prior, the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis and the global consulting firm Monitor Institute conducted interviews and solicited input from a host of people inside and outside the arts sector. (A full list of thought partners is included in Appendix B.) The resulting report lays out a conceptual framework that is meant to aid in the planning and assessment of the NEA’s research priorities from 2012 to 2016, and to facilitate reporting to the White House Office of Management & Budget, Congress, and the public on the Endowment’s progress.

Summary 

The practical goal of “How Art Works” is actually broader than this: beyond a research agenda for the NEA itself, it “proposes a way for the nation’s cultural researchers, arts practitioners, policy-makers, and the general public to view, analyze, and discuss the arts as a dynamic, complex system.” The strategy involves stating “feasible, testable” hypotheses about all manner of arts-related impacts on individuals and society in the form of a system map. The map in turn is intended to provide a theory of change to guide arts research and to facilitate field-wide investigation and discussion.

Mapping the Impact of the Arts

The fundamental hypothesis of “How Art Works” is as follows:

[E]ngagement in arts contributes to quality of life. Quality of life contributes to society’s capacity to invent, create, and express itself. This capacity contributes back to art, both directly and indirectly.

The effects of engagement in the arts are cyclical and reciprocal, inherent and instrumental, and can be seen in artists, participants, and society at large.

To specify and organize the range of possible interactions, reactions, and transactions, the major feature of “How Art Works” is a system map, a visual representation of the parties and forces at play. According to Innovation Network, “this approach involves first visually mapping the system of interest and then identifying which parts and relationships are expected to change, and how.” A system map facilitates discussion with the goal of getting everyone on the same page.

In the “How Art Works” system map, the major components of the arts ecosystem are represented as “nodes” connected by arrows representing the relationships between those nodes.

The map’s starting point – the Big Bang for the entire arts ecosystem as we know it – is the “human impulse to create and express.” This impulse is the motivation to experience or participate in artistic creation. The rest of the nodes on the map spring out of this drive and fit into four broad categories: Inputs, Art itself, Quality-of-Life Outcomes, and Broader Societal Impacts. In order to clearly define each node on the map, “How Art Works” includes a graphic representation of what the authors call a “Multi-Level Measurement Structure” for each component or variable within the main nodes, which will inform the measurement model for future research involving each part of the system. For example, here is the Measurement Structure for one of the two system Inputs, education and training:

Each Measurement Structure includes a list of “definitional questions and methodological challenges” (not pictured here), which are designed to help readers imagine how one might effectively gather data on all of these various and in some cases slippery concepts. Challenges include things like “insufficient data available,” difficult-to-isolate factors of change, or the limitations of prior research.

To summarize the map, we’ll walk through each of the nodes within the four main categories and briefly touch on the methodological challenges and observations on potential future research.

Inputs. According to “How Art Works,” the translation of the universal impulse to express into actual artistic activity depends on two Inputs, education and training and arts infrastructure.

Education and training represents all manner of arts learning opportunities, “from YouTube and street jam sessions, to K-12 and adult arts education, to apprenticeships and conservatory training.” It is education, both informal and formal, that allows for skillful expression of ideas for artists and develops a stronger sense of personal taste for arts consumers.

Arts infrastructure is described as the “institutions, places, spaces, and formal and informal social support systems that facilitate the creation and consumption of art.” These support systems include venues, organizations, schools, networks, unions, and associations, as well as less concrete elements like financial and volunteer support and public policy. Of course, the quality of available infrastructure matters as much as the quantity.

Art. Given the initial spark to create and the infrastructure and training to fan the flame, the next category is the Art itself. The artistic product, represented on the map by the yellow circle, has two sub-categories: creation and participation. Arts creation is the production of an artistic work within an established or emerging set of artistic principles with “the intention of communicating richly to others.” Arts participation includes creation but extends more broadly; it is defined as “the act of producing, interpreting, curating, and experiencing arts… and the consumption of these outputs.”

Finally, we move on to outcomes of the art, of which there are two types included as part of the map: Quality-of-Life Outcomes (so-called first-order outcomes) and Broader Societal Impacts (second-order outcomes).

Quality-of-Life Outcomes. Quality-of-life outcomes are the direct effects of interaction with the arts on individuals and communities. The report acknowledges that these outcomes could be positive or negative, though the word “benefit” is consistently used to describe them. The two nodes in this category are:

• The benefit of art to individuals, and
• The benefit to society and communities.

The outcome called the benefit of art to individuals encompasses the “cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physiological effects” on participating individuals over time.

The second outcome, benefit to society and community, is farther-reaching than the first. This node encompasses “the role the art plays as an agent of cultural vitality, a contributor to sense of place and sense of belonging, a vehicle for transfer of values and ideal, and a promoter of political dialogue.”

The report points out a few definitional questions, methodological challenges, and issues for further exploration to keep in mind with these Quality-of-Life Outcomes:

• In current research many of these effects are intertwined and overlapping. Determining what can be isolated and tested will be an important step in illuminating these outcomes.
• One complication when measuring the benefit of art to individuals is the uneven distribution of participation in arts activities. Presumably some people who like the arts like them a lot and choose to engage deeply and consistently, whereas others may never feel compelled. This is a methodological challenge because it makes data about impact difficult to generalize across the entire population.
• It is unclear whether the impact of the arts on children versus adults is different enough to demand separate evaluation strategies.

Broader Societal Impacts. The final node of the system map represents the second-order outcomes on society at large. A more detailed version of the map (immediately below) shows three new elements within this category:

• societal capacities to innovate and express ideas,
• new forms of self-expression, and
• outlets for creative expression.

These outcomes are included as “works in progress” in the report, which declines to offer a measurement structure for any of them. The latter two in particular are moving targets, as new art forms, techniques, and platforms continue to emerge; the authors cite platforms such as YouTube and Facebook and forms of expressions like data visualization as examples.

System Multipliers. Beyond the nodes themselves, the authors posit that certain forces act on all of the various components of the system to varying degrees, all at once, to affect the system’s environment. These so-called System Multipliers are like societal weather. They don’t necessarily change what you’re going to do in a day, but they might change how you do it, or how long it takes.

There are five multipliers proposed: markets and subsidies, politics, technology, demographics and cultural traditions, and space and time. It’s easy to imagine how these forces could shift the arts sector in big and small ways. Technology, for example, has completely changed the way we share and consume art. It has also changed the ways artists get compensated for their work, for better or worse, in ways many did not see coming even five years ago.

Obviously, the reach of these multipliers is vast. The authors explain at a high level how each multiplier could affect the arts sector, but do not provide insights on potential research applications beyond suggesting they be periodically tracked using evidence from individual research projects.

Shaping the Research to Come

In the final section of “How Art Works,” the authors assess to what extent the NEA’s current research priorities square with the hypotheses represented in the map. These pages feature a list of priority projects initiated or planned by the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis over five years beginning in 2012, with each project keyed to an element of the map.

After reviewing the opportunities and potential areas of emphasis, the authors call attention to “a research gap associated with the nodes and relationships on the left side of the map: Societal Capacities to Innovate and to Express Ideas, and, in the expanded version of the map, New Forms of Self-Expression and Outlets for Creative Expression.” These nodes “mark a vast unsettled terrain” that “ultimately may hold the most promise and profit for those seeking to measure arts-related impacts.” Despite this promise, however, “How Art Works” notes that “most of the NEA’s research agenda for the next five years will continue to focus on arts infrastructure, education/training, arts participation and creation, and individual and community-level benefits,” areas where the NEA already has significant investment. The reasoning is that there are gains to be made in the short term by building on recent findings about Inputs and the benefit of art to individuals.

The report encourages the NEA to decide whether the rapidly-evolving “work-in-progress” elements outlets for creative expression and new forms of self-expression, as well as the catalyst of the system, the human impulse to express and create, are areas the Office of Research and Analysis can address in the next five years, or whether others will need to take the lead. “A reasonable approach might be to lodge these concepts in the broader dialectic of the arts research community, so that new hypotheses, research questions, populations, data sources, and methods might be proposed by groups outside the NEA.”

Finally, the authors point to the need to strengthen structural support for this research, for example through the NEA’s ongoing efforts to partner with other federal agencies for both program delivery and data collection. These priorities include “a clear need to build national time-series (preferably longitudinal) data collections including arts variables.” Additionally, over the next few years the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis plans to consolidate arts-related data and make it publicly available to other cultural researchers.

Analysis

“How Art Works” does a good job of defining a reasonable and comprehensive model of the arts’ impact against which to consider the NEA’s own research efforts. However, the report is a bit like an impressionist painting: from far away it looks complete, but when you get close, individual features are hard to make out. It is a step forward to be sure, but its broad-brush approach and failure to build explicitly on past attempts, combined with a few untended loose ends, represent a missed opportunity to be a watershed for cultural researchers.

The Necessary Specificity

”How Art Works” is certainly not lacking in grand designs. A map of any sector from public agencies to individual consumers that fits within a report as short as this one is inevitably going to work at a high level. But there are times when the map’s lack of specificity and detail seems to call into question its value entirely. Take, for example, Illustration 5 (the second image above), the Measurement Structure for education and training. This diagram divides all of arts education and training into two sub-categories – arts subjects and non-arts subjects – and then further divides those into art itself and evaluation of art, then further into modes of instruction, and finally into discipline “types” being studied.

This framework is frustratingly generic. Arts education is an area we actually know quite a bit about. There are professional associations representing every corner of the field, from in-school arts teachers to community-based organizations to art therapists. There’s even the National Center for Creative Aging, which has a bird’s-eye view of current trends in arts education for older adults. The NEA’s own prior research is especially strong in this area, though this isn’t reflected in the text or the diagram. At some point in the process of making this and other models widely applicable, specificity – and with it utility – have been somewhat lost. If the goal is to direct further research, the system map should take full advantage of the knowledge we have already.

Doing so might have pointed out areas where the frameworks don’t quite make sense, even at the very high level on which they operate. For example, the generic language of “art as a subject” and “art in non-arts courses” brings to mind child-age learners in school settings. This seems a strange choice, since education and training according to the authors is meant to include arts learning in informal settings for learners of all ages. It may be that the map needs to be generic for universality, but it certainly shouldn’t implicitly narrow the field with imprecise language.

The audience for How Art Works is described briefly as “researchers, practitioners, policy-makers in the arts and in other sectors.” But this lack of specificity serves neither experts in the field, who are offered scant new insights into their focus areas, nor those less familiar with the arts, who will glean only the most general outlines of the work involved, even for well-established fields of practice like arts education. For those completely oblivious to the arts sector and all of its components – those who have never considered the connection between a community dance studio, what goes on inside the walls of the Kennedy Center, and, say, the economy – this report could be educational, but only to a point. Some nodes are more instructive than others. Benefit of art to society and communities for example (pictured above), could enlighten and spur new thinking for people who don’t spend all day dissecting the impact and values of the arts. But education and training wouldn’t provide much information for people who don’t already know what arts education looks like in all of its various forms.

Building on Prior Work

As a framework for understanding the effects of the arts, “How Art Works” misses important chances to incorporate and build on prior work like Gifts of the Muse. Published in 2005, Gifts is an extensive literature review that attempts to compile all of the various claimed benefits of the arts to individuals and society and evaluate and connect them in one text. It details the intrinsic benefits (captivation, pleasure, expanded capacity for empathy, cognitive growth, creation of social bonds, expression of communal meaning) and instrumental benefits (attitudinal, behavioral, health, community, economic) of the arts, assesses the available evidence, and makes recommendations on how to fill some of the gaps. Like “How Art Works,” Gifts constructed a working model of the benefits of the arts, the summary version of which is pictured here:

A few years before Gifts, the Cultural Dynamics Project (a collaboration between The Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the consulting group National Arts Strategies, and the California non-profit Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley) likewise created a system map of the arts and cultural sector. The collaborators’ hope was that such a map would “inform our arts policy, expand our understanding as arts professionals, guide and contextualize existing and future research on the field, and drive more thoughtful funding initiatives among those seeking to support and evolve this complex system.” That sounds familiar. It’s worth noting that the individuals involved with the Cultural Dynamics Project didn’t let 8.5×11-inch paper shrink their vision or cause them to over-generalize. The map comes complete with instructions on how to attach four sheets together to reveal the full diagram. Another attempt to conceptualize the benefits of the arts was Alan Brown’s 2006 essay “An Architecture of Value.” Brown’s model explicitly builds on Gifts of the Muse and focuses on the language we use to explain “the value and benefits of arts experiences.”

While “How Art Works” has the additional mandate of providing research guidance for a particular (and important) player in the field, it’s odd that so much of the report – and presumably the effort that went into making it – was spent on ground well-covered by these and other previous works – especially since several of the individuals involved in those previous initiatives were consulted during the discovery process. “How Art Works” isn’t entirely duplicative, but it isn’t 100% additive either. With the ultimate goal of getting everyone on the same page so that arts research can proceed in a more coordinated manner, it’s ironic that these prior efforts to map the system were scarcely mentioned in even the footnotes or appendices of the report.

Neglecting the Negative

“How Art Works” sets out to “[provide] a conceptual frame for planning and assessing research priorities so that the NEA can improve its ability to meet a core goal: To Promote Knowledge and Understanding about the Contributions of the Arts.” One would expect such a report to accentuate the positive when it comes to the impact of the arts. But if the system map presented is meant to be realistic – a picture of how art really does work, and not a romantic representation of how we would like it to work – the possible negative effects of self-expression should be acknowledged more explicitly. Take, for example, this sentence from an early paragraph describing the forces at play in the system map in the simplest terms:

The impact [of the arts on a person] also flows back to the artist, directly in some instances (e.g., the artist sells a work of art) and indirectly through education, infrastructure, and society’s general embrace of creativity and freedom of expression.

In fact, creativity channeled through the arts does not always lead to an expansion of freedom of expression. Sometimes it leads to a backlash and a crackdown. We have seen widespread objections to certain works of art: the agency has been repeatedly accused of funding “pornography” (see reason number five of these Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment of the Arts). In 1998, after decades of periodic controversy over NEA grants, the Supreme Court ruled that the agency could make “decency” a consideration in funding decisions. This kind of stipulation doesn’t stop the production of controversial work, but it does send a message about the value of certain works of art, and art more generally to society, and it has real implications for artists’ ability to find financial support for their work. The impact that circles back to the artist is sometimes a structural restriction of creativity and expression.

Art itself can also be intrinsically harmful. The authors acknowledge in a footnote that, “[b]ecause communities do not all have the same values, ideals, or political inclinations, art that is seen as beneficial by one community can appear threatening to another.” But this understates the potential for art to do damage; for example, there is no shortage of racist music out there reinforcing and promoting prejudice. Finally, the arts can have unintended indirect effects, such as their ever-controversial role in neighborhood gentrification. Many observers have argued that  the influx of artists into an area can spur a kind of neighborhood change that is harmful to residents who subsequently are priced out of their homes or experience a more metaphorical sense of displacement. That kind of impact is not included in the benefits to society and communities structure, but nevertheless represents an example of a tangible outcome that could be caused by the arts.

Implications

So, what if it worked? What if we pursued this research agenda as laid out, and we really did have all of the metrics under all of the nodes defined in five years? We would know how things work now. But I can’t help wishing that this research agenda were more aspirational. If we had instead a working map of an ideal arts sector, could we be stronger at the end of five years instead of just smarter?

Such a map would show how and where we want average people to encounter the arts in their community, and what the impacts of those encounters would be. It would chart how public sector dollars can work with private and community foundations and individual donors to support a diverse and healthy arts infrastructure. It would theorize what tax structures and other policies could benefit individual artists, and those hypotheses would be tested in the research to follow, instead of simply stating that all of these elements exist.

Such a report would also draw on prior research in these specific areas. A literature review was conducted as part of the process of creating “How Art Works,” presumably for the purpose of assessing the current state of knowledge in the arts. But somehow those insights don’t seem to have made it into the final product, save for an annotated bibliography provided in Appendix A and sorted by map node. By drawing a map that got into details about what we already know and what we have yet to find out, “How Art Works” could have launched the sector into a new era of coordinated, proactive research.

Instead, we will have to be satisfied with the report’s more limited ambitions. By the time this research agenda was released, the NEA had already made an inaugural round of fourteen research grants. Fordham University studied the impact of arts programming on the social skills and mental health outcomes of at-risk youth, exploring the benefit of arts to individuals, society, and communities. Harvard looked into factors contributing to “birth” and “death” rates of arts and cultural institutions, which pertains to arts infrastructure. The University of Dayton studied the relationship between arts engagement and quality of life, investigating arts participation and arts creation. And the University of Georgia performed qualitative research to generate a hypothesis about community-built practice such as playgrounds, mosaic sculptures, murals, and community gardens, looking into the benefits of arts for societies and communities. This research is compelling, and the best examples will hopefully lead us forward as a field. Happily, the quality of that work will not be diminished by a grand vision that is, arguably, still under construction.

Further reading:

• Barry Hessenius, Research and Data Blogathon Day #4 (Barry’s Blog)
• Ian David Moss, Arts Policy Library: Gifts of the Muse (Createquity)
• Alan Brown, An Architecture of Value (WolfBrown)
• The Cultural Dynamics Working Group, The Cultural Dynamics Map: Exploring the Arts Ecosystem in the United States
• Ian David Moss, Live-blogging the “How Art Works” convening (Createquity)
• Keith Sawyer, How Art Works (Creativity & Innovation)
• Alexis Clements, A Grand Unified Theory of Art? (Hyperallergic)
• Mark Robinson, How Art Works? (Thinking Practice)

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.

• The Future of Music Coalition’s Casey Rae recaps current policy on orphan works (i.e., creations under copyright but whose owners no longer exist), and outlines a solution that protects the original author/performer in such cases. Casey’s post has instructions if you want to file supporting or additional comments with the Copyright Office.
  
• With all the headline grabs about cuts to public funding, we don’t hear enough about the politicians that really do support the arts, who often do so behind the scenes. Guy Yedwab shares some observations from a speech by outgoing Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is now running for city Comptroller.
• California is changing some of its rules for fiscal sponsors.
• Kaid Benfield writes on the increasingly unchecked, government-like powers of local homeowners’ associations.
• Rocco Landesman writes a postcard from retirement; Doug Borwick reflects on his tenure at the NEA.
• I realized last week, to my embarrassment, that the NEA’s official Art Works blog had not been showing up in my Google Reader feed since this past August. This happens sometimes when content providers move to a new platform and change their feed URL – there’s no way for subscribers to know unless you put up a notice on the old feed telling them to resubscribe at the new address. We’ve seen this at ArtsJournal as well as the blogs there have slowly migrated from Moveable Type to their new WordPress platform. If you’re subscribed to any of these blogs in Google Reader, check to make sure you’re still getting updates! I keep a list of such feed changes at my blogroll. Anyway, here are some of the fun pieces at Art Works that I missed over the past few months because of this:
  • Steven Shewfelt and Ellen Grantham describe a new pilot initiative to assess the artistic excellence of activities funded by the NEA, after the fact.
  • Elizabeth Miller interviews Rachel Cain and Anthony Radich about WESTAF’s Public Art Archive software.
  • Sunil Iyengar analyzes the new SNAAP report, “Painting with Broader Strokes,” and another report from the National Center for Education Statistics. (Would be nice to have links to those in the post…)
  • An interview with NEA Acting Chair Joan Shigekawa. Here’s a previous interview with Deepa Gupta, who serves on the National Council of the Arts and was formerly an arts program officer with the MacArthur Foundation.
  • Rich Heeman describes the NEA’s recent efforts at improving data collection and transparency practices.
  • Shewfelt reflects on creativity in arts research, the NEA’s arts research grants program, and arts-related changes to the General Social Survey.
  • Julie Heizer shares an update on the federal government’s national tourism and marking strategy, and details how arts organizations can get involved.

IN THE FIELD

• Michael Kaiser announces his planned departure as head of the Kennedy Center. No word on what’s next for him.
• Four dance companies in Chicago are coming together to share marketing and customer service responsibilities. I’m not sure if the model is as unusual as they seem to think it is, but it’s still one to watch for those interested in shared services as a cure for the 501(c)(3) blues.
  

BIG IDEAS

• The perspectives on race and the arts continue to roll in, with responses from Jon Silpayanamant, Linda Essig, Doug Borwick, and this particularly trenchant one from Trevor O’Donnell (I’d love to get him and Borwick in a room together!). Another lens on this whole thing is a geographic one; a lot of the initial discussion came from people on the West Coast, and the rhetoric in the Clayton Lord post that I originally responded to, arguing that institutions had a moral responsibility to have audiences that looked like their local communities, struck me as very California way of looking at the issue. For better or worse, the powers that be in the East have largely not been pressuring arts nonprofits to diversify with the same ferocity, seemingly for worse in this particular case.
• Oh, and in case anyone was under the illusion that this was only an issue in the United States: “Salvador, with a welcoming Atlantic harbor, was the first capital of Brazil. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, until Brazil ended slavery in 1888, it was the largest port in the New World for the slave trade, and 80 percent of the city’s current population is Afro-Brazilian….African-rooted rhythms propel much of Brazilian popular music. Yet the prime-time face of carnaval is almost entirely white.”
• Seth Godin on the NFL vs. the arts (a subject that came up in other forums as well): “The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don’t point everyone to one bit of content, don’t trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one. The cultural touchstones we’re building today are…mostly not for everyone. Instead, the process is Tribes -> Connections/communities -> Diverse impact….[W]e build our lives around cultural pockets, not cultural mass. Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.”
• Chad Bauman on the formula for subscription success: “great artistic product + best seats + best price + outstanding customer service = more subscribers.”
• “What exactly is the dividing line between respecting your audience’s taste and shameless pandering?” Adam Huttler considers by examining the case of Netflix’s new show House of Cards, which represents a $100 million bet on algorithmically-determined original programming.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Some great resources for measuring the impact of advocacy work.
• Peter Pennekamp (former president of the Humboldt Area Foundation) and Anne Focke consider community democracy as a tool for philanthropy in this occasional paper for the Kettering Foundation.
• Over at the Nonprofit Finance Fund blog, Anjali Deshmukh and Rachel Heitler analyze an evaluation of the Violence Against Women Act. Very interesting reading for those interested in understanding how to bring these concepts to arts policy analysis.
• Southern Methodist University is launching a new Center for Arts Research.
• A new electronic journal from Scotland examines creativity and human development. And speaking of journals, issue #2 of Artivate, the journal for entrepreneurship in the arts, is out.
• An entire webinar on data visualization for philanthropy.
• An interesting take on network effects in the fashion industry.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Three perspectives on the fiscal cliff deal: from Nonprofit Quarterly; from Americans for the Arts; from the Performing Arts Alliance.
• Musicians vs. airlines – and government security. One wonders if the more cello-friendly attitude musicians report encountering in days of yore has anything to do with declining rates of arts education?
• A window into the Turnaround Arts initiative, a high-stakes gambit to amp up arts programming in a few select low-performing schools around the country.
• Rocco offers Barry’s Blog some last words on his way out the door.
• Exotic dance = art? Judith Lynne Hanna makes the case (and part 2).

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Senior program officer Lynn Stern is leaving the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Arts and Cultures program.
• The New York Times‘s veteran culture editor Jonathan Landman has accepted a buyout from the Gray Lady.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Mark Zuckerberg has committed half a billion dollars to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. This is interesting in that community foundations have been increasingly seen as a relic of past generations of donors, with new millionaires and billionaires choosing to distribute their philanthropy with the help of private wealth advisors instead. This gift, coming as it does from one of the scions of the technology world, could change that in a big way. Dan Lyons reluctantly gives Zuck the slow clap.
  
• Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center may be plenty controversial, tearing up as it did significant chunks of the neighborhood, but one thing that’s pretty great about it is that none of the concessions stands are operated by national chains. Instead, “you can get barbecue from Williamsburg’s Fatty ’Cue; Cuban sandwiches from Fort Greene’s Habana Outpost; pizza from Gravesend’s Spumoni Gardens; and, in an inspired old-school-new-school mashup, a confection called a concrete that combines Junior’s black-and-white cookies with ice cream from Blue Marble.” Here’s hoping other developers take the hint and start buying local.

IN THE FIELD

• After a period of impressive growth, Ovation, the only cable channel exclusively devoted to the arts (as traditionally defined), is being dropped by Time Warner Cable. The story is well worth a read, as it is an object lesson on what happens in the commercial marketplace for culture when profit maximization is the goal. Despite costing Time Warner a mere seven cents per subscriber, it (along with other low-rated networks) is being shed to help pay for major increases in the network’s most expensive channels, mostly sports-related. If you’re a Time Warner customer and would like to voice your concern, Ovation has set up a website for the purpose.
• Greg Sandow has been offering an interesting series on “mavericks”/bright spots in classical music, including this profile of the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston.
• More on the mysterious Woodruff Arts Center embezzlement fiasco.
• Crowdfunding French style means helping the Louvre acquire $3 million ivory statuettes.

BIG IDEAS

• Some end-of-year looking back and prognostication: Nonprofit Law Blog recounts the big nonprofit moments of 2012; Thomas Cott crowdsources arts predictions for 2013, and Barry Hessenius says nothin’ much will change this year. (I think Barry’s got it right.) Meanwhile, Tim Mikulski possibly reveals too much in recounting the top posts on AFTA’s ARTSblog in 2012.
  
• Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating interview with Jaron Lanier, an internet pioneer and futurist who has now turned against many of the hacker-derived “information should be free” principles he once embraced. In explaining his change of heart, he cites the music industry as exhibit A of what went wrong.
  

  “I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ “And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

  And then there’s this:

  “To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It’s somebody’s value that’s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it’s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it’s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes—and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.”

  Read the whole thing.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new website called AidGrade might give Createquity fave GiveWell a run for its money. It takes a quantitative approach to aggregating and analyzing randomized controlled trials of various international aid program types (like microfinance, deworming, and bednets), and offers some pretty cool features.
• “It’s all driven by seventh-grade arithmetic and a whole bunch of data.” Rick Lester breaks down patron segmentation and analysis in this podcast from Technology in the Arts.
• Is creativity linked to dishonesty? Keith Sawyer analyzes a new study and finds that the answer may be yes.
• Fascinating interview with Jennifer C. Lena, a sociologist studying cultural economics and the spread of musical taste.
• This was just cool: 2012’s year in maps, from the Atlantic Cities.

ETC.

• Here’s some advice from a pro on live-tweeting events and conferences in an official capacity.
• “My five-year-old could have painted this” is so over. Now it’s, “my pet snake could have painted this!”

From Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History’s Family Fallapalooza

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the previous editions here: 2009, 2010, and 2011.  The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world. This year, for the first time, I opened up the creation of this list to Createquity authors past and present, and I am particularly grateful to Jackie Hasa for contributing the entries for orchestra labor strife and SOPA/PIPA versus the internet. If you’re interested in being a part of a growing and increasingly active team here, a reminder that the deadline for the Createquity Writing Fellowship is coming up on January 8.

2012 was a year of cautious optimism for the arts. As the economy continued its slow recovery, for the first time in four years, government funding at the state level did not see a decline, and the slash-and-burn tax-cutting fervor of political conservatives seemed to be blunted by November’s election results, at least temporarily. There were stories of individual organizations making good, and ambitious initiatives seemed to be around every corner. And yet in certain contexts, the arts were still or newly facing dark days. Arts communities in much of Europe and the Western world struggled with austerity measures, as did orchestra musicians in the United States. And in many Muslim countries, art and artists found themselves in the middle of (or even the target of) oppression, strife, and violence. One comes away from this list with the sense that things are going to be interesting in 2013.

10. Nina Simon reboots the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History

I don’t normally include innovation stories from rank-and-file arts organizations on this list, but Nina Simon’s transformation of Santa Cruz MAH has been so far-reaching and impressive that its broader fieldwide significance is hard to deny. It’s not just about the numbers, though Simon has those too: attendance has more than doubled, the busiest day drew triple the participants over previous years,and there’s now a $350,000 cash reserve. More interesting, however, is the combination of Simon’s fame and her daring programming that has put the MAH “on the map” in a way that simply wasn’t the case before. Simon is the rarer-than-you-might-think example of a consultant who has successfully transitioned into an executive role, and in the process she has eagerly seized the opportunity to reshape a struggling institution into a playground for her (and the community’s) ideas. Through new programs like the You Can’t Do That in Museums Camp, an exhibition-as-exhibition, and more, Santa Cruz MAH is charting the frontiers of what it means to be a participatory museum, and we get to have a front-row seat by virtue of Simon’s long-running and admirably transparent blog, Museum 2.0. Simon’s approach may not be right for every arts organization, but it surely presents one very clear vision of the future, one to which attention must be paid.

9. The European funding model shows more cracks

Let’s be clear on this one: the core Western European philosophy of seeing culture as an essential arm of government is not on the verge of dissolving, and the wealthy countries that have historically been most faithful to this notion–including Germany, France, and the Scandinavian nations–have so far shown little willingness to abandon it in favor of American-style privatization fever. At the fringes of the European Union and beyond, however, government-centric cultural policies underwent substantial stress in 2012. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, the national museum closed due to lack of funds provided by a non-functioning government; in Greece, spending on the arts has dropped 35% since 2009, and in Italy, Rome’s MAXXI Museum has been put into receivership. Arts Council England, having already suffered major cuts two years ago, is looking at a potential loss of 150 staff, while cities like Newcastle are looking at even more drastic cuts. This is a trend to watch in 2013.

8. SOPA/PIPA vs. the Internet

In early 2012, an enormous Internet protest caused both houses of Congress to indefinitely postpone voting on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA).  These bills sought to regulate Internet content in the name of fighting piracy, which split arts organizations into two opposing camps—those with a vested interest in strong copyright protections, which included many major entertainment industry unions and associations, and those concerned that the bills’ more draconian regulations would dampen creative exchange, which included a broader range of organizations, from McSweeney’s to Fractured Atlas to Dance/USA.  After tabling SOPA/PIPA, Google and other major tech companies helped Congress draft the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (the OPEN Act) as part of a more balanced approach. Public comments on the OPEN Act are encouraged, even as its sponsor, Darrell Issa (R-CA) pushes for a 2-year moratorium on Internet regulations.  Efforts to control the web also failed on the international stage, when a U.N. committee charged with rewriting Internet rules couldn’t get buy-in from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and dozens of other nations due to concerns over censorship.   Lawmakers may not resolve these debates in 2013, but in the years ahead, we will doubtless see continued efforts to regulate Internet behavior.

7. The arts face violence and turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa

Where to begin? In Syria, where the ancient city of Aleppo has been devastated by that country’s civil war? In Mali, where a fundamentalist group called Ansar Dine has destroyed world-famous heritage sites in Timbuktu and threatened musicians with bodily harm? In Somalia, where some 18 media figures, including a popular poet and playwright, have been assassinated by the Al Qaeda-aligned Al Shabab, for daring to mock the militants in public? In dozens of countries where mass protests broke out, some turning violent, in response to a video made by an American filmmaker and con artist with insulting depictions of the prophet Muhammad? In the midst of all the tragedy, we also had uplifting stories like the role that young artists had in galvanizing Egyptian dissent during the Arab Spring. From our comfortable perch in the US, it can sometimes feel like the arts are a frill, a plaything for the privileged, or simply inconsequential. It seems fair to say that in this part of the world, today, the arts matter.

6. State arts councils turn the corner

State arts councils reversed a four-year slide in 2012, finally coming out of the annual budget appropriations process in the black. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies reports that total appropriations rose 8.8% in the aggregate to $282.9 million, although most of this change is attributable to substantial increases in Florida, Michigan, and the District of Columbia, each of whose appropriations more than doubled over the previous year. (Michigan’s budget grew an astounding 366.8%, albeit after having sustained equally astounding cuts in previous years.) In addition, two anti-arts governors found themselves with egg on their face this year, as the recently vanquished Kansas Arts Commission made a triumphant return as the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, and the South Carolina Arts Commission fought off yet another veto threat from Governor Nikki Haley. Other states with budget increases of $1 million or more included Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, and Ohio. (Update: See comments for info about Connecticut.) And while the Arizona Commission on the Arts continues to receive no legislative appropriation from its state government, it did win a ten-year re-authorization against the odds. The year was not completely free from bad news, however, as the arts councils in Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Utah all suffered double-digit cuts, continuing a trend in the first three states.

5. Labor strife reaches new heights in orchestras and beyond

This year was rife with labor unrest in the arts, most notably among orchestras. Driven by fundraising shortfalls and sometimes debt from capital projects conceived in flush times, musicians walked out—or were locked out—all over the U.S. Unions in Chicago, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Spokane, Louisville, New York, Philadephia, San Antonio, and Indianapolis all successfully reached deals that ranged from modest raises (San Antonio) to 32% wage cuts (Indianapolis). The strife will continue in 2013: in the Twin Cities, both the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra have been locked out for months, with no resolution in sight. We’re also seeing some signs of resilience and cooperation, as the previously disbanded Syracuse and Utica Symphony Orchestras vowed to return for the 2012-2013 season. In 2013, we may see more attention paid to the Colorado Symphony as a potential model. Following their own labor conflict in 2011, they revised their contract to allow for more organizational flexibility. For instance, the orchestra can now play in smaller groups, allowing them to perform in communities around Denver in minor venues.

4. Rocco steps down

It wasn’t a surprise, but it was news nonetheless: Rocco Landesman left the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) after three-plus eventful years as Chair. During his tenure, he set the agency on a technocratic course with more explicit attention paid to the instrumental benefits of the arts, particularly their economic value. His highest-profile accomplishment while in office was the creation of two new grant programs to encourage “creative placemaking,” Our Town and ArtPlace (more on that below). His most enduring legacy, however, may turn out to be his work, along with Senior Deputy Chair (and now Acting Chair) Joan Shigekawa, to develop partnerships between the NEA and other branches of federal government and to set the research office on a more strategic path. Lastly, it was during his tenure that the NEA began more explicit efforts to welcome the public into its decision-making process, offering a series of live webcasts of convenings and meetings including those of the National Council of the Arts, the body that oversees the NEA. No hints as of yet as to who may replace him, but we won’t likely know until well into 2013.

3. The Detroit Institute of Arts gets a millage

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) was in a pickle. The venerable museum was facing a financial downward spiral, and it was one of the few institutions of its kind not to receive funding from either its city or state. The solution? Advocate for a millage (a form of property tax) to support the DIA in Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties, in exchange for free museum admission for residents from those counties. The measure passed in an election on August 7, and will raise a whopping $23 million annually for the DIA over the tax’s 10-year duration.  There are charitable and less charitable ways to interpret this development, and arts world response seemed to be divided between them. On the one hand, here was an example of a cultural institution demonstrating relevance to its community in the most direct, unimpeachable manner possible: a majority of residents in three counties, urban and suburban, voted to tax themselves so that this institution could survive and thrive. On the other, the DIA raised and spent an enormous sum of money – $2.5 million – getting a piece of legislation passed that benefits only one arts organization – itself. No matter how wonderful the DIA may be, that precedent is a bit worrisome.

2. The creative placemaking backlash

It was just last year that the #1 arts policy story was “Creative placemaking ascendant,” so it’s not surprising to see that the movement has come back to earth in 2012, facing public relations challenges on multiple fronts. Much of the discussion has focused on the way that the NEA’s Our Town program and its private-sector cousin, ArtPlace, plan to track and measure the impact of the grants they make – a dialogue begun here on Createquity with May’s “Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem” and continuing in the fall with further back-and-forth between researcher Ann Markusen and the NEA’s Jason Schupbach and Sunil Iyengar. But creative placemaking’s PR hiccups this year went much further than that. They started small, with the revelation that much of ArtPlace’s grant funding is geographically restricted, meaning that applicants in many parts of the country face longer odds than others, and a brutal exposé by the Los Angeles Times of problems within the ArtPlace-funded Watts House Project. By the summer it seemed that criticism and skepticism was pouring in far and wide, from sources as diverse as Thomas Frank (author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?) and Roberto Bedoya, and leading to trite headlines like “Hipsters won’t save us” in mainstream publications. To make matters worse, Richard Florida decided in the midst of all this to re-release his most famous and now-controversial book, The Rise of the Creative Class, prompting a rash of articles attacking the intellectual origins of creative placemaking work. Some of the criticism has been fair and some of it considerably less so, but there’s no sign as yet that the creative placemaking juggernaut is slowing down as a result of it.

1. Election 2012

This last item is unusual, in that it’s more about what didn’t happen this year rather than what did happen. As things turned out, the balance of power in Washington hardly changed at all and we can look forward (I guess?) to divided government for at least the next two years. By contrast, most analysts agree that if Mitt Romney had won the election and Republicans had regained control of the Senate, both of which were distinct possibilities through most of the summer and fall, what little arts policy infrastructure remains at the federal level would very much have been in jeopardy. Romney had made no secret throughout the campaign of his disdain for the NEA, the NEH, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, even bizarrely choosing to make Big Bird an issue in an otherwise well-received first debate with the President. And it doesn’t take much imagination to conclude that conservatives, fresh off a massive gain in Congressional seats during the previous midterm elections, would have felt empowered to take a hacksaw to domestic spending following even a narrow win. With these outcomes averted, it’s likely that funding levels will stay steady or suffer relatively minor cuts in the near future, though with the seemingly endless negotiations over the “fiscal cliff” and debt ceiling, anything could still happen. Election Day also saw the unfolding of some arts policy stories at a local level, most significantly the passage of an important new income tax in Portland that will fund arts grants and arts education.

Honorable mention:

• Kickstarter vs. the NEA
• Pussy Riot causes an international sensation
• The Chicago Cultural Plan
• “Set in Stone” questions conventional wisdom around cultural facilities
• The Cultural Data Project leaves home

Happy New Year to Createquity readers far and wide, and we look forward to what 2013 brings!

The National Endowment for the Arts will soon have a new Chairman. Rocco Landesman announced yesterday his plans to retire at the end of the year, in a decision widely anticipated among arts insiders. Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa will serve as acting chair until a successor is named.

The Supreme Court will consider a case involving first sale doctrine and whether consumers have the right to resell copyrighted items bought abroad in the United States. The New York Times comes out in favor of copyright holders on this one. I’m more skeptical though – limiting consumers’ rights in this way seems like a recipe for convoluted legal restrictions and the Grey Lady offers no prescriptions for how the limitations should be put into practice. Meanwhile, the FCC is adopting new regulations pertaining to the use of wireless microphones (relevant for some large theaters and performing arts centers).

What do this month’s election results mean for copyright, anyway? Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman speculate that in the short term, we probably won’t see any major (successful) efforts to expand copyright protection, especially with two of Hollywood’s favorite pro-copyright Congressmen, Howard Berman and Mary Bono Mack, losing their elections. In the longer term, we may see Republicans try to pursue a libertarian line on copyright in an effort to draw a wedge between Democrats and younger voters. I’m not sure how well that would work, but there is already evidence that, among its many civil wars, there is also a generational divide among Republicans on this issue. Last week, the conservative Republican Study Committee released and then pulled a memo by 24-year-old Congressional staffer Derek Khanna advocating for meaningful copyright reform. Future of Music Coalition’s Casey Rae has more.

DOMESTIC – STATE AND LOCAL

Denver’s arts community is in an unusual situation, finding itself with $57 million in publicly approved bond money for capital construction to spend after a planned renovation of Boettcher Concert Hall failed to go through. The mayor has submitted a list of recommendations redirecting the cash to nine institutions. Denver’s not the only city with new publicly approved money for the arts: as previously reported here, the city of Portland, OR’s Regional Arts and Culture Commission will get $5.7 million a year in new arts funding because of a recently passed ballot measure. Eloise Damrosch explains how it happened.

Obviously inspired by the recent passage of a millage (property tax) to support the Detroit Institute of Arts, arts advocates in Ann Arbor put a similar millage proposal on the ballot for this month’s elections – this time to support public art. The measure would have cost taxpayers $11 per year and raised about $450,000 for public art programs, but failed to garner enough votes to pass on Election Day. Aaron Seagraves, Ann Arbor’s public art administrator who is interviewed in the article, says he doesn’t know why the measure didn’t pass, but I’m guessing the DIA’s $2.5 million advocacy campaign (and presumably the lack of same in Ann Arbor) might have had something to do with it.

INTERNATIONAL

For the second Createquity update in a row, the arts policy news from abroad ranges from inconvenient to tragic. Canada’s oldest arts advocacy group, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, is no more. The organization had received continuous funding from the federal government since 1965 which represented about three-quarters of its budget, but Canada’s conservative leaders decided to cut the cord. CCA had at times been critical of government-supported policies, though the decision appears to have been more financial than political. Advocacy is not completely dead in Canada, though – Shannon Litzenberger has a report from the all-volunteer Canadian Arts Coalition’s Arts Day festivities (similar to Americans for the Arts’s Arts Advocacy Day).

In the UK, Arts Council England is reducing its staff by 21% as part of a previously negotiated agreement with the government, and Creative Scotland is adjusting its grantmaking procedures in the face of artist concerns. Folks don’t seem to be happy with the general direction of things. In Newcastle, the local government has cut all funding to the arts for a whopping £90 million savings, losing 1300 jobs in the process – similarly drastic cuts had already happened in the cities of Somerset, Derby, and Darlington.

A very sad story comes from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the 124-year-old National Museum is closing due to lack of funds. The museum, in Sarajevo, is the victim of a political crisis that is destabilizing the government of the young country. Several other revered cultural institutions are in danger of failing as well. Things are a little better in Greece, where Ira-Ilana Papadopoulou reports on how the economic crisis there has affected the cultural sector.

Even sadder news continues to come from the Muslim world, as news of arts-related tragedies attributable to conflict or oppression continues to pour in. In Syria, the ancient city of Aleppo is losing its cultural heritage in the wake of the civil war taking place there. In Mali, where the militant group Ansar Dine has already destroyed mosques in the ancient city of Timbuktu, Salafists are now threatening and harassing musicians. In Somalia, a popular poet, playwright and songwriter was assassinated in Mogadishu by Al Queda-aligned group Al-Shabab. Astonishingly, he is the 18th media figure killed by the group this year. Iran, thankfully, is not beset with this kind of violence, but its national orchestra is virtually dead in the face of financial difficulties and political pressure.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Arts Marketing blogger Chad Bauman, who returns to Arena Stage as Associate Executive Director only a few months after leaving for a position at the Smithsonian. Chad had previously been Arena’s Director of Communications.
• …and to San San Wong, who is relocating to Boston to join the Barr Foundation as that institution’s first full-time Senior Program Officer in the Arts, following a turbulent last year as Director of Grants for the San Francisco Arts Commission.
• Congratulations to Doug Borwick as he transitions out of the presidency of the Association of Arts Administration Educators and  retires from his post at Salem College in order to begin a new life as an entrepreneur and consultant.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Congratulations to ArtPlace’s latest round of grantees, all 47 of them. In its second round, ArtPlace distributed $15.4 million to projects in 22 states. The press release emphasizes some of the more rural and/or unexpected recipients of the grants, and there are certainly some of those. Perhaps the most eye-popping choice is a $250,000 award to a museum in down-on-its-luck Eastport, ME – population 1,331 and a six-and-a-half-hour drive from the nearest city of more than 100,000 people.  Nevertheless, the geographic restrictions of certain foundations participating in the coalition are evident in the list of grants, more than three-fifths of which went to recipients in Alaska, California, Miami, New Orleans, the Detroit metro region, Minnesota, New York City, and Philadelphia.
• The latest numbers are in from Giving USA, and charitable donations went up 4% in 2011 (slightly under 1% in real dollars), to just shy of $300 billion – still well off the 2007 peak. Arts and culture organizations received $13.12 billion of this amount, or 4% of the total, and the trendlines were consistent with overall giving.
• We all know about artists using crowdfunding to support their work, but what about fans using it to commission artists? Andy Baio reports from personal experience.
• The New York Times runs down the various forms of emergency relief available to artists, somehow without once mentioning MusiCARES.

IN THE FIELD

• The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, despite its innovative audience development efforts, is facing a deficit this year of up to $1 Smillion.
• Is the “Emerging Leader” moniker a term of empowerment or of exclusion? Barry Hessenius argues for the latter; Stephanie Evans Hanson responds. This is a complicated subject, partly because I suspect that the idea of “emerging leaders” is more helpful to the goals of the movement than is the “emerging leader” designation for individual arts professionals. But more on this later.
• Etsy is now a certified B corporation.

BIG IDEA CORNER

• Don’t miss this six-part blog post by Center for Effective Philanthropy President Phil Buchanan giving a full-throated defense of the nonprofit sector against those who idealize “business thinking.” Phil holds a Harvard MBA, so it’s not like he doesn’t know whereof he speaks.
• The Future of Music Coalition’s Joe Silveri makes the case for a global music registry.
• Lucy Berhnolz and Patrick Hussey wax eloquent on the massive potential for data to change the way we live and work.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Americans for the Arts released its long-awaited follow-up to Arts & Economic Prosperity III, and — wait a sec — the economic impact of the arts went down?! From $166.2 billion to $135.2 billion? Supporting 26% fewer jobs? It’s true. While organization expenditures remained more or less constant in 2010 (when the study was conducted) compared to 2005, audience spending dropped like a stone due to the recession’s influence. Unfortunately, the results underscore the downside of relying on this particular argument to advocate for the arts, as the economic impact narrative to date had been all about more, more, more: the arts are a growth industry, so you should support them! Now it’s, the arts are shrinking, so you should….still support them? My previous review of AEP III is here. Meanwhile, Catherine Brandt has an entertaining account of enforcing the embargo on the AEP IV results.
• In other research from Americans for the Arts, Randy Cohen details a couple of novel ways of understanding the competitive environment for arts organizations in a region through the Local Arts Index: millennial share and the four-firm concentration ratio.
• Which neighborhoods in the US are gentrifying the fastest? Here is one estimate by the Fordham Institute, which names such surprising cities as Oklahoma City, Chattanooga, and Roanoke VA among the leaders. But Matt Bevilacqua at Next American City takes issue with the methodology of that analysis, which uses an increase in the share of white, non-Hispanics as a proxy for gentrification.  Bevilacqua makes the case that in certain cities such as Washington DC, people of color can be the agents of gentrification as well. While I don’t disagree with Bevilacqua’s point, it underscores the need for a clearer sense of what we actually mean when we invoke the g-word. Because honestly, my sense from hearing lots of people talk about this issue over the past few years is that most have a pretty clear picture–some might say stereotype–in their minds of what gentrification looks like, and to them it looks like  “white people moving in.” Rightly or wrongly, it seems like Fordham’s proxy measure is pretty faithful to this idea.
• Fascinating: some university researchers are turning to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find psychology test subjects and survey respondents, in order to avoid the “WIERD” (from Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, Democratic societies) bias inherent in using college students for that purpose. There’s even a whole blog about using experimental methods on crowdsourced populations.

ETC.

• This beautiful Father’s Day tribute from Rocco Landesman brightened my day when I read it, as did the photos of Fred Landesman’s gorgeous paintings. Well worth a read.

Grand Rapids LipDub – photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.

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

This is a scary trend.

He goes on to add:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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