• Americans for the Arts hosted a blog salon last month on the Common Core State Standards (“the next big thing in education”) and what they mean for arts education. I particularly enjoyed former colleague Richard Kessler’s “Steal This Blog” entry.
• Quite interesting analysis from Barry Hessenius of possible future directions for local arts agencies.
• Burning Man is in danger of losing its longtime home due to new county regulations seemingly aimed at pushing the arts festival out, including prohibiting nudity. The county had previously hit Burning Man with an $800,000 bill for police services, a nearly fivefold increase over last year.
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports on the two candidates for President and their positions on issues of concern to nonprofits.
• B Corporations, those hybrid entities that pursue both profit and social purpose, have apparently become wrapped up in a Tea Party conspiracy theory. Because they are mentioned in a United Nations report ominously (to conservatives) titled “Agenda 21,” legislation to create B Corporations in North Carolina was recently stonewalled.
• The government of Turkey is pursuing a particularly aggressive campaign to recover its antiquities from museums around the world.

IN THE FIELD

• The New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts is the anchor attraction for a new residential development in economically challenged Newark called One Theater Square. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is cited as a model.
• The Pacific Standard Time art festival in Los Angeles, organized by the Getty Foundation, was a big success in terms of drawing national media attention to LA and its 20th-century artists. But in terms of driving attendance to the participating museums? Not so much.
• The Baltimore Symphony’s “Rusty Musicians” program has become a poster child of sorts for institutional programs that welcome adult audience members as participants. The New York Times‘s Dan Wakin embedded himself among the amateur musicians over the summer, and offers an entertaining account of the experience.
• Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge CEO Derek Gordon passed away last month at the age of 57.

BIG IDEAS

• Very interesting: Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution blog, after talking up the coming sea change in online education, are getting in on the act with their own resource entitled MRUniversity; their first course covers developmental economics. Cowen and Tabarrok are themselves professors at the bricks-and-mortar George Mason University.
• Is it already backlash time for collective impact? Silicon Valley Community Foundation CEO Emmet Carson plays the devil’s advocate; FSG’s Emily Gorin Malenfant offers a defense.
• Roberto Bedoya has an important critique of creative placemaking in a new online journal entitled Arts in a Changing America published by former LINC collaborator Maribel Alvarez. Bedoya argues that in their zeal to refashion America’s communities, creative placemaking advocates have ignored “history, critical racial theory, and [the] politics…of belonging and dis-belonging” at the expense of economic development and urban planning technocracy. On the one hand, I think Bedoya’s right to call attention to the creative placemaking movement’s tendency at times to blithely dismiss hot-button cultural tensions like gentrification and social inequality. It’s something I’ve noticed and commented upon here as well, though only in passing so far. At the same time, I don’t want creative placemaking to get bogged down in academic “discourses” that delight in problematizing status-quo practices without, in my estimation, offering much in the way of practical solutions. As much as I agree with aspects of Bedoya’s critique, I found myself wishing by the end of it that I had a better sense for what kinds of arts grantmaking or programming practices promote his desired sense of belonging.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Warhol Foundation is planning to sell off its collection of the artist’s work, boosting its endowment by nearly half.
• David Byrne’s new book offers a “radically transparent” view into the economics of the music industry, through his own experiences.
• It turns out that one of New York City’s most significant institutional funders of the arts, arguably, is one you’ve likely never heard of. Arts Brookfield is the cultural programming and presentation arm of Brookfield Office Properties, managers of several high-profile buildings including the World Financial Center. Run by Deborah Simon, Arts Brookfield spends $1 million directly presenting performances and exhibitions in the public spaces of its properties each year. The article includes this money quote: “Brookfield executives say that for them art is an investment in the core business that pays off in a better class of tenants and higher rents.” In an ironic twist, Brookfield Office Properties is perhaps better known to artists as the owners of Zuccotti Park, made famous as the staging ground of the Occupy Wall Street protests. OWS and Brookfield tussled in the press and the courts for months last year as the latter tried to evict protesters from their de facto headquarters. Perhaps strangest of all is to see Judd Greenstein, a ringleader of the Occupy Musicians offshoot of OWS (and friend of this blog), quoted in the Times article singing the praises of Brookfield now that he is curating a concert series for them: “’They have been really open-minded and flexible….You can talk to them about the power of an idea, and that’s really liberating.” Sometimes the world is very weird.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Kudos to the Foundation Center for coming clean about published mistakes in recent research about multiyear giving patterns.
• One of the tragic consequences of our field’s fragmented funding infrastructure is that support for the arts tends to be concentrated in large urban metros. While especially apparent in funding for art projects themselves, it applies equally to research about the arts, which means that creative activities in rural areas fly even further under the radar than they would otherwise. A new project called the “Rural Arts and Culture Map” aims to do something about this by crowdsourcing stories, media, and video testimonials about art in the boonies.

ETC.

• A panoply of established leaders in the arts share the wisdom they have learned over the years. A highly personal and at times touching collection of lessons.

PUBLIC POLICY AND THE ARTS – FEDERAL

• The State Department, though the New England Foundation for the Arts, is funding a major new cultural diplomacy program aimed at bringing foreign artists to small and midsize cities across the United States.
• Alyssa Rosenberg apparently wasn’t done going through the arts records of the 2012 Presidential candidates; here’s her take on Barack Obama.
• The Future of Music Coalition is really developing a top-notch policy shop within its ranks. No other arts service organization I know of is as on top of current (non-NEA-related) legislation as they are. Policy Fellow Liz Allen takes a thorough look at a proposal put forward by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) that would make streaming a work without the copyright owner’s permission a felony in certain circumstances.
• Some big-name fashion designers are agitating for copyright protection of their works. I haven’t yet formed an opinion, but I have yet to read a commentary from outside of the fashion industry who thinks this is a good idea.
• Judith Dobrzynski reports that the Smithsonian’s proposed budget appropriation for FY2012 has suffered little impact from the Hide/Seek controversy late last year.
• As mentioned, the same House of Representatives budget has a 16% cut for the NEA included for next year. But at least the House defeated an amendment that would have cut an additional $10.6 million.
• Scott Walters has been hard at work analyzing the proportion of the NEA’s recently-announced Our Town grants that went to small and rural communities. Bottom line: although there were some out-of-the-way areas that received grants (more than I personally expected to see, in fact), Scott shows both that the overall distribution is still weighted towards big cities even after population size and the number of applications from different-size communities are taken into account. A follow-up post offers some interpretations.

PUBLIC POLICY AND THE ARTS – STATE AND LOCAL

• Denver has consolidated its Office of Cultural Affairs within a larger city agency, and some people are not happy about it.

PUBLIC POLICY AND THE ARTS – INTERNATIONAL

• More on the Dutch arts cuts, which are apparently supported by 60% of the population despite the fact that the burden will fall mostly on local organizations.
• An expansion of the comprehensive Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe will include countries in Asia. When is the USA going to get in on this?
• The invaluable Christopher Madden has penned a helpful two–part rundown of New Zealand’s cultural policies.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA has released a new research note looking at the proportion of the national GDP accounted for by (mostly for-profit) cultural industries including performing arts, museums, movies, music, publishing, and, uh…sports.
• CEOs for Cities finds a clear connection between walkability and real estate values. It would be an interesting research project to disentangle the effects of walkability from arts amenities in examining their shared influence on housing prices.
• Missed this nugget before: is it true that we’ve lost 50% of the arts journalism jobs in America over the past 5-8 years? Dennis Scholl doesn’t cite a source, but if so, wow.
• Pew Research is out with a new study featuring some eye-popping stats about the disparity with which the recession affected different racial groups. The median wealth of whites dropped 16%, but 53% for blacks, 54% for Asians, and an astounding 66% for Hispanics. Hispanics in particular are concentrated in states where housing values dropped through the floor, meaning that much of the drop is from plummeting home equity (made worse by increasing consumer debt). Perhaps even more amazing is the disparity between whites, blacks and Hispanics in terms of current median wealth: the median white household had 19 times as much wealth as the median black household and 15 times the wealth of the median Hispanic household in 2009; by far the highest ratios recorded since 1984. And yes, Tommer, this is relevant to the arts. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it should be no great mystery why arts institutions have a hard time reaching nonwhite audiences. Sure, it’s about the content to some extent. But really, it’s about the money. (More from the Center for Social Inclusion’s Maya Wiley.)
• Here’s some more information about the UK’s new national wellbeing measurement project. Household members will answer four questions (as part of a larger survey) about how satisfied they are with their lives generally, whether they find meaning in their activities, and how happy or anxious they felt yesterday. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has further commentary.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND DIALOGUE

• Barry’s Blog has another gigantic forum going on this month, this time focusing on arts education. The Hewlett Foundation’s Julie Fry is co-hosting.
• Ron Evans does us all a favor, poring through the tweets from the Americans for the Arts Convention and picking out his personal top 50. (Part I; Part II)
• Devon Smith, not surprisingly, is all over Google+.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Leah Krauss is the new dance program officer for the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, after having previously served as a consultant.

ETC.

• RIP Tactical Philanthropy Advisors. Long live Tactical Philanthropy!
• Boo to the vandals who robbed Silent Barn of $20,000 worth of gear earlier this month. And a reminder that if you have a performance space, you need insurance!