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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

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

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

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

• 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.