• What is the deal with Shepard Fairey and the Boston Police? Anyone from the visual arts want to weigh in on whether the Obama “Hope” poster artist is getting his due or just getting harrassed? In related news, the AP goes after Fairey for copyright infringement for that poster and writes a “totally” “bias-free” AP article about its own action.
• In tough times, it’s nice to have public officials who see the arts as part of the solution, not part of the problem.
• Arts bloggers are starting to discover the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, or L3C, after the Nonprofit Law Blog posted a very helpful roundup of internet coverage of the nascent legal form. We had Robert Lang, the L3C’s originator, here at the Yale SOM Philanthropy Conference in December. You can read about that panel here.
• Secretary of the Arts? Not so much, but there is a new arts staffer in the (White) house. Kareem Dale is a lawyer and former board chair of Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago. Notably, his position is within the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs, which was an explicit recommendation made by Jonathan Sheffer when he spoke at the National Arts Policy Roundtable I attended in November. Apparently someone listened.
• And you thought the $50 million for the NEA was the only way to get arts funding from the feds through the stimulus package? The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies says hi.
• Whoa – the Annenberg Foundation might move to LA? This is not good news for Philly arts organizations.
• Andy Horwitz spills some of the beans on his prescription for new models of cultural production. I am struck by how many of what I thought were my own crazy ideas about the arts (in this case, a shift away from gargantuan institutions toward a more decentralized neighborhood/community model, the idea of the arts as R&D for society, the integration of “wisdom of crowds” thinking into the system) are reflected here, and in the writing of other people around the web. It tells me that a lot of the stuff I’ve been pushing for is perhaps not as radical as I thought, but rather just common sense.
• Nice writeup on the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Cultural Data Project.
• Musical talent is not all innate, according to this new study of kids taking keyboard lessons. Their brains grew larger in the areas relating to hearing and dexterity than a control group of students who did not participate in the lessons. The areas relating to arithmetic, on the other hand, did not appear to be affected by the training.

Anyway, on to the issues of the day:

• Barry Hessenius wants your opinion. More specifically, he wants you to send your nominations for the next NEA Chair to Barack Obama’s transition team.

  Nominate whomever you like – hopefully someone with nonprofit arts experience, familiarity with our issues, and vision for what our field needs. Nominate yourself if you like. I would suggest sending no more than two names, and include with each a brief (perhaps three or four sentence) background on who your nominee is (title, organizational affiliation etc.), and why that person would make a good choice (visionary, experience, effective leader – etc.)

  End the letter with some statement to the effect that this is a very important appointment to you, and the people in your community.

  Address the letter as follows:

  If Obama is victorious – send the letter to:
  John Podesta
  Obama Transition Team
  c/o Senator Barack Obama
  United States Senate
  Washington, D.C. 20510

  Apparently, former NEA Chairman Bill Ivey has been named head of Barack Obama’s transition team for arts and culture, and will be participating in a webinar with Americans for the Arts on Thursday, November 20. (Note: the webinar is free for AftA members, but a whopping $125 for everyone else.)

• Robert Shiller gets it. Shiller, perhaps the most famous behavioral economist out there, published an editorial in the New York Times this week arguing that groupthink among economists was responsible in part for failing to anticipate the home loan crisis:

  I BASED my predictions largely on the recently developed field of behavioral economics, which posits that psychology matters for economic events. Behavioral economists are still regarded as a fringe group by many mainstream economists. Support from fellow behavioral economists was important in my daring to talk about speculative bubbles.

  Speculative bubbles are caused by contagious excitement about investment prospects. I find that in casual conversation, many of my mainstream economist friends tell me that they are aware of such excitement, too. But very few will talk about it professionally.

  Why do professional economists always seem to find that concerns with bubbles are overblown or unsubstantiated? I have wondered about this for years, and still do not quite have an answer. It must have something to do with the tool kit given to economists (as opposed to psychologists) and perhaps even with the self-selection of those attracted to the technical, mathematical field of economics. Economists aren’t generally trained in psychology, and so want to divert the subject of discussion to things they understand well. They pride themselves on being rational. The notion that people are making huge errors in judgment is not appealing.

  Effectively, Shiller is accusing economists themselves of irrationality in thinking that others will act as rationally as they (think they) do. Love it. Meanwhile, Shiller’s own stock, already high as it is, is likely only to rise in the coming months and years. He saw the credit crisis coming in advance and even published a book about it as far back as 2005.

• Speaking of government financial policies, I learned something today which just blew my mind (though probably won’t be a suprise to anyone in my parents’ generation). Did you know that the tax rate for the top income bracket in this country was at least 70% from 1936 to 1981?! Or that it topped 90%(!) in 1944-45 and again from 1951 to 1963, encompassing the entire administration of noted commie Dwight D. Eisenhower? So, conservatives, when Obama says he’s going to roll back the Bush tax custs for the richest Americans to Clinton-era rates, put that in some freakin’ perspective, please.

• And over in philanthropy land, Sean Stannard-Stockton is spearheading an intriguing open-source bailout in the name of transparency. FORGE, a nonprofit devoted to serving refugee populations in Africa, is facing financial difficulties that threaten to foce the organization to shutter its doors. Its founder, Kjerstin Erickson, posted an SOS note on her blog at Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge site, and Sean picked it up soon afterwards. So far, he’s helped hook Kjerstin up with pro-bono strategic consulting and communications help, tons of ad-hoc advice, and doubtless some capital as well. Sean sees this as an “experiment in radical transparency” due to the forthrightness with which Erickson has presented her organization’s predicament and the willingness she has shown to make its attempted rescue a public affair. On its own, the public disclosure of financial troubles frankly doesn’t seem so groundbreaking to me, as we see this all the time in the arts–take Tonic, for example, which went public with an emergency fund drive a couple of years before it was forced to shut down, even though it’s not even a nonprofit organization–but to Sean’s and FORGE’s credit, I’ve never seen a project like this one before in which consultants advising an organization are making all of their work public and blogging about it to boot. It will be very interesting to see where this all leads, and if successful, whether other organizations in trouble will try to follow the same model.

• Finally, it’s instructive to compare two facts about Obama and McCain which tell you all about where the candidates and their parties were oriented with regard to the arts. On Obama’s side, artist Shepard Fairey (famed for the iconic “Obey Giant” stickers ubiquitous in hip urban streetscapes across the country) created an equally iconic poster series with official support from the campaign, sales of which apparently helped raise $400,000 for Obama’s primary campaign alone. This was part of the “Artists for Obama” effort which resulted in a stock of limited-edition prints that the campaign sold to supporters. There was no such analogous Artists for McCain effort. In fact, McCain’s campaign regularly stomped on artists’ intellectual property rights, getting themselves in hot water with Van Halen, Jackson Browne, Heart, John Mellencamp, Bon Jovi, the Foo Fighters, and others for using their songs at campaign events without permission or payment. Most artists didn’t need any convincing, but if you needed another reason to feel positive about this week’s events, there it is.