FEDERAL

Beyond the official departure of Rocco, it’s been a slow news season at the federal level for the arts. One series of developments, however, has involved the Internet Radio Fairness Act, or IRFA. If you listen to Pandora (as I do), you might have heard advertisements in the fall urging action on this bill, which would lower what Pandora claims are high rates it has to pay to rightsholders in order to broadcast their music. Trouble is, the royalties that artists actually receive from Pandora and other streaming services are already extremely shitty, so as you can imagine artists aren’t a huge fan of this one. After a hearing that didn’t go well for IRFA, the bill is shelved for now – but may be re-introduced under a new name this year.

STATE AND LOCAL

Appropriations season has begun for state arts councils, and we are getting an early look into how things might go this spring through the stories that are developing now. Overall, there’s some of the usual attempts to cut budgets, but they don’t seem to have the same teeth as in previous years. Two years after Kansas temporarily zeroed out the budget for its arts council, a proposal to gradually eliminate funding for the state arts council in neighboring Oklahoma is thankfully dead in the water. In South Carolina, Governor Nikki Haley is trying to mess with the state arts commission yet again, though she has given up on doing away with the agency’s grant budget and only wants to get rid of its staffing (how she expects the grants to get awarded without a staff is anyone’s guess). And the California Arts Council is set to lose about $160,000 per year it was getting from donations via California taxpayers’ tax returns.

Meanwhile, as we know, states support the arts through other means besides direct funding. For years, many states have offered tax credit to lure film studios; now, several are trying to do the same with Broadway productions. Illinois passed a law just over a year ago allowing shows such as the Cyndi Lauper musical “Kinky Boots” to receive a tax credit for previewing in the state before hitting New York. Louisiana and Rhode Island have similar legislation on the books. Now Massachusetts wants in on the act as well, though Jeff Jacoby sees trouble down that road.

On the local front, after a millage (property tax) measure to support public art in Ann Arbor failed in November, the city council has voted to suspend the existing public art program so that it can be retooled, hopefully to allow more flexibility in how the funds are spent. At Oregon Arts Watch, Barry Johnson gives an incredibly in-depth account of how Portland’s more successful ballot initiative came to pass (literally) – a must-read for anyone involved in arts advocacy. And ticket sellers take note: Maryland’s highest court has ruled that Ticketmaster’s annoying service fees amount to scalping – in violation of a Baltimore ordinance outlawing the sale of tickets above their face value.

INTERNATIONAL

Great news coming from Toronto, as a billboard tax that advocates have long sought is now going to be diverted toward the city’s arts funding. The tax will eventually bring in $22.5 million per year, boosting the city’s cultural budget by nearly 50% over current levels. It probably doesn’t hurt that arts funding enjoys overwhelming support in Canada, with 87% of respondents to a recent poll saying that government should place a “moderate amount” to a “great deal” of importance on the arts.

Over in merry England, though, things remain chaotic. Arts Council England’s budget will fall £11.6 million between now and 2015, on top of much more drastic cuts enacted in 2010. Meanwhile, multiple cultural leaders in the UK are under fire from the arts community there, including British Culture Secretary Maria Miller. A backlash against the policies of Creative Scotland got so bad that its head, Andrew Dixon, resigned in disgrace. Through it all, England’s cities are facing crushing budget crises: Somerset has already cut its entire culture budget and Westminster is threatening to do the same. The biggest city to contemplate 100% cuts to arts funding was Newcastle, but shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman has stepped in at the 11th hour to prevent that from happening.

Further afield on the Continent, the Netherlands’ arts scene is reeling from budget cuts totaling €470 million, a huge amount for this tiny country. According to the article, “about 40 of the 120 cultural arts organizations in the country became ineligible for federal grants this year. Some of them have been able to secure financing from other sources, but at least two dozen had to fold at the beginning of the year.” Head-scratching policies include a rule that no more than one dance company can be supported per city, leading to the closure of the country’s premier modern dance group, Dansgroep Amsterdam. But hey, at least a tattooed composer and performing arts professor ran fifth in the presidential election of the country that brought you Vaclav Havel!

Recently, Brazil made headlines by promoting a new government policy that gives workers earning up to five times the minimum wage the equivalent of $25 a month to spend on cultural purchases. Ninety percent of the bill is footed by the employer, with the remaining 10% coming out of the worker’s pocket, so it’s like one of those Groupons where you pay $2.50 for a $25 gift card. (The employer expenses are offset 1:1 by tax credits, so it’s still effectively a government subsidy.) The workers really do get a card, which is controlled so that it can only be spent on cultural purchases. Joe Patti wonders why something like this couldn’t work in the United States, although Maria Vlachou isn’t convinced the measure is solving the right problem. For my part, the idea reminds me of my old proposal for income-sensitive tickets (that I think is perhaps worth a revisit).

Finally, we’d written previously about the ongoing tragedy in Mali as Islamist militants took over much of the northern part of the country, threatening artists and destroying cultural heritage sites. Thanks to France’s military intervention, the rebels were driven out of the ancient city of Timbuktu last month, but not before they set fire to two libraries containing thousands of manuscripts from medieval times. The materials presumed destroyed include an ancient history of West Africa and texts on astronomy, poetry and medicine dating back to 1204. There are lots of items that survived the conflict because they were hidden away from the rebels, but it’s still a terrible loss. Meanwhile,  UNESCO has announced that it will help to rebuild Timbuktu’s destroyed mausoleums using local mud-based materials and the buildings’ original plans.

The big news last month was the campaign for and passage of a millage (property tax) in Detroit to support the beleaguered Detroit Institute of the Arts. Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer and ARTSBlog’s Kim Kober are celebrating the new legislation, which passed easily in Wayne and Oakland counties but only by a hair in suburban Macomb. The DIA took the campaign very seriously, spending an astonishing $2.5 million on raising awareness and getting out the vote, despite facing little organized opposition. It’s clearly a victory for hard-nosed arts advocacy, but I only wish that victory (and the resulting tax revenue) could have paid dividends for the entire arts community rather than a single institution, as it does in places like San Francisco, Denver and Cleveland. If other arts institutions follow suit, as Terry Teachout suggests, we could end up with an extremely unhelpful patchwork of government support for the arts whose lack of flexibility is written into the law. On the other hand, the voters in Detroit and environs have spoken, and it’s a meaningful testament to the DIA’s community relevance that this measure was able to pass. Indeed, attendance at the museum has jumped (at least temporarily) since the vote was taken. (Nina Simon, Diane Ragsdale, and Maria Vlachou have more.)

The first draft of the much-ballyhooed 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan has been unveiled. Conducted by Lord Cultural Resources for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the plan contains a mind-bogglingly ambitious raft of recommendations for the city’s next few decades, based on participation by about citizens in four town halls, about 20 “neighborhood cultural conversations,” meetings, interviews, and online. All in all, about 3,000 people have participated, according to the draft. This extensive process produced 36 recommendations and hundreds of potential initiatives, which, if collectively adopted, would add tens of millions of dollars to the city’s annual investment in the arts. The reaction so far has mostly focused on this level of ambition – as Chris Jones writes in the Chicago Tribune, “if half of the recommendations in the draft of the Chicago Cultural Plan — heck, even 5 percent of the recommendations — were implemented, Chicago would become an artistic nirvana without global peer.” It seems obvious that the initiatives are not intended to be implemented all together – but it seems like an effective plan would prioritize specific actions in a clear sequence, not just present a gigantic brain dump of options. There are other criticisms as well – most notably, the Chicago Reader points out that “nine of the ten priorities and 33 of the 36 recommendations are updates or restatements of items in the original Chicago Cultural Plan, commissioned in 1985.” The final version of the plan is due to be released this fall. There’s more reaction and commentary – not all of it negative – from Kelly Kleiman, Elysabeth Alfano, Tanveer Ali, and Philip Hartigan.

In other local news, the Fort Worth (TX) Arts Council has had its budget cut by 25% as a result of recent financial issues for the city.  By contrast, there’s not much going on at the state and federal level. But remember the Kansas Arts Foundation, the nonprofit that was supposed to replace the Kansas Arts Commission after the latter’s budget was zeroed out by Governor Sam Brownback? Well, it ended up raising $105,000, but surprise surprise, has not made any grants.

INTERNATIONAL

The real action these past few months has taken place outside of the United States, and unfortunately most of the news has been bad. Europe’s financial instability is not surprisingly having an effect on government support for culture in countries suffering from high debt, particularly Greece, Spain, and Italy. Greece’s spending has dropped 35% since 2009, and in Italy,

[T]he Uffizi Gallery in Florence is renting itself out for fashion shows, and Rome’s MAXXI Museum has been placed under state receivership. The building opened just two years ago and was feted internationally for its splashy design by architect Zaha Hadid, but after its €7-million ($8.7-million) subsidy shrank by 43 per cent, the museum could barely cover staff wages.

In Spain, the Fundación Caja Madrid has closed 48 cultural centers around the country, and analysts fear thousands of creative sector jobs are at stake. The arts are feeling the pinch in some of Europe’s richer countries as well. After suffering through a cut of 25% last year, the Netherlands culture budget is looking at potentially losing another up to another 16 million euros to meet EU debt targets, and even Finland of all places is tightening its belt (while increasing funding for sports clubs).

In the South Pacific, Australia is in the midst of a major upheaval to its arts funding system. Following a review by two “corporate advisors,” the Australia Council for the Arts is restructuring many of its programs and considering doing away with its discipline-based peer review system that mirrors in many respects that of the National Endowment for the Arts. And speaking of transition, the UK is changing culture ministers (who apparently won’t be missed) and chairmen of Arts Council England (the new guy’s claim to fame is bringing the TV show Big Brother to the Brits). Just two years after sustaining substantial cuts, Arts Council England is facing the prospect of having its administrative structure decimated, resulting in the loss of up to 150 staff members by next July. But hey, at least ACE is pioneering a new program to help encourage more paid internships in the arts!

Meanwhile, the past couple of months have featured more than their share of repression of artistic statements by conservative governments. The recent cause celebre of free speech advocates has been the all-female Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years in a forced labor camp for staging a 45-second guerrilla art performance at an Orthodox church. Coverage of the initial sentencing was extensive, but Jillian Steinhauer has been keeping a close eye on the aftermath of the decision. Meanwhile, officials in the island nation of the Maldives have banned mixed-gender dancing altogether and discouraged any singing and dancing at government-sponsored events, deeming such activities contrary to Islamic values. And the right-wing leadership of Hungary has actually gone the opposite route, co-opting the government-controlled Budapest New Theater so as to promote performances of an anti-Semitic play.

Finally, three very sad stories from Africa and the Middle East show how art can be grievously impacted by the absence of a functioning government. First, in Mali, a gang of Islamic fundamentalists has wreaked havoc on the historic treasures of Timbuktu. In Somalia, a comedian (yes, a comedian) was assassinated by members of an extremist group in retaliation for his biting satire of said group. And in war-torn Syria, many museums, monuments, and historical treasures are either at grave risk or are already lost, recalling the disaster that befell Iraq’s cultural heritage following the American invasion in 2003. These tragedies may seem far away, but referring to the upheaval in Timbuktu, Delali Ayivor puts it in starker terms: “Imagine a group of people who make no apologies for desecrating your history, who revel in the destruction of your identity. Envision then, the sense of helplessness, the horror as you watch them dismantle the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, The Alamo, Ground Zero, as they set fire to Yosemite, set off a blast that decimates the Grand Canyon.” Yikes.

Sorry to be depressing! I wish I could tell you that there was some good news for arts funding coming out of the international arts community during this period, but there seems to be precious little to celebrate. Just one of those accidents of history, I guess.

CLOSURES, OPENINGS, MERGERS, AND PAY CUTS

• Gentrification claims another arts space in Williamsburg.
• The Sacramento Opera and Philharmonic are in active merger talks.
• I would like to see more of this kind of story: after Pittsburgh Symphony musicians agreed to a new contract that forced them to take a 9.7% pay cut, their music director, Manfred Honeck, announced that he would take a 10% cut too. Of course, Manfred can afford to lose a bit of income, as he made $546,700 last year. But still, it’s surprisingly rare that we see even this much of a gesture from the leaders of organizations under financial duress. Meanwhile, the Wichita Symphony players recently accepted a further 20% pay reduction, on top of a voluntary wage cut of nearly 14% over the past two years. No word on any concessions made by the music director there.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Paul Brest, who has been president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a little over a decade, is retiring next year.
• Antony Bugg-Levine will be the new CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund. Bugg-Levine was formerly Managing Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, and is an expert in impact investing.
• Mario Garcia Durham, the former NEA Director of Artist Communities and Presenting, will be the new President and CEO of the Association of Arts Presenters, replacing Sandra Gibson.

PHILANTHROPY TALK

• The philanthropy/nonprofit blogspace is all abuzz over the fact that GOOD, a for-profit media company focused on social causes, has bought Jumo, the social media and crowdfunding platform for nonprofits started by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. The fact that Jumo is itself a nonprofit that was started with the help of $3.5 million in grants from the Ford and Knight Foundations and Omidyar Network seems to be the source of the intrigue.
• Good news for cultural diplomacy enthusiasts: New York’s Robert Sterling Clark Foundation has dramatically increased the resources it is pumping into international cultural exchange programs. A list of grants made so far is available here.
• The Save America’s Treasures grant program, administered through the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is shutting down.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Emerging arts leaders: do the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Council and your fellow citizens a solid, and fill out this survey to share tips, tools, and resources that you find useful with your peers.
• Musicians: do the Future of Music Coalition and your fellow citizens a solid, and fill out this survey about the ways in which you make your money (or don’t). I hear there are iPads to be won!
• I think it’s pretty awesome that the American Planning Association would publish a report called “Community Character: How Arts and Culture Strategies Create, Reinforce, and Enhance Sense of Place.”
• The Aspen Institute is studying artist-endowed foundations.
• Ways in which cities are using data and research to improve citywide out-of-school-time (OST) systems.
• Freakonomics contributor Daniel Hamermesh is out with a new book called Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. I’ve been interested in this topic for at least a decade, ever since I first became aware of psychology and economics studies showing the substantial life benefits reaped by attractive people, and am glad to see it starting to enter the mainstream conversation. Curiously, the data suggests that there is more downside than upside to the attractiveness game for men as compared with women. Hamermesh goes so far as to make a (fairly cogent) argument for fashioning a legally protected class out of the ugly. Fascinating stuff!
• Sage advice for young cultural researchers from Canada’s Lidia Varbanova: “Cultural policy research field is rewarding but not an easy one: it requires a good portion of diplomacy and negotiation skills as it reflect diverse stakeholders because research without policy actions stays only in the libraries without real impact on improving the creative life of cultural professionals and the communities. It also needs patience, as in many cases undertaking practical policy actions as a result of research findings requires time, lobbying and joined advocacy efforts.”

ART AND THE LAW

• The previously-blogged New Jersey plan to require nonprofits in the state to allow program-restricted donations has been thankfully dropped.
• A little-known provision in current copyright law allows artists to apply for reinstatement of the ownership rights to their work after 35 years. That deadline is coming up and record labels, publishers, and others that rely on the assignment of copyright (and milking cash cow artists) for their business model are understandably freaking out about it and trying to challenge the law. The conflict centers on whether (for example) albums made under a recording contract can be considered “work for hire” and thus belong to the record company by default. With the legal ramifications unclear, Representative John Conyers has come out on the side of the artists.
• I never thought I’d be writing these words, but there is going to be an arts policy storyline on a major network television show.

ART AND GOVERNMENT

• Sam Brownback just doesn’t know when to quit. Not satisfied with being the first governor in history to completely defund his own state’s arts commission, now he’s having his chief of staff show up at ribbon-cutting events to mouth off about how wonderful the arts are. Meanwhile, he refuses to reconsider his decision – despite the fact that the state now has a $180 million surplus.
• Jay Dick from Americans for the Arts explains the complex web of societies for elected officials and why AFTA tries to have a presence at their convenings. In my (still developing) observation, this type of advocacy seems to be what AFTA is best at: the behind-the-scenes relationship building that takes place in different corners of the country and among policy insider circles. I sometimes think AFTA doesn’t get enough credit for its work in this area, which to my mind would be very difficult for others in the arts field to replicate. It’s definitely soft power rather than the hard power represented by massive lobbying dollars or enormous mobs with pitchforks, but soft power is better than nothing.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

• Diane Ragsdale considers the shape of arts cuts and new funding models in the Netherlands and Australia. Meanwhile, severalEuropean impresarios talk about the effect of recent budget cuts on their plans and speculate about the future.
• Sad news: a British cultural council in Afghanistan has been the focus of a terrorist attack. At least twelve people died in the fighting, mostly Afghani police and security guards.

AND SO ON…

• If you’re hankering for some great live jazz streamed direct to your computer, Tara George has your fix.
• I enjoyed this neat idea from Andrew Taylor on “job function trading cards.” He’s definitely right that small organizations risk making suboptimal use of their employees’ unique talents because they are too beholden to job descriptions.
• It sounds a little ridiculous, but I actually think these “gofer” services popping up are pretty brilliant. Besides providing value to buyers and sellers, it could help the long-term unemployed stay productive and earn a little on the side.

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!

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Steve Gunderson is stepping down as CEO of the Council on Foundations.
• Social justice groups are freaked out that the previously-reported departure of Gara LaMarche from Atlantic Philanthropies will mean less money for social justice.
• Will Miller is the new President of the Wallace Foundation.
• Luis Cancel is out as head of the San Francisco Arts Commission. There’s apparently some intrigue around this one, as Cancel was under pressure for his treatment of staff and for working too much from home – his second home, that is, in Rio de Janeiro. Vice President JD Beltran has been named interim director.
• Congratulations to Arts Council for Long Beach Executive Director Craig Watson, who has been announced as the new director of the California Arts Council. Culture Monster has more.
• The Joyce Foundation in Chicago has a new senior program officer for culture: Angelique Power. Power replaces Michelle T. Boone, who left earlier this year to become the new commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
• Dave Dombrosky is no longer the executive director of the Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, proprietors of the Technology in the Arts blog.
• Finally, a special thanks to Grantmakers in the Arts, from whom I get most of my foundation personnel announcements. Tommer, Steve, Abigail, and Janet have seriously been doing a great job over there this year.

ART AND GOVERNMENT

• The NEA has announced the inaugural round of Our Town grants. Rocco’s signature program got an extra $1.5 million in the end despite midyear cuts to the agency, and a total of 51 awards were announced rather than the 35 originally anticipated.
• In a new partnership with the Knight Foundation, the NEA is funding a new arts journalism challenge grant program. On the NEA’s Art Works blog, Kerry Lengel offers a post-mortem on the recent pop-up journalism experiment Engine28.
• Unfortunately, the NEA’s funding is being chipped away at again by the committee in the House of Representatives that controls appropriations. They’re now looking at $135 million for FY2012, which would be the largest cut in 16 years. Not only that, Congresscritters are now trying to micromanage the NEA’s awards programs. There’s still time to act.
• Finally, some good news from the states on arts agency appropriations: Ohio is looking at a 30% increase, Pennsylvania avoided a drastic cut, and in New Jersey a Republican governor actually removed budget language that would have reduced appropriations by a further 27%. ARTSBlog has the skinny, and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies looks at the big picture.
• Wise words from Think Progress’s Alyssa Rosenberg, in response to those who might think fighting for public arts funding isn’t worth the trouble: “If you’re thinking strategically about the long-term argument between progressive and conservative worldviews, it’s conceding a lot of ground to walk away from programs where government investment is small as long as we think it might still be useful.” Alyssa has been doing the yeoman’s work of looking up the arts records of each of the 2012 Republican candidates or potential candidates for President. I wish there were more of interest to report, but basically they all suck for the one-issue arts voter (of which there are, like, dozens I’m sure). If Mike Huckabee were running, it’d be a different story. Anyway, here are Alyssa’s profiles of Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Tim Pawlenty, Gary Johnson (who?), Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and good ol’ Newt Gingrich. (Speaking of Alyssa, she kindly picked up our Createquity Arts Policy Library block party and offered some commentary.)

ARTS POLICY ACROSS THE WORLD

• Arts Council England unveils a plan to increase private giving to the arts in the UK.
• Simon van den Berg gives a great first-person perspective on the why, how, and what it’s like of recent cuts to arts funding in the Netherlands.

GIVING NOTES

• Alec Baldwin takes to ARTSBlog to talk about a giving campaign from CapitalOne to support Americans for the Arts. I was impressed to read that CapitalOne is actually including an insert with the monthly statement (with him on it) to get the word out.
• Phil Buchanan notes that foundations can’t expect grantees to measure effectiveness without help.
• The fact that the Gates Foundation has a philanthropy program is news to me, but it’s welcome news. Gates’s Darin McKeever posts on Tactical Philanthropy about an 18-month planning process for the program as well as the directions in which it is heading (part I; part II).
• There’s a new Awesome Foundation chapter in Seattle, and this one features Grantmakers in the Arts Deputy Director Tommer Peterson. Read all about it here; the blog is worth reading for other reasons as well.

ETC.

• Wondering what a millennial generation’s approach to dealing with our budget deficit would look like, since they’re the ones who will be most affected by it? The Roosevelt Institute and Peter G. Peterson Foundation did too, and convened a gaggle of 18- to 26-year-olds to come up with a plan (which has been scored by the Congressional Budget Office). Freakonomics has the details here; from the highlights, it sounds center-left and quite sensible.
• Chad Bauman points out differences in how nonprofit and commercial arts organizations approach dynamic pricing.
• Over at Technology in the Arts, Createquity Fellowship alum Crystal Wallis walks us through some examples of participatory performing arts.
• Alex Ross finally weighs in on the NYC Opera meshugas, which seems to be getting uglier by the day. My take: I don’t know that NYCO has much choice but to move from Lincoln Center or drastically change its union contracts, given the disastrous financial situation that George Steel inherited from Gerard Mortier and Susan Baker. I have a great deal of respect for Steel, but he does seem to be losing the PR war, which is an important leadership task. I suspect it would help matters greatly if there were a clearer, longer-term artistic vision expressed than what has been shared to date – and if Steel offered to take a (temporary) pay cut.
• Want.

(By the way: I’m starting to think that I might standardize the section titles in the round-up. Any thoughts?)

ARTS AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Rhode Island is the newest state to recognize the L3C.
• Tim Mikulski reports on the activities of a new coalition that is revising the 1994 National Standards for Arts Education.
• What would a Republican campaign for higher office be without a little copyright infringement? It’s really kind of inconvenient for them that most of the karaoke klassics out there were written by hardcore liberals.
• The IRS’s list of nonprofits whose status was revoked apparently contained some errors – apparently George Washington University and the University of Michigan were included, for example. Whoops!

THE ART OF GIVING

• The Irvine Foundation has announced its new strategy for the arts focusing on audience engagement. The WolfBrown white paper written about on this blog last week is clearly a part of this. You can watch the video and join the discussion on Irvine’s website – Rocco Landesman has already kicked things off.
• Meanwhile, former San Francisco Foundation program officer John Killacky has something to say to his erstwhile colleagues in the grantmaking world.
• Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest is back blogging, this time as a guest for Grantmakers in the Arts. In his first post, he points out that despite a major focus (and seeming agreement) within the funding community in recent years on the value of general operating support, there is little evidence of a pronounced upward trend in GOS grants. Change doesn’t come easy in the foundation world, I guess.
• Brian Newman wonders if the crowdfunding phenomenon exemplified by Kickstarter is, uh, crowding out donations from institutional funders.
• Finally, GiveWell offers a perspective on why we should expect giving effectively to be difficult.

MERGERS AND CLOSURES

• Arthouse at the Jones Center is exploring a merger with the Austin Museum of Art.
• Another orchestra down: The Seattle area’s Bellvue Philharmonic is no more after this weekend.
• Diane Ragsdale pays tribute to the now-defunct Florida Stage. The post also features a great and lengthy comment from National New Play Network Executive Director Jason Loewith.

APPOINTMENTS AND PROMOTIONS

• Lisa Philp will be the new Vice President for Strategic Philanthropy and Director of GrantCraft for the Foundation Center.
• Blogger, longtime executive director of the Center for Arts Education, and my former boss’s boss Richard Kessler will be the new Dean of Mannes College The New School for Music.
• Stellar Technology and the Arts blogger Amelia Northrup has taken on a new position as Strategic Communications Specialist at TRG Arts. Not content merely to share the news, Amelia goes out with a bang by sharing some fantastic tips for organizing your job search.

RESEARCH AND READINGS

• According to the latest Giving USA report, charitable contributions were up in 2010, but only slightly: 2.1%. The arts, however, fared better than most, seeing donations rising 4.1% after inflation. You might recall that Giving USA got some egg on its face earlier this year when evidence surfaced that its econometric models drastically underestimated the extent to which individual giving dropped during the recession. Now they say they’ve included another variable in the model that explains the drop, so this year’s estimate should (hopefully) be more trustworthy.
• With all the talk about eliminating or reducing the tax deduction donors receive for their charitable gifts, kudos to Sarah Lutman for digging into the Congressional Budget Office’s recommendations on the subject.
• Theatre Bay Area has published a report on social media use by arts organizations, authored by our friend Devon Smith of Threespot Consulting. Devon has her own account here.

ACROSS THE POND

• Going England one further, the right-wing government of The Netherlands is set to cut its arts funding by 25% and more than triple the tax on tickets to concerts. Sadly, the powers that be have chosen to let smaller arts organizations bear most of the burden – an especially heavy one since unlike here, government funding makes up the vast majority of revenue for most. Recommendations to phase in the cuts were ignored.
• Michael Kaiser reports from a trip to England (part I; part II); Michael Royce checks out the arts scene in Berlin (part I; part II; part III).
• Weirdness: a Chinese firm has contracted Albert Speer & Partner to build an exact replica of the Austrian village of Hallstatt – in Guangdong Province.
• Weirdness: Norway is apparently training its own diplomats how to explain black metal.
• Weirdness: a city in India has no municipal government – and is apparently doing pretty well. Marginal Revolution and Matt Yglesias provide interesting commentary.

BIG IDEA CORNER

• Meant to mention this last time around – National Arts Strategies is launching a cool-looking initiative designed to help CEOs become more effective leaders. Andrew Taylor provides his customary brief summary.
• Lee Streby has an extraordinary three–part exploration on what he would do if he were building an orchestra from scratch. And speaking of orchestras, Greg Sandow has been musing on how we might objectively evaluate the quality of their performances.
• Sasha Anawalt, Doug McLennan, et al. set up a five-day “pop-up newsroom” called Engine 28 last month to cover live theater convenings and events in LA. The LA Times has more.
• Dollars and sense: Assets for Artists is looking to expand beyond Massachusetts. Gary Steuer draws the line between arts education and economic development. Barry Hessenius on a different kind of arts endowment – and how we might fund it. And since I’m always a sucker for people questioning the premises behind microeconomics, here’s Justin Wolfers recounting how being a father has made him question the neoclassical model; and Seth Godin on why coordination, not competition, is the next frontier for economics.
• If you’ve ever played the mobile/tablet game Angry Birds, you know how addictive it can be. Now the company that makes Angry Birds, Rovio, is launching a totally visionary location- and accessory-based scavenger hunt in which visiting various special places in real life activates Easter egg features in the game. This is some seriously creative shit that arts marketers should be paying close attention to.

I’ll do a close reading of each paper in turn, then offer some concluding thoughts.

I. Marlet and van Woerkens

The first paper, authored by Dutch researchers Gerard Marlet and Clemens van Woerkens, compares creative class theory to human capital theory (human capital means the collective skills of a population, often represented by the percentage of adults with a college degree). This is the same question that was considered by Ed Glaeser in his review of The Rise of the Creative Class. Glaeser found that human capital was a better predictor of population growth in the set of US metropolitan areas mentioned in Florida’s book, though he did not look at employment growth.

Marlet and van Woerkens find that the creative class concentration in 1994 was a significant and reliable predictor of employment growth from 1994-2003 in Dutch cities. Notably, they find that this effect seems concentrated in urban areas; regional creative class share does not impact employment growth within the city. They test two different formulations of the creative class, Florida’s liberal definition which comes out to about 35% of Dutch workers, and a tighter definition leaving out people like secondary school teachers and government administrators. The two definitions perform similarly to each other. The authors also tried to disentangle causality by examining “exogenous” variables such as theater and musical performances, proximity to nature, quality of restaurants and secondary schools, number of students, and so on. I’m not totally convinced by this analysis since, as the authors acknowledge, many of these variables are probably influenced by creative class concentration as well, but it’s interesting to consider.

Marlet and van Woerkens also tested the creative class statistic against the concentration of people with Bachelor’s degrees, and found that the creative class was a better predictor of employment growth than human capital, with both a higher coefficient and stronger statistical significance. These results are replicated with different sets of years and when specific variables in the model are left out.

Finally, the authors looked at the Bohemian index (the concentration of artists in an area) and found that, while it does seem to have some explanatory power for employment growth over and above the creative class, this effect disappears when Amsterdam is removed from the sample. Perhaps Amsterdam’s status as a “world city” enables it to take advantage of artist concentrations in a way that smaller population centers cannot.

Marlet and van Woerkens conclude as follows (emphasis mine):

Members of the creative class are essentially working, but not necessarily highly educated, while highly educated people are not necessarily doing any work at all. Highly educated people might end up without jobs after studies, or choose for easy routine jobs, leaving their human capital largely unused….Levels of human capital can therefore be higher in places with more people working in creative jobs than in places with the same levels of education but less people working in creative jobs – not only because individual levels of skills and knowledge grow, but because everyone is making more and better use of other people’s knowledge. This means that the use of human capital may be more productive in places where more highly educated, creative people are living and working. Equal levels of human capital can, in other words, have different production outcomes due to different ways in which human capital is actually used: ‘working human capital’ is more productive than ‘non-working human capital’.

We suggest that it is not creativity in the sense of painting or making sculptures that makes Florida’s creative class responsible for regional growth differences. In our view creativity is the creative use of skills and knowledge. Defining creativity in this way makes the creative class an indicator for human capital.

Our overall conclusions are that Creative Class is theoretically much the same as Human Capital. To that extent we agree with Glaeser’s comment on Florida’s popular book. At the same time, the Creative Class standard – and this is precisely what Florida said in his ‘Response tot Edward Glaeser’s review’ – is in the Dutch case “a slightly better handle on actual skills, rather than using only an education-based measure – to measure what people do, rather than just what their training may say about them on paper”. By introducing the concept of Creative Class Richard Florida has found better standards for measuring human capital than the often-used education levels, this being his major (perhaps only) contribution to a better understanding of regional growth.

So that answers one question. But what drives the creative class to a particular area versus another? Marlet and van Woerkens followed up with another paper in 2005 entitled Tolerance, aesthetics, amenities or jobs? Dutch city attraction to the creative class. The co-authors understand that of Florida’s “3T’s,” the Tolerance indicator is really the linchpin of the three. (“Talent” is, after all, just human capital, which we’ve demonstrated above to be more or less the same as the creative class; and the idea that people who specialize in technology would gravitate to places with technology firms seems rather tautological.) Marlet and van Woerkens find none of the tolerance subcomponents (gay concentration, artist concentration, or pub closing hours) to be statistically significant in explaining the share of creative class workers in a city, and only one (artists) statistically significant in explaining creative class growth–and that in the wrong direction!

Rather than stop there, however, Marlet and van Woerkens go on to construct their own theory of what attracts creative class workers to the same place. In contrast to the “bohemian index” concept of concentration of artists, the co-authors find instead that the number of live performances per 1,000 residents is highly predictive of creative class concentration. This suggests that it is not self-defined artists but rather artistic activity that drives this growth (though when looking at actual creative class growth, performances lose some significance). Other significant drivers include proximity to nature, proximity to jobs, and the historic nature of buildings in the area. Each of these factors has an independent, positive association with creative class concentration. The co-authors go so far as to create an “amenity index” that has more robust explanatory power for this variable than any other single factor.

These papers are great. They are both quite readable, even if you don’t understand the numbers, and the analysis is, as far as I can tell, thorough and theoretically sound.

II. Florida, Mellander, and Stolarick

The major contribution of this paper, Inside the black box of regional development (purchase only — an earlier, free draft is available here), is to introduce a “stage-based” model that looks at the development process as a multi-step evolution rather than a simple cause and effect. Quoth the authors:

Our modeling approach is designed to address a significant weakness of previous studies of the effects of human capital and the creative class on regional development. Most of these studies use a single equation regression framework to identify the direct effects of human capital and other factors on regional development. The findings of these studies, not surprisingly, indicate that human capital outperforms other variables. But that does not establish that these other variables do not matter. First, something has to affect the initial distribution of human capital. Variables that have not performed well in other studies may exert influence by operating through human capital and thus indirectly affect regional development, or certain variables may operate through different channels. By using a system of equations our model structure allows us to parse the direct and indirect effects of key variables on each other as well as on regional development.

This new “path model” represents a bit of a departure from the theory presented in The Rise of the Creative Class. While the “3T’s” are still in evidence, Florida, Mellander and Stolarick now add universities and service amenities into the mix, as follows (click to enlarge):

As far as the human capital vs. creative class question goes, the co-authors make a useful, if slightly confusing, distinction between income (money received from mostly passive sources like investments and royalties) and wages (money earned from salaries, tips, and the like). They find that human capital is associated more strongly with income, but that the creative class has a stronger relationship with wages. No attempt is made to connect either metric with employment growth.

So what did they find? In a series of structural equation models (SEMs), not surprisingly, the “Talent” factor scored the best in predicting both wages and income. The co-authors used three different measures of talent: human capital, creative class concentration, and the super-creative core. Of these, only human capital performed well in predicting income but all three were reliable inputs into wages. In all cases, the relationship between Technology and income/wages seemed pretty weak, never getting above a correlation of .36. Tolerance varied wildly; in the version with income as the dependent variable and the super-creative core as the talent indicator, the correlation was as high as .46, but in the version with wages as the dependent variable and human capital as the talent indicator, the relationship was totally insignificant.

How about the factors that draw the creative class to a region? Taking the model that shows the strongest case for creative class theory, the creative class/wages version, we see that tolerance and universities seem to have decent, though not extraordinary correlations of .36 and .32 respectively. Service amenities have a statistically significant but low correlation of .16 with creative class concentrations.

Notably, in the above construction the R-squared for the Talent indicator is very weak, at .332 (for the super-creative core it’s even weaker, at .316). That means that only 33% of the variation in Creative Class concentration in a region can be explained by the combination of Tolerance (i.e., gay and bohemian concentrations), university faculty concentration, and service amenities. Human capital is much better explained by these factors, driven by a much stronger correlation between the Tolerance measure and human capital. I suspect, based on other reading I’ve done, that this is simply because artists and openly gay individuals are much more likely than the general populace to have college degrees.

In case the above three paragraphs were gobbledy-gook to you, the plain English version is that while the analysis contained in the paper is a head-and-shoulders improvement over that contained in the book, it still doesn’t really tell us all that much. The major weakness comes down to causality; even the authors admit that

the graphic picture of the structural model (Figure 1) expresses direct and indirect correlations, not actual causalities. Rather, the estimated parameters (path coefficients) provide information on the relation between the set of variables. Moreover, the relative importance of the parameters is expressed by the standardized path coefficients, which allow for interpretation of the direct as well as the indirect effects. We do not assume any causality among university, tolerance and consumer services but rather treat them as correlations.

Though it’s a stretch to say that the Marlet/van Woerkens article establishes causality beyond doubt, at least that paper uses employment growth over a period of time as the dependent variable. In other words, their model asks, “what can the concentration of creative class workers in a city in 1994 tell us about what happens to employment in that city between 1994 and 2003?” By contrast, Florida et al.’s model asks, “what can the concentration of creative class workers in a city in 2000 tell us about wages in that city in 2000?” Set up this way, the model cannot even pretend to be predictive. And as a result, it becomes far less useful.

Furthermore, the theoretical model placing the “3T’s” at the center in this paper struck me as a little forced. The authors seem to bend over backwards to come up with reasons why Tolerance is a signifier for other things that may or may not contribute to prosperity. Witness, for example, this rather vague series of assertions:

Fourth, locations with larger artistic and gay populations signal underlying mechanisms that increase the productivity of entrepreneurial activity. Because of their status as historically marginalized groups, traditional economic institutions have been less open and receptive to bohemian and gay populations thus requiring them to mobilize resources independently and to form new organizations and firms. We thus suggest that regions where these groups have migrated and taken root reflect underlying mechanisms that are more attuned to mobilization of such resources, entrepreneurship and new firm formation.

When I see stuff like this I think, why not just measure the underlying mechanisms directly? If the point is that entrepreneurship and new firm formation is good economically, then why not include self-employment and new firms formed per year in the model? Instead, we have artists and gays as proxies for all of these other things. But here’s an important difference between the two: artists, by the very nature of their work, actually produce things that in themselves make neighborhoods more valuable — like live performances, gathering spaces, aesthetic markers, and so on. Can we make any such generalizations about gays, lovely people though they may be?

Concluding thoughts

The whole kerfuffle around which of human capital or creative class theory better predicts economic development, while providing much fodder for the blog, in the end amounts to little more than an academic pissing match. Both sides agree that the two measures are highly correlated and mostly capture the same people with some variation at the edges. The real question, in my opinion, is what draws these highly talented individuals with much to offer their communities to one place over another? To answer that question, Marlet and van Woerkens offer a simple model that performs markedly better than the 3T’s approach despite hewing closely to concepts embraced in The Rise of the Creative Class: namely, that highly educated, talented people value ready access to jobs, natural beauty, authenticity, and a lively street scene in their local environment. Florida et al.’s paper, on the other hand, still feels to me like a model in search of a justification; there is even a lengthy note on page 13 going into some detail about how many other regression techniques failed before they settled on the one used in the paper. It makes me wonder whether the 3T’s are more of a hindrance than a help in developing useful frameworks for these questions; taking a fresh look at the problem, as Marlet and van Woerkens did, may prove more fruitful in the long run. What I do appreciate about Florida et al.’s contribution is that it takes a step toward breaking out these complex interactions into their component parts; in other words, positioning talent concentrations as the result of numerous inputs with their own causal links, rather than the move-lever-A-get-result-B style of analysis we have seen in the past. Clearly, though, we still have a long way to go before we’ll have a complete understanding of the mechanisms behind regional development in the 21st century.