ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• This is pretty much the most creative cultural tourism gambit ever.
• The Michigan House approved a plan to contribute $195 million in state money to the “grand bargain” to save the Detroit Institute of Arts from the city’s creditors; this money would join the $366 million pledged by foundations, $100 million pledged by the museum itself, and possible funding from union groups. Some creditors still reject the deal, although the judge overseeing the proceedings has refused their request to remove and appraise every painting in the collection.
• “National and local governments don’t take decisions about arts funding based on evidence, however convincing it is.” The Guardian argues that our only hope for better public funding is to create “the kind of solid public support that makes cuts politically dangerous or, even better, unthinkable” through closer ties to local communities.
• Score one victory for the arts lobby: after a vigorous campaign by organizations such as the League of American Orchestras, the Obama administration has carved out an exception for musical instruments in its new ivory regulations.
• Meanwhile, the FCC is accepting public comments on its latest proposed net neutrality rules, which would seem to allow internet providers to strike deals with content sites for faster service – deals akin to those that already exist with tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Given the Commission’s recent flip-flopping, there’s no telling where this will lead, and we may not know until after the next election. One thing we do know: the idea of America itself is at stake.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Handler will be the new executive director of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, sponsor of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Handler is currently the program director at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
• Moy Eng, former director of both the Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program and Palo Alto’s Community School of Music and Arts, has been announced as the first executive director of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a real estate services provider for artists and arts organizations.
• John Horn, of the Los Angeles Times, will be the new host for an arts an entertainment program on KPCC, Southern California Public Radio.

IN THE FIELD

• Just a year after losing its highly respected director Deborah Cullinan to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts has just announced a major restructuring that will result in the closure of several programs and the layoffs of key staff. And NPR is cancelling “Tell Me More,” a little-heard daily talk show aimed at minority audiences, and eliminating 28 jobs. The National Association of Black Journalists blames lackluster promotion efforts.
• The San Diego Opera lives! But along with a full 2015 season, the company has announced layoffs including 13 full-time staff. And now the auditor is calling.
• New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning to gut-renovate its modern and contemporary wing to make room for a major gift of Cubist paintings and potentially create a new entrance from Central Park. Is this another case of museum hubris?
• The plan to dissolve the Corcoran Gallery of Art has been finalized, with the collection going to the National Gallery of Art and other museums it chooses and the building and design school going to George Washington University.
• When you think of St. Louis, do you think of jazz? A $10 million expansion to Jazz St. Louis—to be called the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz—hopes to make the two synonymous, establishing St. Louis as one of the top hubs for jazz in the world.
• Lower Manhattan is home to a new performing arts school. Thanks to three years of significant growth, Pace University’s performing arts program will become a school within Pace’s liberal arts college.
• Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Jonathan Safran Foer on behalf of all of those without enough to read, Chipotle cups will now be adorned with short texts by literary luminaries. Not everyone is enthusiastic.
• Those Colorado Symphony mile-high marijuana concerts are now invitation-only, due to an overlooked regulation banning toking up in public. The Denver Post’s music critic went and got blasted – I mean, had a blast.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• AT&T announced that it intends to buy DirecTV. The “media chessboard is moving more than it has in the past decade,” with Comcast’s February purchase of Time Warner cable and Sprint’s overtures to T-Mobile…
• … and reports that Apple is planning a major new foray into streaming music with an acquisition of Beats Audio and of co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, though something is holding up the deal.
• Nearly four years after announcing a name change, a new mission, and a new grantmaking strategy focused on impact, Cincinnati’s ArtsWave (formerly the Fine Arts Fund) seems to be seeing results. The united arts fund raised a record $12 million for its annual campaign this year, helped catalyze last year’s creation of a new multidisciplinary arts festival drawing national attention, and is starting to form strategic partnerships with non-arts funders. Retiring CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson deserves a lot of credit for seeing this transformation through.
• The Hewlett Foundation’s Fay Twersky defends the decision to end the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative as data-driven in the face of William Schambra’s accusation that a leadership change was the primary driver. Let’s hope this public debate doesn’t dissuade grantmakers from following Hewlett’s lead on transparency.
• The Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund has announced a new capitalization program, including its largest-ever grant of $200,000 to the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. The Fund created the program in response to research showing that even many of the city’s strongest arts groups were constrained by having only three months of financial cushion.

BIG IDEAS

• Is it time for foundations to embrace partisan politics instead of trying to remain above the fray? Writers for the Stanford Social Innovation Review think so. “Partisan conflict is not an external factor that advocates can work around,” they write. “It is the defining axis of American politics today, and funders must be unafraid to reckon with it.”
• The expansion of the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge – a promise to give away at least half of one’s fortune – to include billionaires from around the world raises questions about different cultural attitudes toward philanthropy (in China, public or transparent giving is eschewed) and about the relative merits of the Big Philanthropy model vs the more distributed community foundation model of giving.
• Arts entrepreneurship aficionados, look out: Barry’s Blog has a stellar lineup, uh, lined up for a weeklong blogathon on the topic starting…today!

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Academy of Sciences has hard numbers that show students learn better through hands-on activities than through lectures – at least when it comes to the sciences.
• Philanthropy Northwest reports on a year-long peer-learning project on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts involving 10 foundation CEOs in the region.
• Corporate giving is up again, according to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s annual tally.
• South Arts has released two research reports on arts education in the South. The first, a survey of nearly a third of all principals in the region, found among other things that Southern students have less access to visual arts and music than other American students but greater access to dance – with significant variation among Southern states. The second, case studies of nine strong arts education programs, found that the successful schools cultivated a shared vision of the arts, incorporated the arts into the core curriculum driven by state and national standards, and exposed students to working artists.
• Bringing the ability to make snazzy charts and tables to the masses, evaluators Stephanie Evergreen and Ann K. Emery have developed a data visualization checklist for the graphically challenged among us.
• In case you ever wondered about the correlation between per capita consumption of cheese and the number of people who die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets, Tyler Vigen has you covered.

• The backlash against unpaid internships has spread beyond our borders: Ontario’s Ministry of Labour has ordered two high-profile Canadian magazines to immediately end their internship programs. The Ministry also announced it plans “an enforcement blitz this spring focused specifically on internships across a variety of sectors.” (NB: while nonprofits are generally exempt from the US Department of Labor requirements for unpaid internships, state laws, including New York’s, can be more stringent.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• After nearly 30 years as CEO of National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Jonathan Katz is set to make his exit soon.
• Margit Rankin has resigned as Executive Director of Washington State’s Artist Trust. The Trust plans to “focus on internal efficiencies and statewide reach before hiring [her] replacement.”
• Carolina Garcia Jayaram was recently appointed the new CEO of United States Artists, and will be taking the Los Angeles-based organization back with her to Chicago.
• Miguel M. Salinas, formerly Program Director at the Adobe Foundation, is moving into the newly-created position of Program Officer for Local Grantmaking at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. His portfolio will include arts funding for Northern California’s Monterey County and surrounding region.
• Ken Cole of the National Guild for Community Arts Education will be taking over the role of Vice President of Learning and Leadership Development with the League of American Orchestras.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Detroit Institute of Arts saga continues. Not to be outdone by the “grand bargain” that would offer the city (and its creditors) over $800 million in exchange for taking the art museum (and more importantly, its art) off the table in bankruptcy negotiations, one of those creditors, Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. (FGIC) is now soliciting bids for the DIA’s entire collection. So far, four bids have been received with a high of $2 billion, but they’ve drawn a cool reception from the city’s Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr. Curious why Wall Street types care so much about a bunch of old paintings? Well, one estimate puts the opportunity cost of displaying Breughel’s “The Wedding Dance” at $1,200 per viewer.
• The CEOs of the Hewlett, Ford, and McKnight Foundations got together to discuss the results of a report that suggests a kind of Lake Wobegon effect among foundation leaders: they tend to be pessimistic about their field’s overall progress toward achieving goals, but optimistic about the work of their own foundations. The three executives acknowledged their incentives to demonstrate individual leadership get in the way of the collaboration and coordination to which they aspire and promote to their grantees.
• Speaking of foundation strategy, Daniel Stid, senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, candidly asks on the foundation’s blog whether Hewlett’s nascent bid to advance democracy by supporting both political parties and campaign finance reform makes any sense. Score one for philanthropy transparency – and zero for the rest of us: several days after the post went up, there were exactly no responses.

IN THE FIELD

• In response to an uproar from patrons, the San Diego Opera formed a special committee of the board to explore ways to avert the closure it announced abruptly last month, and a board member has announced a $1-million gift. Also, and we’re not sure which way this cuts, PR doctor Mark Fabiani has volunteered his crisis-management services, putting the Opera in the august company of Whitewater-era Bill Clinton, doping-era Lance Armstrong, and kleptocracy-era Goldman Sachs. Alas, it all seems to have been for naught.
• Portland, Oregon is about to go on a Bard binge: more than fifteen local theater companies are collaborating to produce all of Shakespeare’s works across the city over the next two years.
• Scape Capital, a Russian management firm, has purchased ARTnews from long-time owners Milton and Judith Esterow.

BIG IDEAS

• One possible result of investing in a “STEAM” (science/technology/engineering/math + arts) approach to K-12 education: shifting to a framework of “deeper learning” as amusingly outlined in this recent Hewlett blog and pioneered by San Diego’s High Tech High. High Tech High, incidentally, scores extra awesome points for launching their own MOOCs (with the help of their students) on how to design and build schools using this approach.
• A simple point, but one not made often enough: nonprofits see growth in their costs in part because growth in their revenues makes it possible.
• Are think tanks doomed in the face of human irrationality?

RESEARCH CORNER

• The state of the nonprofit sector is pretty grim, according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund: more than half of surveyed organizations reported they were unable to meet demand for their services, and are operating with three months or less of cash on hand. You can dig into arts-specific data using this interactive tool. Some nuggets: only about a third of arts nonprofits reporting an inability to meet demand, and arts orgs are significantly less likely to regularly collect data long-term data on impact than the nonprofit sector as a whole.
• A new NEA analysis of monthly census data reveals that the unemployment rate for artists continued to drop slightly in 2013 (7.1% vs 7.3% in 2012) and has recovered considerably from its Great Recession peak of 9.5% – though it remains much higher than the 2006 low of 3.6%. Two interesting sidebars: 1) Some findings about those for whom the arts are a secondary job, including the fact that 20% are teachers in their day jobs – and 20% are artists in a different capacity. 2) Although artists are classed as professionals, their 2013 overall unemployment rate was much closer to the total population’s (6.6%) than to other professionals’ (3.6%).
• This handy infographic breaks down the differences between US and UK philanthropy. The gold for sheer size goes the US, where the average person gives almost three times as much and the non-profit sector represents almost seven times as large a share of GDP, but the authors caution their fellow Brits against imitation in the full paper.
• Nifty data crunching suggests that films passing the Bechdel Test — a standard, albeit depressing, measure of gender bias — are actually a much better return on investment than Hollywood execs claim.
• Think there’s no way to judge creativity? Think again: new research suggests that people can be trained to accurately identify “subcomponents” of creativity. Interestingly, the control group  didn’t deem the same works “creative” as the group that received the training. Control group members did, however, tend to identify the same works as other control group subjects, implying they were all reacting to another, unknown component of the art.
• Speaking of assessing creativity, education leaders who bemoan American students’ consistent “underperformance” relative to counterparts in other countries may have a glimmer of hope: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted its first test of creative problem solving and found that American students did much better than they did on standard reading, math, and science tests. The bad news? They still trailed students from several countries like Singapore and Australia, both of which happen to put heavy emphasis on arts education. Hint, hint…

• Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale and known to many as “Joan of Art” for her arts advocacy efforts, passed away February 3.
• After April 6, cracking jokes in the UK will become a little easier. A new UK regulation allows for the use of parts of original copyrighted material if used for parody, caricature, or pastiche.
• Over at ARTSblog, Ciara McKeown argues municipalities are commissioning too many permanent public art pieces, and suggests public art programs “generate goals that are not defined as permanent or temporary, but that are about people and experiences.”
• Well, this is one way to make it as a DIY band: Canadian electro-industrial rockers Skinny Puppy have invoiced the Pentagon for $666,000 for the unauthorized use of their music during interrogations at Guantanamo.
• Confused about the ins and outs of all those visual art lawsuits of the past few years? Daniel Grant has a detailed overview over at Hyperallergic.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Geoffrey Canada, the charismatic face of one of the most ambitious and widely watched education and anti-poverty initiatives in the country, is leaving the Harlem Children’s Zone after two decades at its helm. He will be succeeded by Anne Williams-Isom, the organization’s current Chief Operating Officer.
• The William Penn Foundation has found its new leader: Peter J. Degnan, Vice Dean of Finance and Administration at the Wharton School. The foundation’s new structure (his title is “managing director”) will allow him to “focus on aligning interconnected organizational functions, including strategic grantmaking, knowledge-building, and community engagement.”
• Ron Ragin will jump coasts from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to become the first arts program officer for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
• The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University recently appointed Kate D. Levin, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, as its first fellow. As part of role, Levin will be responsible for raising the center’s visibility and providing input on its research. Levin will continue in her new position with Bloomberg Associates, a consulting firm founded by the former Mayor that advises local governments around the world.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Artist Pension Trust controls some 40,000 works of contemporary art as part of a risk-pooling retirement plan for the artists themselves. As it begins to sell some of them off in its tenth year, dealers express concern about the effect on the market – and others question whether the plan can possibly make money.
• Arts funders, take note: the New York-based F.B. Heron Foundation has ceased requiring its grantees to submit reports, moving instead to a “outside, cooperative data warehouse” to provide real-time information. It’s also transformed its structure and operations to maximally integrate investing with grantmaking. President Clara Miller’s annual letter describes the nuts and bolts of the foundation’s ambition to maximize the social return from every dollar in its corpus.
• Foundation transparency is all the rage this month. It emerged as a major theme in a recent arts funders’ convening on failure hosted by NYC’s The Field. GrantCraft published a new guide with tips for funders interested increasing the transparency of their day to day work. And the new site Inside Philanthropy targets potential grantees with eye-catching headlines (“Find Out How You Can Get $10,000 From the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation”), and offers subscribers insight into individual program officers’ giving preferences. It also exposes staff email directories and allows anonymous Yelp-style reviews.

IN THE FIELD

• The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) has been hard at work drafting new national arts standards for K-12 classrooms. These standards are rad for a number of reasons, most importantly 1) because they are aligned to the Common Core, and 2) they bring us into the 21st century by including media arts as a distinct discipline. A final draft of the standards is up for final public review through February 28; get on over and check them out.
• The New England Foundation for the Arts has launched a new directory mapping artists, “creative businesses” and cultural nonprofits across six states.
• Following an encouraging trend started last year, issues of race and diversity continue to spur conversation, with HowlRound devoting a week of blog posts to asking whether or not “a white person can write, adapt, direct, or perform stories from a different culture or race.” Meanwhile, new studies on how perceptions of an individual’s race change over time underscore race as a social construct.
• Even better than talk, though, is action, and there’s good news on that front: Detroit’s Sphinx Organization and management agency IMG Artists have a budding partnership aimed at creating greater diversity among classical musicians while broadening audiences for classical music. Stay tuned for the first trial run at this summer’s Napa Valley Festival del Sole where the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra will perform.

BIG IDEAS

• We’ve mulled whether computers can generate art, but a related question is whether computer programmers are artists when they dabble in code. A novelist makes an eloquent case that they are.
• Been a while since your last nerdgasm? Read up on social physics, which explores how ideas flow, evolve, and (we hope!) improve within communities — and asks whether “our hyperconnected world may be moving toward a state in which there is too much idea flow.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• Following up on the first-ever official count of the arts’ contribution to the GDP, the NEA has released more detailed estimates for individual industries, including a breakout of performing arts groups by tax-exempt status. (Most of the $526 million added by dance comes from non-profits; most of $407 million from circuses is pure capitalism.)
• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) released a study claiming that, contrary to the insinuations of Republican lawmakers, NEA doesn’t simply represent a “wealth transfer” from poorer to wealthier citizens. Michael Rushton, however, argues that the study doesn’t succeed in the argument because it looks at wealth at the level of the community, preventing firm conclusions about the wealth of individual attendees of NEA-sponsored arts. The comments on Rushton’s article contain a lively methodological debate if you like that sort of thing. In other news, NCAR officially launched its inaugural report (originally reported by Createquity back in December) on the health of U.S. arts and cultural organizations; the event was webcast by HowlRound TV.
• A new study from the College Art Association shows that visual arts professionals – scholars, curators, publishers – don’t understand fair use, and they avoid or abandon projects because of it. The CAA is working toward a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use to assuage the anxiety; such a code proved helpful to documentary filmmakers.
• Anyone who works with schools should carve out a few hours to play with this: DonorsChoose.org, which in 13 years has allowed teachers to raise more than $220 million in funding for their classrooms, is making its 20+ million project records on proposed and successful projects available via a free, interactive data analysis tool.
• Are too many of our research and evaluation efforts in the arts theoretical rather than directly applicable to practice? Nina Simon thinks so, and the comments from Peter Linett, Jay Greene, Carlos Manjarrez and others are worth checking out as well.

• A consortium of City of Detroit creditors have made the first legal move towards pressuring the Detroit Institute of Arts to sell city-owned artworks to help pay for debts owed. Executive Vice President Annemarie Erickson defends the museum against Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s demand that the museum find one way or another to contribute $500 million in assistance to the bankrupt city.
• The California Arts Council will apply a $2-million funding windfall it received from Assembly member John Perez to several new initiatives in arts education and community improvement, including Creative California Communities, The Arts in Turnaround Schools, and Jump stARTS. In the face of a 7.6% budget cut handed down last year, the state arts council is taking a gamble on the success of these programs winning fresh credibility with policymakers and an increase in annual funding.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jamie Bennett, chief of staff and director of public affairs at the NEA, will take over as executive director of the creative placemaking funder collaboration ArtPlace America starting in January. He succeeds ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta, who joined the Knight Foundation back in March, and interim head Jeremy Nowak.
• After a decade serving Californians as president of the James Irvine Foundation, James E. Canales will step down in the spring to become the first president of another arts funder, Boston’s Barr Foundation.

• There has been some shuffling in the world of state and local arts councils. Ohio Arts Council ED Julie Henahan has retired after thirty years; Milton Rhodes, President of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in North Carolina, has retired and been succeeded by Jim Sparrow; and Glenda Toups was dismissed from her position as ED of the Houma Regional Arts Council in Louisiana in the wake of the discovery by the board that the Council was not in compliance with state reporting law.

• We’ve known for a while that Michael Kaiser is leaving his post as President of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; now it turns out he’s taking the DeVos Institute of Arts Management with him. Both are moving to the University of Maryland, where Kaiser will be a professor of practice beginning in the fall, and hopes to expand the Institute to include a master’s program.
• Financial news giant Bloomberg has decided to discontinue its cultural journalism brand, Muse, in favor of focusing more on leisure and luxury. Along with the reassignment of Muse editor Manuela Hoelterhoff and a cadre of employees and contracted writers, the news outlet laid off theater critic Jeremy Gerard.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a rigorous new “Openness and Transparency” policy, which assumes from the outset that information the foundation creates should be made public to improve outcomes, spark debate, and foster collaboration. Hewlett’s President Larry Kramer offers context in a post on the foundation’s new blog; transparency watchdogs celebrate the policy.
• The D5 Coalition has released a scan of best practices and a guide to online resources for foundations wishing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion at every stage of their work.

IN THE FIELD

• Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall share profiles of El Sistema “encounters” in five of approximately 55 countries – Sweden, Austria, Korea, Japan, and Canada – that have borrowed from Venezuela’s seminal movement to realize youth development goals through “intensive investment in ensemble music.” The global umbrella for El Sistema has also released the first literature review of “research, evaluation, and critical debates” related to Sistema-inspired programs around the world.
• The Arts Council of Lawrence, New Jersey has shut down after 42 years, having, in the words of one member, “outlived [its] usefulness.” Originally formed by a group of female volunteers, the Council struggled to recruit younger members throughout the recession.
• The August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh is struggling mightily. After a struggle to find an audience and keep backers the organization has been forced to move further and further from its original intention to create a cultural home for the people portrayed in Wilson’s plays, working class African Americans. A conservator has been appointed to try to avoid liquidation.
• The Warehouse, an all-ages music venue in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has filed to become a nonprofit after 22 years as a for-profit, prompting some musicians to wax lyrical about their time there. Financial pressures were the primary impetus, but owner Steve Harm has indicated he will open the space to the local community in new ways to provide a public good.
• Fractured Atlas has added another tool to their encouraging-and-rewarding-arts-entrepreneurship tool belt. The Arts Entrepreneurs Awards will recognize artists and arts organizations who have “innovated new business practices or paradigms” or  “developed novel solutions to old problems.” Nominations will be accepted until December 22nd at 5:59pm.

BIG IDEAS

• A report from the Next Generation Evaluation Conference forecasts “game-changing” trends in impact evaluation, including shorter evaluation cycles and simpler measurement systems.
• “Is social practice gentrifying community arts out?” Arlene Goldbard parses the difference between the art world’s latest obsession and community cultural engagement.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research is about to release its inaugural report, drawing on what it calls the “most comprehensive set of data ever compiled” on arts organizations.  In addition to a statistical overview of the field – did you know that performance of an arts organization is lower in communities with a higher concentration of graduate degrees? – the report attempts to answer the question, “What makes one arts organization more successful than another?” The key turns out to be leadership.
• Speaking of data aggregation, Markets for Good has a progress report on the BRIDGE (Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities) project, an ambitious collaborative effort to identify and map philanthropic entities across the world.
• A new report by the Consumer Federation of America bashes “abuse of market power by a highly concentrated music sector,” argues against the need “to expand copyright holders’ rights,” and suggests that digital file-sharing (aka “piracy”) may, in some cases, actually be good for both artists and consumers. One well-circulated chart suggests that it is the proceeds of live performance, not recordings, that drives artists’ income.
• Gold standard at Crystal Bridges? In a rare, randomized, controlled (albeit “natural”) experiment on the effects of art on students, a single school-group visit to the major new museum appears to have raised students’ scores on vague but desirable traits such as critical thinking, social tolerance, historical empathy, and likelihood of future museum visits. It’s too soon to parse out the effect of contemporary art in particular.
• A study of STEM graduates from the Michigan State University’s Honors College found that graduates who went on to earn patents or start companies had more arts and crafts experiences than the average Americans – and believed their ability to innovate was influenced by that experience. (The paper itself is behind a paywall.)
• How “rampant” is gentrification? New research suggests that most urban areas experienced only “moderate” gentrification in the past decade, with significant variations across cities. Unsurprisingly, gentrification was most prevalent in large and dense metro regions with solid public transit infrastructure.

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.

• Weird, the very day that the Huffington Post published my “debate” with Carla Escoda about arts funding, the New York Times published a “Room for Debate” feature on a very similar topic. Something in the water? Anyway, Sean Bowie has a nice summary if you don’t have time to read all eight entries.
• The National Governor’s Association, which has been friendly to the arts in the past, has released another study highlighting the economic role of arts and culture in state government.
• Marisela Treviño Orta has a good take on a bill proposed in the California Assembly that would have placed a tax on live theater tickets. Thanks to advocacy by the LA and SF arts communities, the bill has been withdrawn.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Andrew Taylor is leaving his longtime post as the head of the University of Wisconsin’s arts administration program to join the faculty at American University in Washington, DC. Quite a coup for Sherburne Laughlin and company.
• Anne Corbett is moving on from her role as executive director of CulturalDC (formerly Cultural Development Corporation) to lead a commercial real estate development project in northwest Washington, DC.
• Congratulations to Mary-Kim Arnold, new arts program officer for the Rhode Island Foundation…
• …Wayne Martin, new executive director of the North Carolina Arts Council…
• …and Earl Lewis, new president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, succeeding Don Randel. Mellon continues its record of hiring its head honchos from academia – Lewis was provost of Emory University and already serving on Mellon’s board.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently published an interesting analysis of the winding career paths of foundation CEOs.

IN THE FIELD

• A huge gift from Oregon philanthropist Fred W. Fields will go to the Oregon Community Foundation to support education and the arts.
• Nina Simon shares some lessons learned from her first year as executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
• Liz Lerman has choreographed a performance of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun for the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra played from memory and danced around the stage during the piece. While the dancing is about at the level one would expect from classical musicians, there’s enough there to suggest a vision of what might be if people actually pursued this as a serious subgenre. The video and further discussion, from Andrew Taylor, are available at the link.

INTERVIEWS, CONVENINGS, AND CONVERSATIONS

• The Animating Democracy project at Americans for the Arts hosted a wonderful blog salon during the first week of May on impact and evaluation of social change in the arts. The posts are well worth sifting through, but some of my highlights included contributions from Rachel Grossman, Mark Stern (and again), Chris Dwyer, and former Createquity Writing Fellow Katherine Gressel. And now, just a couple weeks later, the Public Art Network is doing a blog salon on evaluation in public art.
• Barry Hessenius has another interesting interview, this time with Association of Performing Arts Presenters director Mario Garcia Durham.
• Nina Simon reports from the 2012 American Association of Museums conference.
• The Foundation Center’s PhilanTopic blog has a “Flip” (video) chat with Courtney O’Malley, VP of the Starr Foundation, about foundation transparency. It’s an interesting choice of topic (and thus, conversation), given that Starr is probably one of the least open and transparent foundations supporting the arts in its size group.
• The NEA’s Art Works blog did a week’s worth of posts on art and science (or “artscience”). Here are a few examples. In the last link, the NEA’s Senior Advisor for Program Innovation, Bill O’Brien, notes that the NEA will be encouraging grant applications that involve collaborations with science across all of its programs.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA co-organized a convening at the Brookings Institution last week on the topic of “The Arts, New Growth Theory, and Economic Development.” I was fortunate to attend and may share some of my notes later, but in the meantime, audio from the day’s sessions is available here.
• Great list of data and visualization blogs worth following from stats blogger Nathan Yau. You can find Createquity’s version of this here. Nathan also shares five common statistical fallacies. Have you been guilty of at least one of these in the past week?
• GiveWell is doing some interesting and important research into strategic cause selection (the merits of supporting international aid over domestic education, e.g.). After some preliminary investigation on what large funders are most likely to support today, they have identified four priority cause areas for future exploration: global health and nutrition, scientific research, something called “meta-research,” and mitigating catastrophic global risks such as climate change and nuclear war. I’m particularly interested in the meta-research cause area, which GiveWell defines as “trying to improve the systematic incentives that academic researchers face, to bring them more in line with producing maximally useful work.” I wonder if they will focus on non-academic research as well. As for arts and culture, GiveWell announces that it will not be a priority; while I’m not surprised at this outcome, I’ll be curious to read their justification for it as promised in a future post.
• House Republicans have acted on their dislike of the American Community Survey and voted to eliminate it (this has no chance of passing, thankfully). Here is more on the American Community Survey. The politicization of government data collection is a very troubling trend.
• Child mortality in Africa is going down, down, down – is this a vindication for international aid, free markets, or both?
• Mark Kramer says we need a flexible paradigm for evaluation, because social problems are complex. I couldn’t agree more. Talking about evaluation in blog format is hard because the conversation requires a lot of subtlety and nuance. There isn’t one right way to do it, but at the same time there are countless wrong and/or dumb ways to do it.
• The online education revolution is only in its infancy: Harvard and MIT have just committed $60 million toward a new online course platform called EdX.

• Mike Boehm has more on the important role California’s soon-to-be-defunct community redevelopment agencies have had in shaping Los Angeles’s cultural development.
• Gene Takagi provides this extremely helpful dispatch from a session on new “hybrid” legal forms such as the Benefit Corporation and L3C.
• Culture360 has published a helpful two–part history and analysis of cultural policy in South Korea.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Hewlett Foundation has a new President – and just like the last one, he’s a former dean of the Stanford Law School.
• Guidestar’s CEO, Bob Ottenhoff, is moving on.
• The Tennessee Arts Commission has announced Anne Pope as its new executive director.
• Welcome Sarah Lovan, new arts program officer for the McKnight Foundation.

BIG THOUGHT

• I’ve been thinking about transparency a lot lately. It’s harder than it looks, but here are two recent examples I find admirable from two organizations that have been committed to transparency from the beginning. First, the open embrace on the part of the Center for Effective Philanthropy of ways it can improve its flagship product, the Grantee Perception Reports. And second, a fairly devastating report from GiveWell on the progress of its #1 charity recommendation from 2010, VillageReach (to which I was one of many donors). The latter seems especially dicey at first, but GiveWell goes out of its way to praise VillageReach’s continued commitment to collecting and reporting data on its activities and adds, “we always prefer discouraging observations to no observations.”
• Lisa Bernholz lauds David Sasaki of the Omidyar Network for committing to blogging about every grant he makes. But Omidyar still lags behind on other transparency standards, as Glasspockets points out.
• You’re going to be reading a lot more about the term “Collective Impact” this year, I predict. Nonprofit consultants FSG, who coined the term last year in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, write about their choice not to trademark the name.
• Michael Eisen, co-founder of the open access publisher PLoS (Public Library of Science), opines on why the academic publishing model hinders scientific progress. (And yes, research on the impact of the arts, lest we forget, counts as science.)
• Check out these fun videos of “culture warriors in their native habitat” discussing Harvard Business School case studies, courtesy of Fractured Atlas Deputy Director Tim Cynova.

BIG MONEY

• The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation looks to become a major new player in visual arts philanthropy.
• NYC arts institutions will receive $100 million from Brooke Astor’s estate.
• It turns out that a portion of ArtPlace’s funding, which comes from a handful of major arts foundations, is restricted geographically to the areas that those foundations serve, leading to a disproportionate focus in some regions vs. others. While this revelation won’t be a shock for those who know the foundations in question – Knight, for example, has a particularly idiosyncratic geographic reach arising from the Knight family’s historical connections to newspapers in specific markets – it’s not going to be much comfort to the applicants who faced higher odds because of it, and reveals the challenges of relying on a patchwork of arts funders to create a truly national agenda.

IN THE FIELD

• Cute advertising conceit for a symphony concert plays on desperate fundraising campaigns.
• Is the Colorado Symphony following through on its supposedly transformative business plan? Inquiring minds want to know.
• The SAG-AFTRA merger is finally complete.
• I always appreciate interviews with artists in which they are candid about their economic circumstances and how they make money (or don’t). Jen Dziura has a nice one with musician Kim Boekbinder in the Grindstone.
• Barry Hessenius has a good interview with Doug Borwick, president of the Association of Arts Administration Educators.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA is out with a new study from arts education researcher James Catterall finding that at-risk youth with “arts-rich” educational experiences outperform their peers on various metrics of success. Almost simultaneously, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released updated numbers from its Fast Response Survey System covering K-12 arts education, a congressionally mandated study. Sunil Iyengar offers a first read of the result; Janet Brown expresses some skepticism at the numbers.
• The Pennsylvania-based Education Policy and Research Center has a report out providing arts education policy recommendations for state leaders.
• Survey fatigue is a real and growing problem for researchers who want to get information directly from customers, audience members or stakeholders.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Congress has agreed to put aside consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) through the end of the year, but the bill isn’t necessarily dead. Arts and technology commentators have begun to be more vocal in their criticism of the bill, which would, among other things, sanction pre-emptive takedown requests for intellectual property infringement, create an “intermediary liability” for website hosts, and essentially hand over enforcement for all of this to the entertainment industry. It’s that last provision which creeps me out the most; I’m not a copyright anarchist, but I am most definitely against the foxes running the henhouse.
• More on droit de suite legislation, which took effect in the UK on January 1. The policy compensates artists whose works are sold by future owners. As reported last month, similar legislation is under consideration by the United States Congress.
• Interesting interview with the head of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, an intermediary organization based in Lebanon that is funded by the Ford and Open Society Foundations as well as donors in Kuwait and the Netherlands.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Leveraging Investments in Creativity has hired Candace Jackson, an arts consultant, as its managing director. LINC is heading into its final phase of operation, and its concluding work will focus on evaluating its grants and putting out additional research publications.
• The Urban Institute (which has a notable track record of research in the arts) has a new president, Sarah Rosen Wartell.
• Arena Stage’s New Play Institute is splitting up, with two key staff members leaving the organization and taking the program’s media and technology projects to Boston’s Emerson College. More on the transition from David Dower.
• Some strange staffing shenanigans are afoot at the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, but if the article is to be believed, they will be hiring a deputy commissioner and five program directors among other positions.

IN THE FIELD

• An heir to the Walmart fortune has opened the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a community of 35,000 people located two hours away from the nearest large city. The museum apparently has amassed nearly a billion dollars in assets in just five years, mostly funded by the Walton Family Foundation. It offers free admission to the public and is located within walking distance of downtown Bentonville, which happens to be the location of the world headquarters of Walmart. The museum has raised eyebrows on the east coast for buying up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art for its collection and getting into a legal battle with the Georgia O’Keefe Museum over its attempts to purchase a 50% stake in a collection at the financially troubled Fisk University in Tennessee. But from where I sit, it’s a gigantic infusion of money for the arts in an extremely underserved part of the country…hard to argue too much with that.
• Opera Boston, the second-largest opera company in the region, is shutting down due to a $500,000 funding gap, mere months after it won a Pulitzer Prize with composer Zhou Long.
• Ballet San Jose has announced a unusual partnership with American Ballet Theatre that involves implementing ABT’s training curriculum in the local ballet school and performing works from ABT’s repertoire. Officials claim the arrangement is “not a merger,” however.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Blair Benjamin has published the results of his self-evaluation of the Assets for Artists program in Massachusetts. Speaking of Blair, his second annual “headlines you missed” feature is worth a laugh. My favorite: “Alice Walton’s Plan to Demolish and Replace Her Brand-New Museum with a ‘Super Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’ Promises Wider Selection and an Even More Unbeatable Admission Price”
• Robert Flanagan, a Stanford professor who wrote a report on the economic health of symphony orchestras back in 2008, has expanded that research into a book. Sarah Lutman has the details.
• I’ll sign on to this: “We need a national consensus policy to guide our research efforts into the decade.  As good as our research is, and as capable as our researchers are – it is basically piecemeal.  We need an over-arching policy as to what we need to know, on what timeline and to what purpose.  And we need at least some modicum of cooperation so we can pursue research in some linear pattern.  Somebody please convene a national summit to deal with our currently all over the map research efforts.  At least create ways  researchers (can and will) talk to each other on some regular basis.”

ON GIVING

• PhilanTopic has a thought-provoking roundup of predictions for 2012. A couple that stuck out for me:
  

  In fact, we’d be surprised if there isn’t at least one [Occupy Wall Street]-related protest at a high-profile philanthropic conference or event in 2012. (And the folks in Davos can pretty much count on it.)

  [E]xpect to see calls for greater accountability in philanthropy emerge as a movement in its own right in 2012. Adopting the slogan “private dollars for public good,” a social media-empowered generation of young Americans will use the cheap and ubiquitous tools at their disposal to push for more diversity on foundation boards, more transparency in foundation decision-making, and more democracy in the allocation of tax-advantaged philanthropic resources.

  I hope they’re right.

• Welcome Dan Lurie, the NEA’s new Senior Advisor and Director of Strategic Partnerships.
• Nice to see the National Conference of State Legislatures recognizing the value of arts and culture, especially with state arts agencies under such budget pressure this year and state houses having become quite an ideological battleground over the past decade.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• Is this the first example of a political party devoted to intellectual property issues? Germany’s Pirate Party is “built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency,” and is loosely linked to the Pirate Bay torrent-sharing platform. It also just won 15 seats in Berlin’s regional government, qualifying it for federal funding.

AH, ORCHESTRAS

• Although the Detroit Symphony is back to playing concerts after a six-month strike last year, it is still far from out of the woods financially.
• Trouble in symphony-land: the Colorado Orchestra has seen 20 of its board members resign after a dispute with the musicians’ union. I have to say, up until quite recently I have felt a limited degree of sympathy for the union and its members who are employed by the larger-market orchestras – a feeling informed to a large degree, I suppose, by my experiences as a (nonunion) composer in the previous decade. But this story is pretty ridiculous. The Denver musicians just accepted a 9% pay cut – after accepting a 24% pay cut just two years ago. If I understand the article correctly, their base salaries are now down to $37,310 a year – barely half of what their colleagues in Indianapolis are paid. And two-thirds of the board resigned because the musicians union took a few extra days to think about the cuts instead of swallowing them immediately. There is actually a board member quoted in the article saying that those who resigned were “sick and tired of the musicians’ complaining.” Are you kidding me?

GIVING TO THE ARTS (PRIZES EDITION)

• This year’s MacArthur “Genius” Fellows have been announced.
• The Grand Rapids ArtPrize, which was deemed a great success in its debut last year, has expanded to include music.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Irvine Foundation has released a new report on California’s arts and culture ecology.
• I sometimes think of the Arts Policy Library and some of the other work I do on this blog as “research journalism.” If you want to see investigative research journalism at its finest, check out this amazing takedown of a Gates Foundation-funded report that, due to five separate spreadsheet errors, overestimated the cost-effectiveness of a deworming treatment by a factor of almost 100. Note that these aren’t methodological issues, but typos and calculation errors. After some initial hiccups, GiveWell (who published the second look) has really grown into its own as an organization at this point, and the ethic of transparency and intellectual honesty that they’ve embraced is really paying off for them. Congrats.

IN THE FIELD

• Another stellar post from Devon Smith, this time looking at arts incubator models across the country and noting gaps with similar models and other sectors, has provoked chatter from Diane Ragsdale and Linda Essig.
• Remember the Chief Executive Program? The 100 CEOs who will be participating have been announced – and it’s quite a stellar group.
• I’ve been seeing a bunch of commentaries out there on what Facebook’s new changes mean for arts organizations. Here are Colleen Dilenschneider and Jeff Scott to get you started.
• Attention arts marketers: people in their 20s send a median of 40 text messages a day – and blacks and Hispanics text twice as much as whites.

ETC.

• Are hotel lobbies the next third place? (Cf.)
• Congratulations to CultureFuture author and occasional Createquity guest poster Guy Yedwab on his 1000th post.
• I totally invented this in my head back when I was a bandleader. Damn you iPad for coming out five years too late!