The Diego Rivera Mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts – photo by Quick fix

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past twelve months. You can read the previous editions here: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. The list, like Createquity itself, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world. This year, we distributed creation of this list amongst our editorial team more widely than we ever have before, and this is truly a group effort. Authorship of individual items is noted at the end of each paragraph.

In our annual top 10 list of arts policy stories, we often like to point out the implications that non-arts world events have for the arts. In an unusual twist this year, we had a couple of stories in which the art itself was at the center of significant world events. We always knew that art has the power to inspire wonder, hope, greed, fear and anger; 2014 taught us that we can add bankruptcy negotiations and terrorist threats to the list. –Ian David Moss

10. Trey McIntyre Project disbands

In a move that shocked fans and fellow arts administrators alike, Trey McIntyre announced this January that his celebrated eponymous dance company, known as the Trey McIntyre Project, would disband this season, letting him shift focus to new artistic pursuits involving film production, photography, and less frequently, freelance choreography. Begun as a summer touring company in 2005, TMP launched a full-time dance troupe in 2008-09. TMP had been recognized for its innovative choreography and as a model for audience engagement, but most of all for its unusual relationship to the city of Boise, Idaho, which was selected as the new company’s unlikely home after a nationwide search. This arrangement provided TMP with an affordable and livable community, while Boise in turn embraced the company wholeheartedly, treating the dancers like local celebrities and naming the company as its official ambassador. Drawing national attention and funding from creative placemaking initiatives including the NEA’s Our Town and ArtPlace America, TMP had been hailed by many as a model of engagement for the future. Yet McIntyre has said that ending the company was always part of the plan, which is why he decided to call it a “project.” Speaking to Dance|USA, McIntyre said that “the dance company actually went on longer than I had intended. But things were going on really well and I felt it was important to see it through to its fruition and explore every possibility.” From the outside it might look like plenty of possibility was left on the table, but perhaps even in its demise TMP is still a model for the future – that is to say, a model of an organization that knows how to quit while it’s ahead. –Carlyn Madden

9. Transition and renewal for cultural agencies in New York, LA and Boston

In 2014, three major US cities saw a shift in local government leadership, in each case bringing promise and questions for the arts. New York City’s election of Bill de Blasio as its first Democratic mayor in twenty years coincides with a push by the City Council to undertake the Big Apple’s first ever cultural plan. The proposed law charges the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, led by newly appointed Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, with developing recommendations for increasing participation in cultural activities throughout the city. NYC is the only one of the country’s top ten municipalities to not have some sort of cultural plan; this bill will hopefully change that when it comes up for a vote in 2015. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti – the city’s first Jewish mayor, and its youngest in a century – opened the year by reshaping the arts conversation, putting emphasis on the fact that the arts are “a value for the entire city government.” In June, he appointed Danielle Brazell, who had previously headed up the city’s arts advocacy organization Arts for LA, to lead the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. But the greatest excitement belongs to Boston, which elected its first mayor last year following the 21-year reign of Tom Menino. The statewide arts advocacy coalition MassCreative took the transition as an opportunity to put culture at the center of the electoral conversation, and its efforts paid off this year in dramatic fashion. In September, newly elected mayor Marty Walsh appointed Julie Burros as Boston’s first Chief of Arts and Culture in more than 20 years, and tasked her with stewarding the creation of the city’s cultural plan. Adding to the sense of momentum, Boston’s Barr Foundation has taken on a newly assertive role in guiding the future of the arts in Beantown, bringing in former Irvine Foundation president James E. Canales and joining the ArtPlace America coalition. –Clara Inés Schuhmacher

8. State arts councils come back with a vengeance

State arts councils had their best year since the turn of the millennium with a nearly 20% increase in funding for FY2015. Total appropriations for arts agencies reached $367.4 million, the highest total (in nominal terms, don’t get too excited) since 2002. The biggest winner was the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which had suffered a crippling 94% budgetary cut over a three-year period ending in 2009. The Sunshine State’s arts council roared back this year with a 433% increase, unseating the New York State Council on the Arts as the most formidable state arts council in the country – and with a conservative governor at the helm, no less. California and Michigan also received significant increases in funding, and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley apparently got tired of trying unsuccessfully to veto funding for the state’s Arts Commission as she had done in each of her previous years in office.  With the improving economy, unplanned midyear cuts to state arts agency budgets saw a marked decrease, down to eight states in 2014 from 41 in FY2009. –Louise Geraghty

7. The landscape for film tax credits gets reshaped

After years of what resembled a high-stakes poker game in the competitive environment for film and TV tax incentives, 2014 saw several significant shifts that involved some states upping the ante and others folding their hand. California led the way, more than tripling its tax credit program to $330 million annually in a bid to reassert dominance and keep Hollywood productions in Hollywood. New Jersey’s state Senate decided to play along too, passing a bill that would raise the annual cap for film tax credits from $10 million to $50 million. States weren’t the only ones in the mix: Austin’s City Council approved reimbursement of up to 0.75% of production companies’ wages. Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid, however; as John Carnwath writes in “The Bottom Line on Film Tax Credits,” the benefits of film & TV tax incentives to the state and its citizens are not always clear. This year saw North Carolina, Michigan and New Mexico scaling down their programs, citing “concerns [that] the cost to taxpayers outweighed the economic benefits.” Meanwhile, skeptical lawmakers tried to derail Maryland’s tax credit program, prompting a high-stakes standoff with Media Rights Capital and its Netflix show House of Cards that brought out a lobbying appearance from Kevin Spacey himself. An eventual agreement kept House of Cards filming in the Old Line State, but only at the expense of $2.5 million that was transferred away from the state arts fund (and thus many deserving nonprofits!) in a troubling precedent. And even after all that, a nonpartisan analysis from the state’s legislative staff concluded that every dollar invested in the tax credits brought back only 10 cents in revenue. –CIS

6. Bring on the era of Jane Chu!

With the NEA chairmanship open since Rocco Landesman’s retirement in November 2012, the confirmation of Jane Chu to the post was welcome news this June. Chu established her arts career in Kansas City, where she led a $414 million campaign for the establishment of the Kauffman Center and was a key player in the city’s transformation into an arts leader. With a midwestern background, a track record with the business community as a board member for the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, and previous fundraising success, Chu seems well-chosen for the task of establishing bipartisan support for the arts and countering the impression that the NEA serves a coastal cultural elite. Nevertheless, some wonder if her limited tenure as result of the administration’s long delay in appointing a new leader will give her much opportunity to drive policy at the agency. Chu has not yet announced any new initiatives in her first six months on the job. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Humanities also saw a new chairman confirmed this year. William “Bro” Adams comes from a career in academia, most recently as the president of Colby College in Maine, but he may find himself taking on a similar agenda of garnering broad based support and bolstering funding for the humanities. Adams has already announced a new initiative entitled “The Common Good, Humanities in the Public Square.”  –Katherine Ingersoll

5. The IRS haltingly embraces the 21st century

In July the IRS announced major changes to the process of applying for 501(c)(3) charitable status, including a streamlined three-page 1023EZ form for most organizations with gross receipts under $50,000. This bodes well for the backlog of nearly 60,000 organizations waiting for their applications to be processed who will see a dramatic decrease in wait time. The move is in line with a larger trend towards more streamlined processes for the exempt organizations division at the IRS – and, quite possibly, more relaxed enforcement of the rules. The changes come at a time when budget cuts, staff reductions, and political scandals, have stoked concerns about the agency’s regulatory oversight. Government transparency advocates have noted that the dilemma of providing effective regulation with fewer resources could be solved by offering 990 data in an open, searchable format online, distributing some of the IRS’s watchdog responsibilities to donor advocates and the public. (Currently the forms are only available on CDs; GuideStar offers the documents on its website with a 1-2 year delay.) Will the IRS be able to modernize its operations while protecting the public interest? Will your tax forms become shorter, and will there be any staff left to process them? Only time will tell. –KI

4. Russia and Turkey crack down on free expression

Although Russia’s aggression toward the Ukraine has occupied many a news cycle this year, the oppressive measures that Vladimir Putin’s government has taken to reaffirm authority at home, many of which affect artists, have not been as widely reported. Among the more troubling developments is what appears to be a return to the witch-hunt tactics of the Soviet era, publicly naming (and ostensibly shaming) “subversive” artists in print and on television. In July, Putin signed a law prohibiting swearing in public performances (these are the four main offenders), leaving presenters struggling with how best to present planned repertoire. International tensions have affected programming in the US as well – most notably, in April, Washington DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre canceled a months-in-the-making festival of Russian theatre, citing loss of previously committed tour funding from the Moscow Cultural Ministry for the 90 artists slated to appear. Putin is not the only national leader to attempt to bend public expression to his will, of course, and he seemingly is inspiring some copycat behavior by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Coinciding with a sweeping consolidation of power this year, Erdogan’s government proposed a bill in April that would establish an arts council to centralize the disbursement of state funds for artistic activities, effectively giving the government absolute artistic control. The proposed bill has drawn outrage from both the arts community and Turkish citizens, and though still in draft form, the effects of its line of thinking are already being felt, with world-renowned pianists blocked from national performances, and mysteriously cancelled productions at the State Theater. –CIS

3. Net neutrality hangs in the balance

It’s been yet another rough year for net neutrality. In January, Verizon challenged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s 2011 “Open Internet Order” and its authority to promulgate such rules. Verizon won, effectively overturning regulations that require internet service providers to treat all content equally, and setting off a maelstrom of concern around innovation, democracy, and the idea of America itself. Under fire, the FCC proposed new net neutrality rules in March, then again in April (these critics claimed were unworthy of the name), with yet a third draft presented on May 15th. The May proposal, which garnered a whopping 3.7 million public comments over a five month period (680k of which the FCC recently “lost,”) would allow broadband companies to provide a “fast lane” for content providers willing to pay a “commercially reasonable” fee, similar to those that already exist with tech companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, and Facebook. In December, President Obama and The White House released a plan recommending that the FCC reclassify Internet broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which proponents argue would give the FCC the increased regulatory power necessary to protect net neutrality. Looming large over the debate is the proposed merger of Time Warner Cable and Comcast – the country’s two largest cable companies – and the access implications if approved (the merger would give the new company a stake in 60% of US broadband households.) For now, it’s wait-and-see. The FCC has said it will implement net neutrality rules as early as February 2015, though that likely won’t bring an end to the debate. Whatever happens, someone is likely to sue. –CIS

2. “The Interview” provokes an international incident

Few arts stories in recent memory have involved as much bizarre spectacle as the recent Sony Pictures hack and subsequent fallout. Hollywood is no stranger to poking fun at North Korea (whose leaders are known film buffs); when Team America: World Police lampooned Kim Jong-il in 2004, life went on without much incident. Ten years later, it’s a different story with Seth Rogen and James Franco’s The Interview, which depicts the assassination of Kim’s son Jong-un. After hackers who may or may not have been aligned with North Korea exposed embarrassing emails and data from Sony Pictures, the producer of the movie, the studio and major movie theaters distanced themselves from the film. When the group claiming responsibility for the cyberattack threatened violence, Sony went further, deciding to delay The Interview’s theatrical release and provoking stern words from President Obama himself in response. Subsequently, Sony reversed its decision and released the film online and in select theaters on schedule. Buoyed by the controversy, it is now the most downloaded Sony Pictures film of all time and earned $15 million in its first three days of digital release (along with $3 million through its limited theatrical run) – and no one has yet been injured in a terrorist attack. Now, some people are even speculating that Sony and other major studios might forego a traditional theatrical release in the future in favor of going directly to online outlets. One thing we’re pretty sure about: never before has a story engaged computer geeks, homeland security experts, celebrity gossip hounds, and arts marketers with such equal intensity. –LG

1. Detroit’s art leads the Motor City out of bankruptcy

News about the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) made our “Top Ten” list in 2012 and in 2013. Let’s hope 2014 – as it reaches the dubious honor of No. 1 – marks its last appearance for a while. After two years, Detroit’s long and painful bankruptcy battle finally came to a close in November with a federal ruling in favor of the city’s bankruptcy plan. For this Detroit has, in many ways, the DIA to thank. Under the so-called “Grand Bargain,” an $816 million deal developed by the Ford, Kresge and Knight Foundations, among others, the foundations will provide funding for Detroit’s public pensions – a key component of the negotiations. The only catch? Control of the DIA must be transferred from the City of Detroit (which has owned the museum since 1919) to an independent charitable trust, thus protecting the art from being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Previously, Detroit’s state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr had included the museum’s art collection among city assets available for liquidation, and contracted Christie’s to appraise portions of the 60k+ piece collection. Detroit city creditor Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. even went as far as to solicit bids for the DIA’s entire collection, receiving four separate offers to buy the art outright for as much as $2 billion. That a museum and its art could become the linchpin of a federal bankruptcy negotiation, soliciting intense interest from creditors and rallying outside philanthropic interests to its rescue, is truly remarkable. Would a “Grand Bargain” — and a Detroit with its dignity left intact — have even been possible without the DIA? Luckily, we won’t have to find out. –CIS

Honorable mentions:

• Drama at the Metropolitan Opera, Atlanta Symphony, and San Diego Opera
• The Cultural Data Project’s strategic reboot
• August Wilson Center sold to Pittsburgh foundations
• US Department of Arts and Culture gets up and running

Happy 2015 to all!

• In a reversal, the FCC has drafted new net neutrality rules that critics claim are unworthy of the name: they would allow broadband companies to provide a “fast lane” for content providers willing to pay a “commercially reasonable” fee. The FCC’s public comment period opens on May 15. Related: if the Comcast-Time Warner merger is approved, “the combined company’s footprint will pass over 60% of US broadband households.”
• A belated tax tip for artists: emigrate to Mexico. Or, for those committed to staying in the US of A, consider launching a worker cooperative as a means of upping income while maintaining time for artistic pursuits. For those on the collector side, there’s always lending your new purchases to a museum in Oregon, Delaware or New Hampshire first.
• Several record companies have filed suit in New York against Pandora to secure royalties under state law for the use of recordings made before 1972, which are not protected by federal copyright. Sirius was targeted by a similar lawsuit last fall.
• Classical musicians may now have a harder time leaving and re-entering the United States thanks to a ban on ivory meant to protect African elephants.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Grant Oliphant, former Pittsburgh Foundation leader, will begin a new role as president at Heinz Endowments this June.
• Also in June, the Canada Council for the Arts will welcome its new CEO and president Simon Brault. Brault was previously vice-chair of Canada Council’s board before moving to the National Theatre School Montreal, and will serve in his new position for a five-year term.
• Michael Kaiser, a man who wears many hats, will add another one in co-chairman of IMG Artists, which will also involve managing a new cooperation between IMG Artists and DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.
• Jonathan Fanton, former president of the MacArthur Foundation and of the New School, has been named President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Former president Leslie Cohen Berlowitz resigned last July in the wake of a scandal over her compensation and qualifications.
• Lorin Dunlop will join the M. J. Murdoch Charitable trust this June as Program Director. Most recently, Dunlop was responsible for public safety grant programs of the Oregon Criminal Justice System.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• PonoMusic, a new high-def digital audio business, raised $6.2 million on Kickstarter to become the third-best-funded project in the site’s history. Neil Young, who started Pono to provide a higher-quality alternative to current digital formats, set the initial goal at $800,000.
• Yet another contender is trying to elbow its way into the crowdfunding game: Crowdrise, a new(ish) platform dedicated exclusively to nonprofits, just received an additional $23 million in financing.
• The Walter & Elise Haas Fund, working together with the Foundation Center and Mission Minded, has developed an open-source, free solution that any grantmaking entity can use to make its grantmaking data searchable, publishable, sharable, and fully accessible. You can see “Open hGrant for WordPress” in action on the Haas site.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera has outlined a new fundraising strategy to avert closure and announced a meeting on Monday of its 850-person membership. It’s been a bumpy ride: half of the 58-member board has resigned; a new chair, Carol Lazier, has taken over and personally pledged $1m to save the organization; general and artistic director Ian Campbell has been placed on indefinite leave; and protests by unions and members have added financial and legal complications. The opera’s plan includes a new $1m crowdfunding campaign with a deadline of May 19; it is actually only one of several San Diego cultural institutions that have been shuttered or are imperiled.
• A closer look at the end of the Trey McIntyre Project.
• A bid by a group of philanthropic organizations to buy out Pittsburgh’s failed August Wilson Center for African American Culture was dropped, with the foundations claiming a preference on the part of the Center’s court-appointed receiver for a commercial developer.
• New York City is facing a sudden rash of failing institutions. The Incubator Arts Project is closing, citing — you guessed it — difficulties raising revenue. The Brecht Forum, a Marxist educational and cultural space, is buckling under the weight of a lawsuit for back rent. And Manhattan’s legendary Canal Street art supply store Pearl Paint has shut its doors and is mourned.
• Is an arts-centric Coursera in our future? Barry Hessenius decries the state of professional development in arts administration and calls for a virtual “one stop shop” of on-demand courses, articles, and networking/mentoring opportunities.
• A handful of arts organizations have been experimenting with a lesser-known organizational structure called the “disregarded entity,” which may offer non-profits a more flexible alternative to independence on the one hand and fiscal sponsorship on the other.
• In The Foundation Review, authors Gary Cunningham, Marcia Avner, and Romilda Justilian of the Northwest Area Foundation note declining philanthropic investment in communities of color and make a pointed call for foundation leaders to commit to reducing racial inequality. And across the pond, British comedian Lenny Henry is leading an effort to secure better representation for minorities on the BBC.

BIG IDEAS

• National Arts Strategies’s Sunny Widmann suggests arts organizations create their own Skunk Works® divisions — originally conceived by Lockheed Martin and not as stinky as the name suggests — to nurture innovate programs and practices.
• We hear a lot about the intersection between creative placemaking and gentrification, but is dealing with it just a matter of saying hi to your neighbor and identifying your privileges? At The Atlantic Cities, Daniel Hertz suggests that if we really care about gentrification, we should be paying a lot more attention to housing policy.
• Global inequality of wealth is at a 100-year high, with the infamous 1% owning half of the planet’s wealth, according to a hot new book by French economist Thomas Piketty. One consequence: “professionals have now been priced out of the [art] market and it’s shifted more toward investment bankers.”
• Barry Hessenius is looking for the next set of big ideas – and the people behind them – with another edition of the Arts Dinner-vention. Nominations are due May 15.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A music psychologist found that introducing random repetition into a piece of music makes it more appealing – and makes people think it was more likely to have been composed by a human being.
• Research suggests literary fiction can help short-circuit ethnic stereotypes.
• A new paper examines the intersections of the arts and health via case studies from Cleveland on interventions including art therapy and the artistic design of healthcare facilities.
• The NEA is out with a new report on the Education Leaders Institute Alumni Summit, a five-year effort on the part of the NEA to strengthen arts education policies at the state level. The Endowment’s Arts Education director Ayanna Hudson discusses the report in the context of the agency’s new strategy.
• A new center at Stanford will focus on meta-research in the medical sciences and examine how much publication bias — which raises questions about all research fields, including the arts — really is a problem.
• The Pew Research Center has published a new report on demographic and generational trends in America. The findings themselves are what you might expect – our population is aging, becoming more diverse, and moving away from religion; immigration and interracial marriage are on the rise; and Democrats and Republicans are at odds – but the presentation brings these and other trends to life.
• Seen any good movies at the theater lately? Probably not, according to new data on film reception by month of release as aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The numbers show that the summer and holiday seasons have the best pickings. Don’t believe it? You can play around with the data yourself.

• A Federal court has overturned the FCC’s “net neutrality” regulations, which have required internet service providers to treat all content equally. Legal details here; implications for artists and ways to get involved here. Meanwhile, AT&T has announced a plan to exempt selected content from wireless data caps; artists are expressing concern.
• How many foundations does it take to keep Detroit’s art in Detroit? Nine and counting: the ad-hoc alliance of funders has pledged to give $330m to reduce the city’s unfunded pension liability if the city’s creditors will agree to allow the Detroit Institute of Art to become a separate non-profit with its collection intact. In a nod to its origins, the Ford Foundation is the largest single contributor. It’s unclear whether this will fly with the creditors, so additional donors are being sought. (This could be part of an alarming trend: the Annenberg Foundation recently had to spend more than $500k to return sacred Hopi artifacts home.)
• Thinking of applying for nonprofit status? You may need to brace yourself for a longer wait time than usual. The recent federal budget agreement gives the IRS $526 million less than last year and mandates the agency spend more time reporting to Congress.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• With Bill de Blasio having taken office, speculation builds around the next NYC Commissioner for Cultural Affairs, with names such as actress Cynthia Nixon, former Alliance for the Arts head Randy Bourscheidt, and Tom Finklepearl being floated as potential candidates to run what may be the nation’s largest arts funder. Meanwhile, Michael Kaiser praises outgoing Commissioner Kate Levin – and says we need her at the NEA.
• Karen Hanan, Executive Director of Arts Northwest, is transitioning to lead the Washington State Arts Commission effective March 1.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• How are arts organizations handling ongoing, recession-related budget pressure? Some are experimenting with curtain times, guerilla art, and other innovations; others are embracing an organizational cultural of abundance. Still others ask, “what budget pressure?”
• On the heels of the NEA’s decision to support collective impact projects for arts education, Ken Thompson of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation observes that despite the flurry of interest from funders, they display an overall “lack of certainty about what collective impact is” and for the most part remain focused on the programmatic rather than systems level. One source of the problem? For all of funders’ efforts to get grantees to collaborate, they aren’t doing much of it themselves.

IN THE FIELD

• After winning hearts and minds across the nation with its making-it-big-in-Idaho story, come this July, the Trey McIntyre Project will disband as a dance company, focusing instead on “other enterprises involving dance, film production, and photography.” Despite TMP’s throwing in the towel, Sydney Skybetter sees a triumph and not a failure.
• In other dance news, choreographer Gina Gibney’s company will take over the former home of Dance New Amsterdam in downtown Manhattan, preserving the space as a hub for dancers from commercial and non-profit companies at a time when space is scarce.
• After a three year lockout (and, as we reported a few weeks ago, an attempt to form their own nonprofit), musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra will return to their orchestra hall next month thanks to a contract settlement that cuts their pay and benefits by roughly 15 percent.
• A painting by Glenn Brown replicating the cover of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel “The Stars Like Dust” has sold for almost $6 million, causing many techies to suddenly find themselves in the unfamiliar position of advocating for copyright enforcement.
• Nonprofit theater makes way for film and television: Atlanta’s Woodruff Art Center has sold its three-stage 14th Street Playhouse to the Savannah College of Art and Design, which will use the space to house TV and film degree programs. Woodruff, in turn, donated $1.9 million of sale proceeds to the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta to establish a new grant fund to support local performing arts organizations.

BIG IDEAS

• We nearly missed this end-of-year roundup of “10 trends and 10 predictions” for the nonprofit sector from NonProfit Quarterly. You’ll recognize several of the items, like the emerging national security state and general government incompetence, from our list of the top 10 arts policy stories, but NPQ adds several others to the table (including an emerging progressive agenda at the local government level) and gives arts organizations a special shout-out – for their “struggl[ing]…business models.” Woohoo.
• Over at Barry’s Blog, social media guru and recent Arts Dinner-Vention participant Devon Smith delves into the potential roles of user experience designers, Google glass, and 3D printers in arts organizations, and offers some insights on the need for think tanks (including ours) in the arts.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts has posted a batch of working papers and reports resulting from the inaugural year of its Research: Art Works program. There’s a range of goodies to dig into, including a study of the racial and ethnic composition of arts boards, and another look at the arts as a driver of economic growth.
• The Brooklyn Commune Project is out with a new report “on the state of the performing arts from the perspective of artists.” Researched and written by volunteers, it includes an impressive and cogent summary of the economic challenges performing artists face, and thoughtful recommendations for the sector. At 50+ pages it’s not a short read, but a worthwhile one. (More from Andy Horwitz here.)
  
• Another report from the UK examines how artists can support the development of socially responsible, sustainable economies, and identifies three “vital practices” that allow them to do so: 1) critical reflection around how artists maintain their livelihoods, 2) opportunities for artists to “pool their risk” when embarking on new endeavors, and 3) opportunities for artists to access unused spaces in urban environments.
• Amid increased calls for states to track student access to arts education comes this welcome reminder that determining access is more complicated than counting which schools offer which courses.
• In the latest distant-reading study, analysts have crunched “various linguistic characteristics” of a slew of old books against their commercial and critical success, then applied the resulting algorithms to contemporary writers to find that Dan Brown, William Faulkner, and Philip Roth aren’t very successful. Points for counter-intuitive results, at least.

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

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

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

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

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

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

Rat City Watching the Trey McIntire Project's Half-Time Show / photo by Kenneth Freeman

(David B. Pankratz, Ph.D., is the Principal of Creative Sector Research in South Pasadena, California. He can be reached at creativesectorresearch@gmail.com.)

In TINA vs. LOIS: Bringing the Arts Back Home, community arts advocate Scott Walters applies a concept developed by author Michael Shuman in The Small-Mart Revolution to cultural economies in American communities. TINA (There is No Alternative), in the broad economic and social terms that Shuman discusses, refers to develop strategies that emphasize: 1) luring large corporations to locate in your back yard, e.g., Wal-Mart, a Toyota plant, or a major studio movie production; and 2) exporting goods as widely as possible. LOIS (Local Ownership and Import Substitution), on the other hand, refers to: 1) local ownership of businesses, and 2) whenever possible, locally-focused distribution of goods and services, e.g., farmers markets, alternative newspapers, and artists space collectives. The LOIS imperative is to maximize the dollars generated locally and to minimize their subsequent departure.

A TINA cultural economy, according to Walters, features passive consumption of the cultural products (the commodities) of large non-profits (many with edifice complexes), merging media companies, and other “outside experts.” The LOIS cultural economy is characterized by the growth of “citizen-artists” who are equipped with the skills needed to extract joy, meaning, and achievement from the practice of art. Walters argues that this kind of personal creativity begets personal empowerment among citizens, unleashes a “creativity multiplier effect,” and can lead to a community’s transformation toward self-sufficiency and sustainability.

Despite these important distinctions, it seems to me that TINA and LOIS are not mutually exclusive, a point Walters acknowledges by saying that “a complete isolation of local economies from the globalized one is not possible or desirable.” In cultural terms, finding meaning in the creations of professionals surely has its place within a community’s cultural ecology. Nor does it seem to stifle “personal creativity,” which is on the rise, exemplified by the proliferation of community choruses, the “curatorial me,” and omnipresent craft festivals.

To be sure, not everyone will be convinced that TINA and LOIS can co-exist peacefully. That said, these kinds of either/or distinctions in the arts sector are softening and blurring. For example, thousands of crafters both exhibit locally and, via Etsy.com, export their wares to national and international buyers. The City of Chicago, in its 2012 Cultural Plan, will seek to promote its major cultural assets worldwide and to attract affluent “creatives” to the city, while also providing ample opportunities to all citizens for personal creativity in neighborhood-based venues. The Irvine Foundation, a major funder of large arts nonprofits, also aims to increase citizens’ engagement in the arts by supporting their making and practicing of art, through its new Exploring Engagement Funds initiative.  Finally, as an example of mutually advantageous blurring of TINA and LOIS distinctions, the Baltimore Symphony’s Rusty Musicians program gives non-professional local musicians the chance to perform in side-by-side concerts with its Symphony members, who are recruited from around the world.

Still another way to look at bridging either/or distinctions is through the practices of individual arts organizations. The Trey McIntyre Project (TMP), I think, provides an especially strong example. TMP is a modern dance troupe that, since its founding in 2004, has toured extensively to national and international acclaim, led by a mission to advance the form of dance “in innovative and ground-breaking ways.” In 2008, TMP conducted a nationwide search to identify a home base of operations, which it had lacked.

In making this decision, the Troy McIntyre Project ranked the locale itself as a significant selection criterion. Boise, Idaho, with its growing arts community, its aspirations to become a regional center of innovation, and its status as one of America’s most livable cities, scored high. And it appeared that Boise would support TMP’s artistic mission.

But Mr. McIntyre wanted more. He had originally placed San Francisco and New York City at the top of TMP’s list of possible landing spots. However, he reasoned that in these and other large cities  TMP likely would just get lost amid the flurry of dance activity. Instead, he wanted a city that needed the troupe, and that wanted it to become part of its civic identity. It wasn’t enough just to make the best possible work. TMP wanted to both reflect and engage its local community AND to tour to and work in other locales in the U.S. and worldwide. (To illustrate, once TMP settled into Boise in 2008, it soon thereafter undertook a 25-city tour).

In the past few years, TMP has also become well-known for the many ways it engages citizens and institutions in Boise—from its SpUrbans (Spontaneous Urban Performances) to an artist in residence program at St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital, where dancers go bedside to bedside. An array of LOIS-like engagement activities are known collectively as the Boise Bright Spot Project.

Boise’s political leaders, following TMP’s lead, bought into both/and thinking as well, naming TMP the city’s Economic Development Cultural Ambassador and their emissary to the world while also making grants to the company annually to support local engagement projects, which now number 40. For their part, Boise citizens treat company members as local heroes and rock stars, offering them a wealth of in-kind services and spaces, reductions in health care services, and driving the price of TMP performance tickets into the $100s on Craigslist.

Some might say that Boise lucked into a mutually beneficial relationship with TMP. After all, it’s not as though Boise tried to lure the company to town, in TINA-like fashion, with a bevy of tax breaks or other incentives. But, in ways that many cities might not have, Boise certainly has  leveraged TMP’s presence. And that goes back to TMP’s thinking in choosing a locale aspiring to be an innovation hub and that needed them.

TMP set a high early standard for itself saying that it wanted to generate local identity and pride equivalent to that fostered by the by the university football team, the Boise State University Broncos. The Broncos regularly rank in college football’s Top 10 and were the authors of one of the most dramatic upsets in college football history, beating the University of Oklahoma Sooners, a perennial power, with highly innovative play-calling in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl. The Broncos head coach, Chris Peterson, along with TMP’s John Michael Schert, is a member of “The Gang,” a select, eight-person group of innovative, high-achievement leaders in Boise.  They are drawn from law enforcement, athletics, business, education, and the arts, and meet to discuss the importance of creativity in their work. Mr. Schert sees parallels between TMP and Boise State football, saying that they both have “a lot of nuance, layers, and integrity and a lot of sense of…[themselves]. They know what they’re trying to achieve and they go and achieve it, and that’s art really.” Participation in The Gang is yet another example of TMP engaging multiple segments of Boise, even if equaling the iconic status of the football team may yet take some time.

In any case, do the examples of recognition, support, and engagement outlined here prove that TMP truly reflects the Boise community, bridging TINA and LOIS orientations? Mr. McIntyre acknowledges that connecting with the city and its residents is an ongoing, unfinished process. And Mr. Schert admits that “our time in Boise is limited. Touring takes us away so frequently that we are not able to fully commit ourselves for long stretches of time to the Boise Bright Spot Project.”

Still, it seems hard to dispute that the Boise community is indeed reflected through the creative dialogue between TMP and community members. Some connections occur in participatory, open rehearsals during which comments from citizens are encouraged, while others are rooted in opportunities for personal creativity fostered in TMP classes at, as one example, the Treasure Valley YMCA.

Further, several of TMP’s new pieces reflect cultural practices in Boise. One example is Arrantza, a piece created for the city’s Basque Festival, an annual event involving Boise’s Basque population of 15,000. McIntyre, out of respect for these local residents, functioned as cultural anthropologist as much as a choreographer, attempting to capture the authenticity of Basque dance, music, and mythologies in Arrantza. In a more whimsical vein, when a local couple discovered a cache of bowling pins, they thought to call and ask if Mr. McIntyre might want them. He did and, not surprisingly, made a dance, called Tenpin Episodes.

Now that it has been awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Arts’s Our Town program and the ArtPlace initiative, the Trey McIntyre Project may well to be able to deepen its connections to Boise citizens, for example, in hospital settings, local watering holes, and many more venues. But these community connections and TMP’s artistic reach are far from mutually exclusive.  Accordingly, TMP, in 2012, will represent the U.S. Department of State in a tour of China, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam; in 2013 the troupe has  week-long residencies in Orange County, CA, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

TMP’s story raises a final question: What can other non-profit arts organizations in the U.S. learn from TMP’s lead? On the one hand, the TMP experience, says Mr. Schert, has ”led other cities in the U.S. to look to the TMP/Boise model and ask how they can create projects similar to Boise Bright Spot in their own city.”  It appears that TMP is being asked less about its artistic innovation or international profile and more about its extensive and diverse community engagement programs.

However, are there other lessons to be learned? Some might be hard to apply. For example, most arts organizations, even if they hope to locate (or re-locate) in a new city, no matter how receptive that locale might be, do not have the standing, reputation, or  assets to do so. Nor is it always the case that organizations with the capacities to choose a new home should do so. All things considered, there are advantages to being part of an extensive artistic community, even as a small fish in a big pond rather than the reverse.

That said, TMP’s approach, grounded in an intentional strategy to both reflect local culture and engage with regular citizens while also pursuing artistic innovation and broad geographical reach, likely can be adapted by other arts organizations.  To do so, such organizations would do well to consult a recent interview with Mr. Schert, who cites several lessons that TMP has learned through its Boise experience:

• Define your values and set your parameters. For TMP, definitions were about how best “to make an impact on the community in which we live and the greater nation, really create new models and systems, and do it in an innovative and entrepreneurial way.  It became apparent to us that Boise was a community that was really ripe ground for this sort of creative leadership to step in.”  
• Invest time and energy to cultivate and steward local relationships. Mr. Schert points out that Boise citizens did not spontaneously embrace the troupe.  Retail relationship-building is hard, time-consuming work.  One of TMP’s signature partnerships, in which a local bar named a cocktail after each TMP dancer, happened only after 30 to 40 hours of planning meetings.    
• Resist the scarcity paradigm so common in the arts. In its first two years in Boise, TMP, says Mr. Schert, “did not approach a single major patron in Boise or…any of the tried and true families that have supported the arts in this community for decades. We created new sources of income: new projects, new patrons, new relationships with certain businesses.”
• Grow the local funding pie. TMP worked closely with a local foundation affiliated with Boise’s performing arts center (the Morrison Center) to revise its distribution policies to include each of the Center’s resident companies and user groups.

In summary, the overarching  message of TMP’s  orientation-spanning work amidst these many lessons,  it seems to me, is for individual arts organizations, and/or a locale’s artistic community, to define and pursue long-term strategies to think and act both locally and globally.

Lots of movement these past couple of weeks!

• Shannon Daut, formerly Deputy Director of Western State Arts Federation in Denver, CO, will be the new leader of the Alaska State Council on the Arts.
• Vincent Stehle has been announced as the new director of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media.
• Fidelma McGinn, Executive Director of Artist Trust, is leaving to become Vice President of Philanthropic Services for the Seattle Foundation.
• Lawrence Tamburri is out as CEO of the financially troubled Pittsburgh Symphony, and has been replaced by a board member.

ART AND GOVERNMENT

• The DC Office of Human Rights has challenged the practice of offering discounts on performances to professionals under the age of 35.
• Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer is speaking out against a wide-ranging state secrecy law in South Africa that she and others say will be a blank check for censorship.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dance/NYC has released a report on the state of dance in New York City.
• The Otis College of Art and Design is out with its second study of Los Angeles’s creative economy.
• NPR’s Patrick Jarenwattananon takes a look at the Future of Music Coalition’s Artist Revenue Streams survey from the perspective of jazz musicians. (includes video)
• The Foundation Center’s Director of Research, Larry McGill, has a great post on Philanthropy News Digest talking about the limitations of measurement in the social sector. The comments are also well worth reading.
• Assets for Artists is conducting an evaluation of its program, and good for them, they’re offering $100 a pop to low-to-moderate-income Massachusetts artists who are willing to participate in their de facto control group. This is the way to do it, folks.

IN THE FIELD

• Jeanne Ruddy Dance, a part of the Philadelphia modern dance scene for 12 years, is shutting down.
• The Future of Music Coalition takes a hard look at the joint venture between Groupon and Live Nation offering heavily discounted last-minute concert tickets.
• This month’s article on classical music entrepreneurship got quite a lot of attention, and is now one of the most-viewed Createquity blog posts all time. One of the groups profiled in that piece, Classical Revolution, got its own writeup in Toronto’s Globe and Mail. And the LA Times‘s music critic Mark Swed shared the experience of another group that sounds like it could have been included, wild Up.
• I’m hearing more and more about the Trey McIntyre Project, a dance company that purposefully transplanted itself in Boise, Idaho, after a nationwide search for a community to adopt. (Baltimore’s Single Carrot Theatre is an example of an ensemble with a similar immigration story.) TMP received a $450,000 ArtPlace grant to “limit its touring to remain in Boise, where it will engage the community to make dance and dancers ever present,” aiming to “generate local identity and pride equivalent to that fostered by the university football team.” More about that project here.
• As someone with little experience in the visual arts trenches, I found this article on the economics and ethics of artists being asked to donate work to benefit auctions illuminating. (Thanks, Katherine!)

BIG IDEAS

• Will someone please offer Michael Wilkerson a blog? The American University arts administration professor participated this past week in yet another blog salon from Americans for the Arts (this one focusing on the private sector), and offered two blowout posts: one proposing a national dedicated revenue stream that would more than double the federal money available to directly support the arts; and a second questioning the good that proposal would do because of the fundamental assumptions embedded in how arts support is distributed.
• Great job-hunting advice from the Mission Paradox blog.
• The Foundation Center’s CEO Brad Smith compares Occupy Wall Street and the Giving Pledge as social movements in this lighthearted post.
• Cool story from a while back about a foundation that lets all of its staff members (even the receptionists) participate in grantmaking. (You need a subscription to Chronicle of Philanthropy to view.)
• Did you know that Zappos (the online shoe retailer that was recently bought by Amazon) offers its new employees a chance to quit after an initial weeklong training period and pocket $4,000? Ian Ayres and Akhil Amar suggest that law schools offer their students a similar “anti-incentive” to quit after their first year, in order to help save everyone a lot of time and money.
• Very smart analysis from Isaac Butler and Matt Yglesias about geographic redistribution in the arts vs. the rest of the economy.
• Are you ready for the neuroeconomics revolution?