Stars at the NYC Time Warner Building (source: PENTAX Image, Creative Commons)

AT&T is the latest telecommunications giant to try for a merger with the media and entertainment industry as the ink dries on an $85 billion deal with Time Warner Inc. In merging with Time Warner, AT&T would create the largest entertainment company in the nation, surpassing the Walt Disney Co., which acquired ABC in 1995, and Comcast Corporation, who already owns NBCUniversal and Telemundo, and recently picked up DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion. Consolidation has been a popular strategy to compete with the growing number of competitors who provide streaming content like Apple and Netflix, but the merger will no doubt draw its fair share of critics. Of particular note is the 2014 deal between Time Warner Cable (a separate company from Time Warner Inc.) and Comcast that cost the two companies $5.5 million before Comcast pulled it off the table in the face of likely opposition from the Department of Justice. The failure of Time Warner’s merger with AOL in 2000 and a slew of other examples further demonstrate how combining telecom and media can be problematic. Given the resistance that the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal inspired from federal regulators for limiting consumer choice, it’s hard to see an easy road ahead for the current merger, and the move is unlikely to cheer advocates for net neutrality given AT&T’s record on the issue.

Video Game Actors Seek Equal Pay. On October 16, representatives from SAG-AFTRA voted unanimously to strike after months of stalemate with key stakeholders in the rapidly growing video game industry. The labor union, which represents an increasing number of voiceover and motion-capture actors providing voices, vocal effects (like grunts and moans), and realistic body images for games, is calling for pay on par with that of motion picture and television actors. Unable to reach an agreement before SAG-AFTRA’s ultimatum, work stopped October 21 on projects put into production within the past eight months. The primary sticking point is residual pay; currently, video game actors received a flat fee while movie actors, for example, get bonus payments based on streaming, downloads and DVD sales. New union boss Gabrielle Carteris, best known for her role as West Beverly High’s academic all-star Andrea Zuckerman on Beverly Hills 90210, has been a surprisingly vocal leader and staunch supporter of the strike, joining the picket lines with SAG-AFTRA’s 160,000 video game actors. Effects of the strike remain to be seen, as gaming companies estimate that only 25% of the total actors working in the industry belong to the union.

The Battle of Bollywood. The seven-decade-long conflict between India and Pakistan has now extended to the small screen. Pakistan removed Indian shows from television and radio in response to a decision from the Indian Motion Picture Producers Association (IMPPA) to cease screening films with Pakistani casts; in addition, the popular Indian film director Karan Johar said he would no longer use Pakistani actors in his films. The moves come at a time of spiking tension between the two countries after a brutal attack on an Indian Army base in Kashmir that killed nearly 20 soldiers (for which Pakistan is blamed). Despite Bollywood’s immense popularity in Pakistan, a 1965 government restriction against Indian films was lifted less than 10 years ago in an effort to increase interest in Pakistani films across the border. While the IMPPA states that its ban is temporary, the organization’s leader has called for a permanent ban and the deportation of Pakistani actors and technicians working the the film industry in India.

Affordable Studio Space for London Artists. With real estate pressures putting a squeeze on artists in hub cities all over the world, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has made good on his promise to do something about it in the UK’s capital. Khan announced the formation of the Creative Land Trust, a pool of public and private funds providing loans to London artmakers who rent studio space and are looking to buy their buildings, among other activities. The move comes two years after the Artists’ Workspace Study, which predicted the loss of artist spaces and, consequently, an exodus of artists out of the country. With the Mayor’s support, the study prompted the formation of Studiomakers, a group of influential entrepreneurs that works with developers and landowners to preserve and create spaces for Londoners to conduct creative practices.

Chaos in the U.S. Copyright Office? Just a few weeks into her new post as Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden removed Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante from the U.S. Copyright Office, assigning her to a new position as special advisor to the Library of Congress on digital strategy. Pallante declined the job and instead filed her letter of resignation. The shift is bringing a wave of concern to creatives, particularly in the music and film industries, who perceived Pallante as a champion for independent artists. Suspicions abound about the circumstances leading to Hayden’s decision to demote Pallante, including evidence that the Motion Picture Association of America aggressively lobbied the Copyright Office to protect its interests.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Billionaire financier David Rubenstein steps into the chairman position at the Smithsonian, adding to his roster of influential positions in Washington arts and culture.
• Croatia’s new Minister of Culture Nina Obuljen Koržinek is pressed to create a cultural sector highlighting inclusivity and diversity with the “Kulturnjaci 2016″ initiative.
• WolfBrown is looking for a full-time Audience Research Program Manager for its San Francisco office.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA) project has developed a new methodology for researching the humanities.
• University of Texas at Dallas’ Professor Stan Liebowitz disputes the findings of a much-cited 2007 article in the Journal of Political Economy that claimed piracy doesn’t impact music sales, bringing specific attention to methodological and data analysis problems.
• New research out of Germany suggests that music training can reduce aggressive behavior in youth. Despite this positive news, a recent Norwegian study claims that musicians are twice as likely to use psychotropic medications, and three times more likely to experience negative mental health symptoms and seek psychotherapy compared to the general population. The effects of music training on the brain are thought to be different than that of dancing, according to a review in NeuroImage.
• Research inspired by Immanuel Kant suggests that while art imitates life, it is perceived differently from representations of reality in the brain.
• A study commissioned by Art Gallery of New South Wales supports the body of evidence recently detailed by Createquity that suggests art alleviates symptoms of dementia by reducing anxiety and increasing “in the moment pleasure.” Good news in light of news that individuals are never too old to experience the benefits of dance.
• Discounted music and theater tickets for disadvantaged children may aid academic performance and self-confidence according to a study by Emer Smyth, research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). Smyth bases this claim on work by ESRI and The Arts Council of Ireland linking artistic engagement with academic self-image.
• Scotland’s a good place for art according to the Scotland Household Survey, which reported an all-time high of 92% of adults engaging with cultural activities in 2015. However, figures are significantly lower in low-income areas of the country.
• A recent study revealed that despite the diversity of the country, arts audiences in United Arab Emirates (UAE) are self-segregating. UAE is not the only country facing challenges expanding audience diversity. In the UK, a survey conducted by ArtsProfessional indicated that perceptions organizations make about their audiences can influence the diversity of the art they produce, further limiting the possibility of attracting diverse audiences.
• An extensive review of the literature on the creative process identified 14 components of creativity. Happiness wasn’t one of them, perhaps indicating that efforts to lead a happier life will not necessarily bolster creative output.
• The English Touring Opera recently conducted research investigating the the role of video content in marketing art. Results indicate that audiences use video content to support their ticket purchases after the fact, rather than motivating them to buy.
• A new report from the UK suggests that cinema broadcasts of plays and musicals could have a positive effect on live performances.

My Console Collection by Flickr user Sarah

It’s widely reported that able-bodied young men, without college degrees are underemployed and unemployed in record numbers. Despite this hardship, one recent study has found that these young men are actually happier than their equivalents were 10 years ago. The source of their pleasure? Much of it may come from playing video games instead of working. The “real-world” jobs available to them do not provide the sense of achievement or community that can be found through gaming, so many of these young men are choosing to live at home, in a virtual reality (nearly three quarters of the drop in work hours for this group is accounted for by increased time spent playing video games). It seems like bad news, but perhaps the implications of this retreat from the workforce are not as dire as they seem: inventive researchers are working with gamers to find cures for disease.

Can the Quality of Art be Quantified? Arts Council England is betting on it. The government agency recently announced a plan to have all of its National Portfolio Organizations (NPO) that receive over £250k per year must adopt and adhere to the Quality Metrics program, a standardized measurement approach designed to consistently and meaningfully measure artistic quality. These grantees are required to participate in a number of annual evaluations and engage in regular peer review, regardless of art form and organizational structure. Despite significant concerns raised in a post-pilot evaluation of the platform, the program is moving forward – for now. The news has sparked quite a row from UK artists on Twitter, and even incoming ACE Chair Nicholas Serota has expressed skepticism. In other quantification news, a new algorithm predicts the likelihood that a book will become a bestseller and, thanks to Apple’s iBeacon, many of the world’s major museums are using big data in their attempts to improve their visitors’ experiences.

High Culture and Pop Culture Converge. BBC2 is dropping an unorthodox bomb in this autumn’s rating wars: high culture. The British television station will shelve its usual schedule of repeats, to air poetry, dance, and documentaries on Saturday evenings. This new focus on culture will feature contemporary programming rooted in traditional forms and narrative (for example, a twist on WH Auden and a production by a performance artist who merges hip-hop, poetry and theatre). Through the creation of a “cultural destination” for its viewers, BBC2 may well provide the UK’s artists and arts organizations with invaluable opportunities and exposure.

The Connected Future of Fine Art? We suppose it was only a matter of time before “hacking” would come for classical art forms.  In August, the Dutch National Ballet premiered Night Fall, a new ballet choreographed by Peter Leung – not for the stage, but for virtual reality (VR).  Viewers need only a VR-compatible device to experience the “goose bump-worthy” performance, the first of its kind, as technology enables the performers to embark on an instant global tour. Meanwhile, the Tate Britain launched the IK Prize-winning online initiative Recognition. The program employs artificial intelligence to match the Tate Britain’s iconic collection with photojournalism from the contemporary 24-hour news cycle. It is designed to provoke new questions about art and life.

Culture vs. Terrorism. In September, France’s President François Hollande stood in the Egyptian Galleries at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and announced the formation of a $100 million fund to combat terrorist attacks on cultural sites in the Middle East. (He did not say how much his own government would be contributing to this “public-private partnership,” but did express hope that the Met’s donors would pitch in.) Hollande also referenced an upcoming (December 2016) conference hosted by the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which will focus on culture and terrorism. Although the preservation of cultural artifacts is integral to global human culture, it is interesting that France’s president advocated for the asylum of art works while its Prime Minister expressed reluctance to grant asylum to people.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Laura Sparks begins her term as the Cooper Union’s first female president in January.  Currently, she’s finishing her term as executive director of the William Penn Foundation; her replacement will be the foundation’s fifth head so far this decade.
• Heather Kim brings over 20 years of experience in higher education research to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in the newly created role Director of Institutional Research.
• Sir Nicholas Serota will leave the Tate, after 28 years (!), to become the next chairman of Arts Council England. Will significant government cuts to the arts prove challenging for the “virtuoso fundraiser”?
• Just four months after being reappointed by David Cameron, BBC chair Rona Fairhead will step down. Her successor has not been named.
• The Center for Arts Education is hiring a Director of Advocacy and Engagement.
• The Center for Artistic Activism is hiring a part-time Non-Profit Manager.
• The New York Public Library’s Library of the Performing Arts is hiring a Deputy Director of Research and Collections Services.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Cultural Innovation released a long-awaited report on trends and conditions affecting U.S. artists, an update of a major, decade-old study and a centerpiece of Chairman Jane Chu’s “Creativity Connects” program. Meanwhile, new arts data profiles published by the NEA offer state-by-state perspectives on Americans arts participation. The data highlights a north-south divide in American creativity, and reveals that the percentage of American adults who read literature fell to at least a three-decade low last year, after a “long, steady decline.”
• A Los Angeles County Arts Commission literature review on public engagement in the arts, and reports from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Our Museum program provide resources on cultural equity and inclusion in museums and beyond.
• Research commissioned by the UK’s Association of Independent Museums, Arts Council England and the Welsh Government shows that introducing admissions fees does not affect diversity, but may cause attendance to fall.
• The latest annual report from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project focuses on institutional connections, resources, and working across disciplines for arts alumni. And a recent study from artnet suggests that the institution from which an artist receives an MFA has implications for career “success.”
• The National Center for Arts Research released its most comprehensive report to date on national fundraising trends. Meanwhile, a new study published in the Public Performance and Management Review suggests that arts donors aren’t influenced by high attendance.
• Partners for Sacred Places has released the results of an evaluation of its pilot program to match artists to historic sacred spaces.
• John Sedgwick and Mike Pokorny’s research on financial risk in the film industry challenges conventional wisdom on the peripatetic nature of box office predictions. And new research from the Journal of Political Economy investigates movies as a shared experience. Unfortunately, the latest report from the University of California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism reveals that Hollywood is all talk and no action when it comes to advancing diversity.
• A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance suggests a link between ballet and sensitivity to others. On the other hand, new research from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law reports that more people find lyrics threatening if they believe they are from a rap song, as opposed to a country ballad.
• Income inequality isn’t the only kind of inequality: using information from the National Center for Education Statistics, the New York Times reports that the educational inequality gap is narrowing for children entering kindergarten. And results of a new study published in the Review of Income and Wealth indicate that happiness inequality is on the decline.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy released a comprehensive report on evaluation practices at foundations.
• A new study from the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis – Center on Philanthropy explores thirty years of nonprofit research.
• Research from Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales found that viewing art relieves anxiety in dementia patients and helps them to “stay in the moment.”
• A new book from Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall chronicles the growth of El Sistema-inspired music education programs around the world. Not everyone, however, is convinced.

North Adams, Massachusetts – photo by flickr user John Herr

In 1986, Thomas Krens, with an MBA in hand from Yale University and new to his consultancy for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, suggested turning a shuttered electrical plant in North Adams, Massachusetts into the world’s largest contemporary art museum. He had spent six years in North Adams as the director of the Williams College Museum of Art, and the plant had been in his backyard. It was a big, wild idea, and it came to fruition thirteen years later, when the site became the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in 1999. Now, nearly thirty years later, Krens is back with a newer, bigger idea for North Adams: a 160,000-square-foot art gallery on the city’s Harriman-West Airport grounds. This new museum is designed to complement, rather than compete, with the “old” one: it would only show its contemporary-art collection, and there would be no exhibition programming. The idea is unusual in structure, as well; unlike most museums, Krens’ idea is for this one to be privately owned by a for-profit group of investors, and they’re only seeking a twenty-year lease. Not much has been heard of from Krens following the end of his twenty-year tenure as director of the Guggenheim Museum, but this new idea–five years in the making and originally planned for China–is sure to push him back into the limelight. The North Adams Airport Commission is on board. Next up: the Federal Aviation Administration.

Chula Vista Schools Invest Heavily in Arts Education. Chula Vista Elementary School District, which lies just south of San Diego, California, serves some 30,000 students. The last time the district had an arts coordinator was the 1970s, and last school year, the district had just four full-time art teachers. All this is about to change: this summer, the district has undertaken a massive expansion of its arts education program, hiring 60 new art teachers, with 16 spots still left to fill. This unprecedented investment in arts education, spearheaded by Lauren Shelton, has been made possible by $15 million in funding approved by the Chula Vista school board in June. The money comes from from Governor Jerry Brown’s state local control funding formula, which shifted education spending decisions to the local level and targets disadvantaged students. Chula Vista is not the only district to benefit from Governor Brown’s formula, but it’s the first to focus the entire pool of funds–$5 million a year for the next three years–on aggressively expanding arts education. The District’s goal is simple, if ambitious: to raise student engagement, boost attendance and improve academic performance among low-performing students, and of course, implement a long-term plan to restore arts instruction in the district.

Social Sciences Scrutinized, Found Lacking. The social sciences have found themselves in the Createquity limelight recently, and not necessarily for good reason. In March, we reported that the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology had banned testing for statistical significance and related procedures in papers published in its pages. In May we covered Michael LaCour’s study on the impact of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior, which was retracted when its data was found to be falsified. And this past month, the journal Science released the findings of a yearslong effort to faithfully reproduce 100 studies, in most cases using original data. These studies, published in the leading journals Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, are considered some of the most important work published on personality, relationships, learning and memory. In the case of more than half of the studies, the replication project found that “the evidence for most published findings was not nearly as strong as originally claimed.” While the study of the studies itself could stand some further investigation, the shocking numbers are just the latest warning not to take research results at face value. Is increased competition for academic jobs and research funding to blame, or is the Internet merely making it easier than before to spot crimes against science? Either way, social science is not doomed–but it sure is harder than we give it credit for.

China Lifts 14-Year Old Ban on Video Gaming. In 2000, the Chinese government banned the production and sale of video game consoles, citing concerns that games could have “adverse effects” on Chinese youth. Last year, China eased those restrictions, letting game console-makers operate in the Shanghai free trade zone (though even then they had to enter into contracts to build new manufacturing facilities, secure approval for console sales from regulators, and allow every console to be individually inspected.) This month, the Ministry of Culture lifted the ban altogether, opening the door to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to manufacture and sell their Xboxes, Playstations and Wii. Although China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s largest mobile gaming market by 2016, it’s not immediately clear what impact the lifting of the ban will have on Chinese gamers, or on the bottom line of the big three. In the absence of consoles, PC and web based games have eaten up the lion’s share of the market, leaving little room for new products, especially new consoles, which have, despite it all, long been available on the grey market.

Art School Profits off of Student Dreams. Remember when the entire first year MFA class at USC Roski School of Art and Design in Los Angeles dropped out in May on account of their funding and teaching opportunities being curtailed? If that story made you mad, have we got a tale of student exploitation for you. The for-profit Academy of Art University, based in San Francisco, was by founded by Richard S. and Clara Stephens in the 1920s. Under the watch of granddaughter Elisa Stephens, who became president in 1992, the school has become the largest private art university in the United States, with 16,000 students (35% of which are online-only) generating an estimated $300 million in annual revenues. The Stephenses are purportedly worth some $800 million, which they spend–lavishly and visibly–on prime San Francisco real estate, summer homes, yachts, jets, and cars. According to a Forbes exposé this month, it seems that fortune has been built on the selling of false hope. The Academy accepts any applicant with a high school diploma and the willingness to spend $22,000 a year on tuition–no art portfolio required. Only 32% of full-time students and 3% of part-time students graduate, and it takes most full-time students six years to do so. (The school keeps a full semester’s tuition if the student is enrolled for at least four weeks.) Add to this a caginess around job placement statistics and numerous building violations, and regulators are finally taking notice. It’s worth reconsidering the white-hot controversy surrounding Roski dean Erica Muhl in this light: shady as the university’s dealings might have been, they affected a grand total of seven students.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• At long last, the National Endowment for the Arts has a new theater director: Greg Reiner.
• Charlotte Cohen has been appointed executive director of the Brooklyn Arts Council, succeeding Ella J. Weiss who is retiring after serving 16 years as president of the organization.
• The Tucson Pima Arts Council announced a leadership shift this month: Debi Chess Mabie was appointed CEO, with current executive director Roberto Bedoya transitioning to the new role of Director of Civic Engagement.
• Angie Kim was named president and CEO of California’s Center for Cultural Innovation.
• Jennifer Coleman has been appointed Senior Program Officer for the Arts at the George Gund Foundation in Cleveland.
• After fifteen years with the Walton Family Foundation, Buddy Philpot will step down as its executive director.
• Sarah Martínez-Helfman has been named president of Philadelphia’s Samuel S. Fels Fund.
• Former Microsoft executive Michael Thatcher was named president and CEO of Charity Navigator.
• Scott Cantrell, long time staff music critic at the Dallas Morning, is the latest writer to accept a buyout at the paper.
• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation seeks an arts program officer. Posted July 27; no closing date.
• The David and Lura Lovell Foundation seeks an executive director. Posted July 31; no closing date.
• The Krupp Family Foundation is hiring a part-time Foundation Grants and Program Director. Posted August 4; no closing date.
• The Prince Charitable Trusts is hiring a managing director. Posted August 5; no closing date.
• The California Arts Council is hiring a deputy director. Posted August 19; closing date September 18.
• The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is hiring a Program Fellow for the three-year Hewlett Fellowship. Posted August 28; no closing date.
• The South Jersey Cultural Alliance seeks an executive director. Closing date September 11.
• Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts is hiring an Assistant Director for the Arts Research Institute. Closing date September 30.
• The New Jersey Council for the Humanities seeks a Director of Programs. Applications will be reviewed beginning October 15.
• ArtsEnging/a2ru_News has openings for a Research Director and Research Fellow. No closing date.
• AEA Consulting is recruiting a research analysts and consultants. No closing date.
• The Oklahoma Arts Council is hiring a Director of Art in Public Places. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A recent analysis of the Mellon Foundation’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute has found that the program has “no significant effect” on Ph.D. completion rates among minority students.
• The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism examined the 700 top-grossing films between 2007 and 2014 and released a report revealing, in no uncertain terms, Hollywood’s bias against women, people of color and LGBT characters.
• A new study suggests that educational television programs such as Sesame Street have not been successful in reducing kids’ prejudices.
• The U.S. Department of Education released two reports assessing the qualifications of middle & high school instructors across arts disciplines. Spoiler alert: they’re not all qualified.
• How do you get to Carnegie Hall? A new study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that individuals underestimate the value of persistence for creative performance. Another report from the same journal indicates that money does matter, and what’s more, that low-income individuals are less happy in places with greater income inequality.
• A public study of Chicago residents commissioned by Arts Alliance Illinois last year reveals that while Chicagoans are united in wanting access to arts, not all have access: 28 of 77 of the city’s neighborhoods are home to zero arts organizations.
• A report published by Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists, reveals that underpayment and harsh working conditions have persisted for migrant workers building new Guggenheim, Louvre and Zayed National museum branches in Abu Dhabi.
• A survey of professional dancers in UK revealed that more than half of them earn less than £5,000 a year from their performing engagements (and other bleak statistics).
• And in more lighthearted news: baristas rejoice! A new study reveals that people are willing to pay more–13% more!–for latte art.

Metropolitan Opera House – Photo by Flickr user Zio Paolino, Creative Commons license

Never fear, Wagner lovers: the largest opera company in the US will open its season on time. Faced with what it called an unsustainable financial strain, management had threatened a lockout this fall if labor representatives refused to accept drastic pay cuts. In the end, General Manager Peter Gelb was able to secure the first pay cuts for the Met’s unionized employees in decades, but the cuts were by no means as deep as initially proposed. Singers and orchestra members agreed to a 3.5% pay cut, effective immediately, and an additional 3.5% cut in six months’ time. That’s a far cry from the 17% reduction that Gelb had previously sought, and will be partially offset by a 3% raise in the fourth year of the union’s contract.

From the standpoint of the larger nonprofit arts field, the most significant part of the deal is a clause that allows an independent financial analyst to monitor the financial management of the organization on behalf of the employees. Experts claim this highly unusual provision could have ripple effects throughout the industry. This agreement came about when the unions, faced with the drastic cuts proposed by Gelb, developed a list of alternative cost-saving measures. While the management didn’t adopt those proposals outright, it agreed to let the employees have a say in how the overall savings are achieved.

California turns to tax breaks to reassert film industry dominance
Just as North Carolina decides to follow the examples of Michigan and New Mexico by scaling back its support of the motion picture industry, California is doubling down (actually, tripling down) on its incentives in an attempt to keep Hollywood productions in Hollywood. Governor Brown and the state Legislature have expanded California’s tax credit program from $100 million to $330 million per year. While the ability of film tax incentives to increase employment and stimulate the economy remains highly questionable (as previously discussed here at Createquity), California lawmakers have described the expanded tax program as a demonstration of their commitment to the film industry. California may indeed be in a somewhat different position than most other states in that a lot of film industry professionals are based in and around Los Angeles and would presumably prefer to work closer to home if the production costs, which can be significantly reduced by tax incentives, are roughly on par with other states.

International cultural agencies shake things up
The Australia Council for the Arts has announced what it’s billing as the most sweeping overhaul of its grant programs in 40 years in order to make them more inclusive and reduce the administrative burden on applicants. Each of the newly created funding categories will be open to artists of all areas of practice and applicants will be able to choose which discipline’s peer panel they want to assess their application. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Council England has rebalanced its portfolio of funded organizations to direct more funding to organizations outside of London at the expense of such venerable institutions as the English National Opera. Nevertheless, critics say the plan to devote 53% of the Arts Council’s budget to regions outside of London (up from 49%) doesn’t go far enough. Finally, the French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, has resigned in protest of austerity measures that led to cuts in her Ministries budget. She will be replaced by Korean-born Fleur Pellerin.

New foundation to support American classical composers
The Chicago music critic Lawrence A. Johnson has launched a nonprofit foundation that will provide grants to ensembles and presenters that perform American classical music and commission new works by American composers. The American Music Project is still in the early stages of fundraising, but it’s already commissioned its first new work and is set to start awarding grants for the 2015-16 season. Johnson hopes to have raised $500,000 by next spring and eventually establish a standing endowment of $1 million. There’s no word yet on the size of the grants that will be doled for performances of rarely heard American works or how many organizations will be supported each year. While some might question the need for another nonprofit dedicated to classical music, Mike Scutari argues that the American Music Project will fill a gap in current support mechanisms with its focus on increasing the breadth of the American repertoire featured in concert halls around the country.

Corbett Foundation closing
Cincinnati’s Corbett Foundation, which has provided more than $70 million to arts and education nonprofits in Ohio and Kentucky since 1955, is finally closing its doors. The dissolution of the foundation has been planned for years; indeed, it was never intended to persist beyond the founders’ lifetimes. Explaining why it took until now to wrap things up after Patricia Corbett’s death in 2008, Executive Director Karen McKim said in effect that rising markets had foiled plans to spend down the foundation’s funds despite best efforts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• The Pittsburgh Foundation has announced its new president & CEO, Maxwell King.
• The National Association of Media Arts and Culture has a new executive director, Wendy Levy.
• The Center for Cultural Innovation’s board chair Angie Kim has been appointed interim leader as the organization’s search for its next President & CEO continues.
• Oregon Cultural Trust has hired Brian Rogers as executive director.
• Grantmakesr in the Arts has chosen Jim McDonald to be its new deputy director and director of programs, replacing the retiring Tommer Peterson.
• ArtWorks, an art therapy service provider in New York & New Jersey, is looking for an executive director. Posted August 15, no closing date.
• National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers seeks a project director; work virtually. Salary: $30-35k for 20 hrs/wk.
• McLean Project for the Arts (DC area) is in the market for an executive director. Salary: $55-70k. Posted August 6, no closing date.
• The Boston Globe is seeking an arts reporter. Posted August 21, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Research on the effects of video games is booming; much is unknown, but apparently Grand Theft Auto promotes bad behavior in real life and playing Voldemort makes you evil. But it’s not just video games: watching reality TV can make you a worse person, too.
• Rhetoric about a “universal language” aside, it turns out that about 3% of people just don’t like music at all, and they’re amazingly not monsters.
• A new study finds that true stories aren’t any more emotionally resonant than fictional ones, despite expectations to the contrary.
• Hollywood still lags behind in diversity. According to a new study, whites had 74% of the movie roles despite making up only 64% of the population.
• A Kennedy Center evaluation found that 4th- and 5th-graders in arts integrated classes displayed more creativity and better problem-solving skills than peers.
• A college-aged mathematician has put together a linear regression model predicting the length of Broadway show runs.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

• You probably didn’t know it, but your fancy new mobile device is making it more difficult for your favorite local theater company to keep its wireless microphones. The Federal Communications Commission is considering auctioning off two “safe haven” broadcast channels used by wireless mics to commercial wireless providers. Theatre Communications Group led a Capitol Hill briefing in support of keeping the safe haven channels intact and also has a full write up for those looking to get up to speed on the issue.
• Despite being, arguably, the cultural capital of the United States, New York City lacks a formal cultural plan – unlike, for example, Chicago, Austin, and Roanoke, VA. Two NYC Council members have introduced a bill that would change that, forcing the Department of Cultural Affairs to assess the cultural needs of artists and communities on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.
• The Big Apple is also gearing up to choose a new mayor, and candidates on the right and left have expressed a range of support for the arts. Interestingly, all but one (Republican and Democrat) claim to be favor of increasing arts education spending. Any guesses as to which one? (Related: Guy Yedwab and the League of Independent Theatres have a voter guide for artists.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The federal copyright office’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel stepped down from her position last month. The Future of Music Coalition pays tribute to Espinel’s service.
• The new director of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture, Denise Montgomery, resigned last month after just 44 days in her position stating, “I cannot in good conscience remain part of the Filner administration.” Montgomery was not the first to leave the administration in response to the mayor’s ongoing sexual harassment scandal. By the end of August, Filner himself was forced to resign. His legal troubles continue.
• Farewell to Trevor O’Donnell, who is leaving behind the nonprofit arts – and his lively blog, Marketing the Arts to Death – to focus on his architecture work.

BIG IDEAS

• In advance of the Arts Dinner-vention Project, Devon Smith offers an awesome google-doc-rumination — with a running comment thread — on “a revolution in the arts.” More, please!
• Mark Schubin has created a half-hour video overview of the history of technology solutions in the performing arts, from sound ducts in opera houses to the phonauthograph and beyond.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• “Deaccessioning has always been tricky”: whether it’s public outrage in the UK or legal troubles in Detroit, cashing in on beloved works of art is no easy way out of financial trouble. Meanwhile, the Willem de Kooning Foundation has decided to sell 10 paintings by the late artist to fund a special endowment program. Rather than risk the negative publicity a public sale could garner (see above), the works have been consigned to Gagosian Gallery, who will exhibit the pieces in an upcoming show and whisk them away privately at undisclosed amounts. The Foundation hopes to raise more than $30 million from the sale.
• On the heels of last week’s announcement that Nashville Symphony Orchestra musicians have agreed to a one-year, 15% reduction in salary, Minnesota Orchestra’s union musicians are standing their ground over demands for higher pay. The stalemate could result in the loss of their renowned conductor Osmo Vänskä and cancellations in their concert series this November.

IN THE FIELD

• Barry Hessenius’s annual list of the Fifty Most Powerful and Influential People in Nonprofit Arts is out, with a lot of new names but a conspicuous lack of arts education leaders. Congratulations to all who were mentioned.
• Arts Council Silicon Valley and 1stACT Silicon Valley have merged into a new nonprofit called Silicon Valley Creates. And two of Chicago’s oldest arts education providers, Art Resources in Teaching (A.R.T.) and Urban Gateways, are also merging. A.R.T., which was founded in 1894 — yes, 1894 — was “severely affected by a combination of recession, public policy challenges, and limited philanthropic support,” and its programs will henceforth be considered part of Urban Gateways’s Visual Arts program portfolio.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA and the UMass Arts Extension Service are creating a treasure trove for “research into the history of the field of arts management, with the potential to help influence arts policy on the national level.” The new National Arts Policy Archives and Library (NAPAAL) will be housed at Amherst and made freely available online. Initially, the archive will include key documents from the two partners as well as Americans for the Arts and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, but outreach will continue to make the archives a “comprehensive scholarly resource.”
• Last spring, Americans for the Arts and the Nathan Cummings Foundation held a Funder Exchange on Evaluating Arts & Social Impact. A recently released report summarizes key points of the discussion and a few case studies in innovative evaluation by funders.
• A new study led by Leonid Perlovsky of Harvard University conducted in Quebec documents higher grades among gifted and talented students taking optional music classes; the students increased test performance in all subjects. The research somewhat addresses a common complaint about such studies, which is that the difference in performance might be due to a difference in inherent ability among the students.
• In his “Let’s Turn this Old Barn into a Theater!” series (parts I, II, and III), community development consultant Mike Hickey provides a fascinating and comprehensive summary of the opportunities and challenges for cultural organizations that make the decision to “buy non-cultural facilities and fix them up.” These findings are the result of a case study of so-called “adaptive reuse” for NOCD-NY.
• Researchers in England report that European artists are more satisfied with their jobs than non-artists – despite higher rates of unemployment and lower income levels. Earlier research found a similar effect in the United States. (Interestingly, British artists themselves report about average job satisfaction.)
• Video games for 70-and-80-somethings may become all the rage. Research out of the University of San Francisco indicates that video games can help improve attention and focus in healthy older adults.
• The MacArthur Foundation has released the findings from  its recent review of the MacArthur Fellows Program, claiming the study reaffirms the program’s positive impact on the professional lives of award recipients and the engaged public. The Foundation also announced its decision to increase the fellows’ living stipend, upping it to $625,000 paid out over five years.
• Britain is due for its decennial census next year, but officials are considering two alternatives to the classic Big Data survey: shifting it online or scrapping it entirely and relying on existing data from other sources. The goal is to reduce the $1.10 per person per year cost. Take note: the per-capita cost in the US is almost four times as high.
• The deadline to apply for an NEA Research: ArtWorks grant is coming up November 5, and Program Analyst Melissa Menzer has some helpful tips for potential applicants.

• The Future of Music Coalition has a great roundup of takeaways from a recent congressional hearing on copyright law and the technology sector. Big ones include the very different challenges posed by copyrights versus patents, and that for the most part, technology companies don’t see copyright restrictions as stifling their ability to innovate.
• A new arts center in New York City (and the whopping $50 million in city capital funding that’s making it possible) has Mayor Bloomberg’s fingerprints all over it.
• Reason #22 to think twice before moving into a glass house: the New York State Supreme Court has ruled that a artist was well within his First Amendment rights when he took and then exhibited photographs of his neighbors — including two small children — inside their glass-walled home from across the street. Upon recognizing their images in an advertisement for the upcoming exhibit, the neighbors had attempted to sue the artist for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Katy Locker will join the Knight Foundation as its Detroit-based program director; she is currently VP of Programs at the Detroit-based Hudson-Webber Foundation. In an interview with former ArtPlace CEO Carol Colletta, she lists the arts as one among several “levers to continuing Detroit’s turn around.”
• Lisa Hall will become VP for Programs at Houston Endowment. She comes from YES Prep Public Schools, where she was VP for Talent Support and General Counsel.
• KPAC, a classical radio station in San Antonio, has cut its five local hosts to reduce costs and will use a syndicated service from Minnesota. The station has offered the hosts part-time work; so far, only one, Dierdre Saravia, has accepted.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Newly-appointed Ford Foundation President Darren Walker offers three lessons on philanthropy: collaborate broadly, as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation did in the Harlem Chlidren’s Zone; invest in due diligence into grantees to ensure leaders are both passionate and adequately supported by their organizations; and recognize that the kinds of metrics used to measure success in business won’t apply in many philanthropic contexts.
• Grantmakers in the Arts continues to take a more activist stance regarding cultural equity. Earlier this summer, the entire GIA board of directors underwent two days of anti-racism training led by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. A similar two-day workshop (though led by a different group) will be offered to grantmakers attending this year’s GIA conference in October.

BIG IDEAS

• Organized labor is declining, the nonprofit sector is expanding, and two may well meet in the middle. Employees at a homeless service nonprofit in San Francisco successfully unionized in June, signaling what might be the beginning of a broader trend.  And while unions have been getting a bad rap recently this article points out that “the mission-driven nature of nonprofits can prove to be an asset in providing an alternative model to the us-versus-them framework adopted in most private sector organizing.”
• Angie Kim shares two great examples (both arts-related) of nonprofit membership associations, typically ill-equipped to drive sector-wide change, assuming a leadership role at the risk of alienating members or compromising revenue streams.
• Half of Barry Hessenius’s “Dinner-vention Party” guests offer their thoughts on how the arts can address declining audience numbers and shifting participation in truly new ways. This first batch includes “briefing papers” by Laura Zabel, Kimberly Howard, Clayton Lord, Margy Waller, Tamara Alvarado, and Nina Simon.
• What happens when video-game designers become auteurs? In the case of Thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen, the artists reworks his art many times before releasing it to get the “emotional impact right,” his company goes bankrupt as the project runs over schedule and over budget – and the final product becomes a critical darling, breaks sales record, and wins its creator a $5.5m venture-capital investment.

IN THE FIELD

• A new movement in the architecture and design field builds on LEED certification’s environmental standards, and calls for a triple-bottom-line approach that takes social factors into account as well.
• Amazon has launched Amazon Art, a partnership with more than 150 galleries that allows you to browse, purchase and review (or faux-review) fine art much as you would a kitchen appliance. At least one blogger isn’t impressed, noting, “Much as I admire [Amazon’s] shipping practices… why compete in a market where an awesomely speedy physical delivery network means next to nothing?” Speed might not matter here, but access to artwork—especially for people who don’t live in major urban centers – might.
• The community-supported agriculture model is being transferred to the arts in cities including Pittsburgh, St. Paul and Flint. Most of them are visual art-specific, with at least one performing arts version as well. And they never have to worry about getting too much Swiss chard…

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) has updated its annual survey of arts alumni. SnaapShot 2012 presents the results in attractive infographics, and SNAAP’s 2013 annual report interprets the data. The theme of the report is inequalities among graduates of diverse backgrounds. Findings include a lack of access to networks among black and Hispanic arts alumni, which disproportionately discourages these alumni from becoming artists; and persistent pay gaps between male and female graduates.
• The Australia Council for the Arts has released a new study of the Australian arts sector in 2012. The report is bullish: attendance at arts events is up by about 3.5%; box office across genres was up 16% (only theater box office declined); and private sector contributions held steady.
• GlobalGiving, GuideStar, the Foundation Center, and TechSoup are collaborating to create an international registry of philanthropic entities. The project, funded by the Hewlett and Gates Foundations, will develop a system of unique identifiers and establish a database for information like the nature and location of philanthropic work.
• A new paper from Yuan Ji, an attorney for Wilson Sonsini and recent Yale Law School graduate, examines the conversion of Burning Man from for-profit to nonprofit status.
• Do copyright laws “make books disappear”? A researcher examines the numbers of books available in print over the last two hundred years, and finds they tend to vanish quickly, only to reappear later when they fall into public domain.
• A new study found that undergraduates tended to like the paintings of the critically-respected 19th-century artist John Everett Millais more with repeated exposure – but they liked the work of the popular but less canonical Thomas Kinkade less the more they saw of it. This is in tension with previous research into the “mere exposure effect” that found that  familiarity just about always breeds affection, even for lesser Impressionists.

Taking a cue from the success of Steam’s bundle sales for independent games, independent game developers David and Jeffrey Rosen of Wolfire Games tried a similar approach, selling games on a pay-what-you-want model…In addition, Wolfire adopted a new and innovative pricing system. Think Radiohead’s In Rainbows, with a dash of gamification and some charitable giving. Basically it works like this: Name your price. If you pay more than the average (which is constantly visible and updating), you receive bonus material, typically another game or two. These schemes seem to mitigate some of the problems artists have faced under a raw pay-what-you-want model, turning a race to the bottom into a race to the top (or at least an average). A portion of each sale goes to one or two charities, and in a move that capitalizes on the gamer demographic, there’s a kind of high score board where those who paid the most are placed on a list of contributors.

This idea takes me back to the Audiences at the Gate guided crowdsourcing concept for grantmaking that Daniel Reid and I co-developed a couple of years ago. That system attempts to use gamification to take the popularity contest element out of crowdfunding and instead turn the focus on to identifying expert curators. Much as the refinement of manufacturing processes played a huge role in the economic advances of the past two centuries, I suspect that many of the innovations of the future will emerge from introducing complexity into, as Cody puts it, the “raw” elements of revolutionary ideas, so as to correct the negative side effects and perverse incentives that may come with them.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Future of Music Coalition has a comprehensive rundown and positive comment on the Obama administration’s new 2013 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement.
• Ouch: the Minnesota Orchestra will have to return nearly $1 million in state grants because of its never-ending labor dispute.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Some big changes are coming to Philly this year! Just a week after we found out about Tom Kaiden’s departure from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Gary Steuer has announced that he is leaving his post as the City of Brotherly Love’s first Chief Cultural Officer to take a position as President of Denver’s Bonfils Stanton Foundation. Here’s Gary in his own words talking about the shift.
• Margaret Ayers is retiring as president of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation after 38 years (!) of service. Clark supports cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy. As part of the transition, Roslyn Black will direct the foundation’s International Arts Engagement program.

BIG IDEAS

• Adrian Ellis lays out his case for the importance of global cultural districts, and Michael Rushton immediately pokes holes in it. (In fairness, Adrian’s piece is really more about the importance of doing cultural districts right and takes the idea that they’re happening at all as a given. But Michael’s question – how much does the district part of cultural districts matter – is still an important one.)
• A very smart essay by Barry Hessenius on the importance of information-sharing around failure. Here’s a quote:
  

  One thing that seems clear to me is that – at least in the arts field – there may be a tendency to seek a solution to a given problem or set of problems, without fully trying to understand the root causes of the problem.  We identify a problem (e.g., declining audiences) and we develop seemingly rational theories about how to address the problem (content with more transformational potential, more engaging efforts et. al.), but often without spending enough time or pouring adequate resources in the harder part of identifying the cause of the problem (i.e., why are the audiences declining).

  I have no idea how much money we have invested in the last 20 years to support audience development efforts, but unless you believe those efforts have helped slow down the rate of audience decline (and that can be defined as “success“), then, in the main, those efforts have failed. The audiences continue to decline.  Why is the question.  We need to know the answer, and to the extent foundations that fund the arts are more willing to ask that question and attempt to answer it, the better off we will all be.

  And, before we settle on what the causes of the phenomenon on the declining audience are – arrived at by research and study – we need to make sure that research and those studies are credible and reliable and not just attempts to skew evidence to support a pre-determined theory of how to address the challenge.  I know we have spent energy in surveying our audiences, but there is credible evidence that people do not always respond forthrightly to surveying.  We have to dig deeper.

  Indeed. And I would add that, if you want to understand why audiences are declining, you need to study people who aren’t your audience.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• More about social impact capital for arts organizations, from the estimable Michael Hickey.
• A new service called Audiam allows musicians be compensated when their work appears on YouTube videos.

IN THE FIELD

• RIP LA’s Reprise Theater Company, most notable perhaps for the fact that it was directed by Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander.
• First bookstores, then music and electronics stores. Is Amazon about to disrupt the gallery business next?
• Colleen Dilenschneider makes some salient points about success stories not being the same thing as models for success.
• MoMA curator Paola Antonelli dishes about the museum’s new collection of video games.

RESEARCH CORNER

• For those who didn’t know (I didn’t), the GRAMMY Foundation offers grants for “organizations and individuals working to research the impact of music on the human condition.” The examples given focus on psychological and health-oriented studies.
• The latest edition of Giving USA is out, and giving to the arts rose 7.8% over last year’s figures – faster than any other cause area. The arts received a total of $14.4 billion in private philanthropic contributions, comprising 5% of the $316.2 billion total.
• Consistent with trends reported previously regarding corporate philanthropy as a whole, a new survey from Americans for the Arts reports that corporate giving to the arts is back on the rise.
• I’ve always liked working in the dark, and people have always thought I was a weirdo for it. Now, according to a new study, “those in the dimly lit room solved significantly more problems correctly than those in the brightly lit room. They also felt freer and less inhibited than their intensely illuminated counterparts.” Told you so, ma!
• A new “data brief” from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project looks at differences between majors, and notes that, interestingly enough, arts education majors are the least likely to be unemployed in the survey sample. (Media arts brings up the rear by that metric.)
• A couple of analyses are out on the recent NEA/EEOC data release on artist employment. However, a colleague pointed out on Facebook that the NEA’s tabulation inexplicably doesn’t seem to include the employment code for “composers and music directors” (27-2041). [UPDATE: I got a note from the director of the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis, Sunil Iyengar, who writes: “As it turns out, we DID include composers and music directors in our data for all musicians, but, inexplicably, we neglected to list the relevant code (27-2041) on the part of the web page that lists all the artist codes. So we’re correcting that bit, thanks to you.”] All in all, the boundaries are drawn kind of strangely, with the massive “designer” category including “commercial and industrial designers…floral designers…merchandise displayers…and other designers such as…memorial marker designers.” Creative workers for sure, but if you’re going to include people like that, where are the chefs and software programmers?

ETC.

• Congratulations to Nathan Yau on six years of Flowing Data.

• The Los Angeles Times, via music critic Mark Swed, revives the Secretary of Culture talk, this time nominating Peter Sellars and Leon Botstein for the job. It’s an earnest appeal for an idea worthy of consideration, but if it was a political nonstarter four years ago, it’s hard to see how it has more legs now.
• Video game makers are finding themselves in the regulatory crosshairs after the Newtown shooting massacre, despite limited evidence that games played a role in motivating recent shootings. (Certainly a lesser role than…guns.)
• Margy Waller continues the charitable deduction discussion in a guest post over at New Beans.
• The NEA has relaunched the “Your Town” program as the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, which invites proposals for community-led workshops to improve quality of life in rural areas with the help of creative placemaking experts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Well, that didn’t take long: Richard Dare, who just left the Brooklyn Philharmonic to take the top job at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, abruptly stepped down after a New York Times investigation into his past.
• Clayton Lord is leaving Theatre Bay Area, where he pioneered a number of research initiatives, to take the position of Vice President of Local Arts Advancement at Americans for the Arts. Lord replaces Mitch Menchaca, who left to become COO of Chorus America.

IN THE FIELD

• Joe Patti makes some astute observations about convergences between the arts and religion, including ways in which churches are getting into the placemaking game and the tidbit that newly minted pastors are more interested in starting their own flock than in joining established institutions. Fascinating stuff!

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Kickstarter juggernaut continues on, raising an astonishing $274 million for projects in 2012. Yancey Strickler’s prediction that the company would outpace the budget of the NEA proved more than prescient. The Economist has more.
• Artspace, the nonprofit artist housing developer, is the recipient of a new $2.7 million grant from the Ford Foundation. Createquity previously reported on a $3 million program-related investment Artspace received from Ford in 2011.
• “Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone” – the New York Times on what it means to be “middle class” on the country’s most expensive island.
• Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill wonder why we haven’t yet given up on GDP.
• Need lots of money for a wacky, wildly ambitious and possibly ill-advised art project? Britain’s Artangel might just be your ticket.

BIG IDEAS

• I think Diane Ragsdale has become the arts sector’s “questioner-in-chief.” She’s back after a monthlong hiatus with a doozy of a question.
• Michael Hickey ruminates on scale, efficiency, and what size grants would encourage the most art created per dollar. (But is it about the most, or the best?)
• A year in the life of Collective Impact.
• Phil Buchanan, writing at the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog: “I think this whole aversion to dependency may be yet another example of where analogies to the for-profit world have created confusion in our sector. We’re so enamored with market analogies that we can’t get our heads around the fact that certain work simply requires ongoing philanthropic support. Other than large-scale government support, there is no ‘exit’ event on the horizon for nonprofits, no analog to the IPOs that allow early private sector investors to cash in and get rich.”
• I wholeheartedly endorse this pledge on Andrew Taylor’s part not to discuss “generic topics” in 2013. Taylor identifies three in particular that provoke discussions with “lots of heat, but not much light”: business models, advocacy, and value.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new research study from Germany appears to show a causal relationship between music training and “verbal memory” (and by extension, speech and language processing). The study seems well-designed although the sample is on the small side.
• The New York Public Library system appears to be more vital and in demand than ever despite budget  cuts over the past decade, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future.
• A woman named Amy Webb found her life partner online…data scientist style. She conducted a detailed study of popular women’s behavior on JDate by creating 10 fake male profiles and interacting with 96 women over the course of a month, taking notes all along. It’s all ever so slightly unethical, but it does make for some, ah, engaging reading.
• This is a great example of how a theory of change can illuminate assumptions needing testing. Do more entrepreneurs and more companies = more innovation?

ETC.

• In 2011, Createquity shared the story of Aaron Swartz, who had been indicted by federal authorities for “liberating” some 4.8 million academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR in an act of protest against restrictive copyright policies. In a sad coda, the 26-year-old Swartz, who suffered from depression, committed suicide this month in the face of a potential 35-year prison sentence (although the prosecutor in the case claims that she was only seeking six months). Among the other tributes making their way around the web, it turns out that GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky (of course) had developed a personal friendship with the kid supergenius.