With arts groups struggling all around us, an article in yesterday’s New York Times, “As Detroit Struggles, Foundations Adjust,” really caught my eye. It contained a warning for arts organizations and arts-lovers. Describing how their reduced resources made them change the way they operate, foundation officials said they were “being forced to pick winners and losers.” In some cases, the foundations were forcing mergers. As a condition of aid to “Women Arise,” for example, the Hudson-Webber Foundation merged it with Matrix Human Services.

Then comes these key paragraphs:

Thus, the Hudson-Webber chief executive, David O. Egner, is asking himself whether Detroit needs both a world-class symphony and its Michigan Opera Theatre, and, if so, whether they could share an orchestra.

“These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking,” Mr. Egner said.

Hudson-Webber is a big foundation in Detroit. In 2007, the most recent figures available on its website, net assets totalled $174 million and it gave away nearly $8 million in grants. Of that, it donated $15,000 in operating support to the opera and $20,000 in operating support to the symphony, plus $200,000 of a three-year grant to support the symphony’s “summer initiative.”

But… 

[Read more…] about Should foundations pick winners and losers in the arts?

It’s encouraging that people are trying to think creatively abou the broken publishing model, which I mentioned on this site in my March 11 post, “Everyone’s A Writer.” After all, who’s going to cover the arts and publish reviews and criticism if not newspapers and magazines?

Turning newspapers into non-profits (on purpose, that is) is one; micro-payments for using online news sites is another.

Here’s another, by Dan Gillmor, posted earlier this week on BoingBoing. Gillmor argues that a critical mass of elite journalism organizations — from the New York Times to the Economist to the New Yorker — should band together and charge readers for access to their websites. Only after a few days would the content become free.

The implementation problems are obvious: someone would pay for the content and put it up online free elsewhere. Sure, that violates copyright laws, but it happens all the time.

But Gillmor’s “thought experiment,” as he calls it, may at least generate more thinking. It’s worth reading.  

West Side Story — a new production of the great musical by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and of course Jerome Robbins — has arrived on Broadway, opening last night. It’s an event.

Since I haven’t seen it yet, I asked my friend Amanda Vaill — who has — to weigh in. Amanda wrote both Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins (2006) and Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, the American Masters documentary that aired on PBS last month. Robbins was billed as the choreographer, director and conceiver of the 1957 original production, which was seen as a radical show.

What was Robbins trying to do with his staging of West Side Story?

 

What changes have been made, why, and do they work?

 

Other changes cut more painfully into Robbins’s design, though.

[Read more…] about What would Jerome Robbins think?

I can’t let today’s special section on museums in the New York Times pass without handing out raspberries, for the dumbest things that were said, and strawberries, for the smartest. Plus, something for Tom Campbell, of the Met.

Raspberries to:

Ann Philbin, director, Hammer Museum, UCLA: “We can’t just be about art anymore. 
Museums are the new community centers.”

Lori Fogarty, director, Oakland Museum: “We’re moving away from the authoritarian voice of a museum. We’re taking the approach that everyone’s perspective is valid.”

Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums: “People don’t expect the museum visit to be passive. They need more than three dry sentences of wall text.”

Strawberries to: 

Neal Benezra, director, SF MoMA: “If you cut excessively — and I think I can say this is wisdom for our current situation in our field right now — the public will lose interest in you. It’s
a very fine line, but you can create a recession of your own making if you’re too extreme in the reduction of your program.”

And Benezra again: “A really great museum that grows to maturity dedicates itself to its collection. I would ultimately like to see a 50-50 ratio without cutting the exhibition program.”

Bruce B. Dayton, museum trustee: “A real strong interest in art — that’s the No. 1 criterion [for recruiting trustees]. And then the ability to give and the ability to raise money.”

Lora Urbanelli, director, Montclair Art Museum: “We’re all talking about how to get this next crop comfortably fluent, if not conversant, in the arts. We have to provide people with the tools to learn how to look.”

Best Straddle:

Thomas P. Campbell, director, Metropolitan Museum: “This is a good moment to refocus and reinvigorate. We want people to know we’re here and have been for 138 years. We’re a place of infinite experiences. Last year there were something like 20,000 different events from lectures to tours. A tour leaves every 15 minutes. It’s really quite phenomenal.”

 

My thanks to Doug McLennan at Diacritical for introducing my AJ blog earlier this week. I am glad to be here.

Then yesterday Doug posted “Is the NEA Bad for the Arts?” about cultural policy, which sure brought back memories. It was 10 years ago this coming August that I wrote an article for the New York Times about the Pew Charitable Trust’s effort to get the nation to focus on culture. The key paragraph:

Over the next five years, the Pew plans to devote about 40 percent of its culture budget, some $50 million, toward getting policymakers to focus on issues like arts financing, intellectual property rights, zoning in historic areas and an arts curriculum for public schools. The effort will involve academic research, opinion polls and more media coverage, among other things.

The Pew later retrenched, ending its efforts. But Stephen K. Urice, who headed the project for the Pew, was right when he told me: ”The next Presidential election should be the last one in which the parties are without a cultural policy plank in their platforms. But first they need to have smart academics, think tanks and data focusing on this, and that’s where we’re headed….We’re talking about developing an infrastructure for understanding the role of culture in America.”

That infrastructure — though a little bigger now — still doesn’t exist.

I was very interested in the subject then, and remain so; I hope to find more developments.

Here’s the link to my 1999 article — “Heavyweight Foundation Throws Itself Behind the Idea of a Cultural Policy.”