News sites on the web demand a stream of content, and a sure way to produce something is to make a list. My previous post knocked a recent list of  'top cities for culture', on the grounds that the way the index was constructed made no sense. Another day, another list, this one from Atlantic's CityLab: 'The best job markets for young college grads now'. Relevant to me, as I teach students in arts administration and hope to understand as best I can what is happening in the labor market. The piece has some of the usual problems of all indices … [Read more...]

Yesterday I came across a ranking of the 'top 20 US cities for culture', from the real estate blog propertyshark.com (no, not one I usually follow, h/t Ted Gioia). The internet loves to produce listicles, and diminishing returns have long set in when it comes to ranking cities. But this one raises an important issue for researchers of the creative economy. It ranks cities according to cultural venues (museums, libraries, theatres) per capita. Their reasoning: And while New York City has an impressive number (2,693!) of such properties — … [Read more...]

The New York Times Arts page reviews the new adventure of Dora the Explorer, now a little older, and starring in 'Dora and Friends: Into the City!', which apparently looks pretty suburban. And Dora's talking backpack is full of dollars, courtesy of New York state taxpayers. Variety reports: While states offering tax credits for filmmaking usually have their sights set on drawing movies that will showcase their locales, there is an increasing battle to draw post-production work, particularly in music scoring, animation and visual effects, … [Read more...]

By now most everyone who follows artsjournal.com and the Amazon dispute has heard of its strange use of George Orwell in its (shockingly mishandled) dispute with the publishing sector. The New York Times reports: The freshest part of Amazon’s call to arms was the history lesson. It recounted how the book industry hated mass-market paperbacks when they were introduced in the 1930s, and said they would ruin the business when they really rejuvenated it. Unfortunately, to clinch its argument, it cited the wrong authority: “The famous … [Read more...]

There lies a contradiction within us. As teachers, mentors, coaches, friends, parents, we encourage people to pursue their dreams, to strive, persevere, don't give up. We reward and praise determination, the kid who 'sticks with it.' And we should - these are excellent qualities in a person, very worth fostering. But at the same time we know that there are circumstances when, in fact, the time to 'stick with it' is past, when the costs of continuing to strive for success, in a career path, an artistic pursuit, a relationship, vastly outweigh … [Read more...]

Ok, not a blog post title likely to set your pulse racing, but with so much discussion in the arts world the past few years on the uses of data, a caveat. It is brought to mind by a story from Money magazine (a branch of Time), which has tried to make inroads on US News turf, and do some college rankings. These new rankings are all about 'value for money' - what does it cost to attend; what is the payoff in salary. Whatever your thoughts on that focus, my issue is with how the rankings are constructed. Money's method is given here. The … [Read more...]

I'm pleased to say my book on pricing in the arts has been released - Amazon link here, and Routledge link (including for ordering e-inspection copies) here. What's it all about? As I do  on this blog, I have tried to give arts managers, and students of arts management, a systematic way of thinking about setting prices, for museums, performances and festivals, whether commercial, nonprofit, or public sector. There is a substantial academic literature on the subject, but much of it is aimed at the economics profession rather than … [Read more...]

Scott Sumner reckons the cost to the City of Detroit in owning (or giving away to a nonprofit) the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts is about $185 million per year. He obtains this number not through looking at the cost of maintaining the collection, and paying the necessary personnel and building costs, but simply through foregone interest, assuming that cash invested in financial instruments could yield 5% return per year, and that the art could be sold for $3.7 billion. If we lower the assumed 5% and/or $3.7 billion, then the $185 … [Read more...]

Those of us who teach classes in cultural policy at some point always engage our students in the fundamental question: why is government in the business of subsidizing the arts? Only when we have really thought about the ends of the policy can we think clearly about the best means to those ends. And there might be many: conservation of cultural traditions; cultural institutions as local amenities for current and possibly future residents; tourism; instilling civic values through the arts, for example. Here I want to focus on just one: making … [Read more...]

Today at Slate, Whitney Kimball tries to make the case for US adoption of resale royalties for visual artists, or droit de suite: In what would become the first scandalously record-breaking Sotheby’s art auction in 1973, taxi magnate Robert Scull and his wife famously made a fortune on 50 artworks from their collection, which included Robert Rauschenberg’s painting Thaw. There, the artist watched as his piece, which he had initially sold for $900, hammered out for a whopping $85,000. As the story goes, Rauschenberg famously shoved Scull and … [Read more...]