Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

New York City has recently been engaged in a debate around cultural planning. The New York City Council is developing legislation that would mandate that a cultural plan be created and then updates every few years. Details are still in development, such as whether a plan might be required every ten years, twenty years, etc., and how much detail should be in the legislation in terms of mandating specific components be included in the plan. Because of the enormous scale of New York City and its cultural sector, this effort has provoked considerable conversation and even contention. Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, is working to ensure that this plan does not end up creating a complex and expensive "unfunded mandate," and also wants to avoid Council specifying in too much detail the structure or process the plan must use. And a local coalition of funders, led by New York Community Trust, has been working to support the conce...

Dancer Jin Young Woon of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet source: Cedar Lake Facebook page, photographer not credited The recent case of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in New York City shuttering as a result of the withdrawal of support from their major benefactor, Nancy Laurie, an heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune, has sparked a dialogue around the pitfalls of over-reliance on a single donor. The New York Times wrote about the dance company's closure  here , and Michael Kaiser addressed the larger issue in a blog post here . Clearly, significant dependence on a single donor by an arts group poses serious challenges, and adds to institutional risk. On the other hand there has been a significant growth of arts institutions, largely in the visual arts, that are the creation of single donors/collectors. Would the excellent Neue Galerie in New York be able to survive without the support of Ronald Lauder and his family wealth? Unlikely. And many of our now-great institutions with d...