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

As many of my readers will know, yesterday we released a new study "Creative Vitality in Philadelphia," that looks at the health of our creative sector - for-profit creative businesses, nonprofit arts and culture groups, and individual artists and creative workers.  This research uses something called the Creative Vitality Index , or CVI, that has been developed by a group called the Western States Arts Federation . Because the data is national, aggregating an array of different sources of information, it provides a great vehicle for measuring our creative sector's vitality over time, and also to benchmark ourselves against the nation and other communities. You can access a PDF of the full report here . The big "take-away" number from the report is that Philadelphia's CVI rating is 1.7, a full 70% higher than the national benchmark of 1.0. The region performs somewhat more modestly - at 1.1 ranking the region 16th out of the top 50 metro areas, though in ...

There was a story in yesterday's Crain's New York Business called Artists Fleeing the City about the fact that the economic downturn, combined with the high cost of living in NYC, was beginning to drive artists out of the City.  Here is a key quote from the article: Though there are no official numbers, a survey of 1,000 artists conducted in 2009 by the New York Foundation for the Arts found that more than 43% expected their annual income to drop by 26% to 50% over the next six months, and 11% believed they would have to leave New York within six months. Even more troubling, cultural boosters say, is that for the first time, artists fresh out of art schools around the country are choosing to live in nascent artist communities in regional cities like Detroit and Cleveland—which are dangling incentives to attract this group—and bypassing New York altogether.   Of course, many arts advocates and policy folks in NY are trying to figure out how to prevent this from happe...