Advocacy

According to a new report published by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Americans who participate in the arts through the internet, television, radio, computers, and handheld devices are almost three times more likely to attend live arts events than nonmedia participants (59 percent versus 21 percent). Users of technology and electronic media also attend, on average, twice as many live arts events—six versus three in a single year—and see a wider variety of genres.

The report, called Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation, looks at who is participating in the arts through electronic media, what factors affect their participation, and the relationships among media-based arts activities, live attendance, and personal arts creation. Audience 2.0 has determined that media-based arts participation appears to encourage—rather than replace—attendance at live arts events. Among the conclusions:

• Education continues to be the best predictor of arts participation among adults, both for live attendance and through electronic media. Survey respondents with at least some college education were more likely than respondents with a grade-school education to have used electronic media to participate in the arts
• For many Americans—primarily older Americans, lower-income earners, and racial/ethnic minority groups—electronic media is the only way they participate in arts events
• The 15.4 percent of US adults who use media only to engage with the arts are equally likely to be urban or rural
• Twenty-one percent (47 million) of all US adults reported using the internet to view music, theater, or dance performances in the last twelve months. Twenty-four percent (55 million) obtained information about the arts online

Audience 2.0 expands on the research published in the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). This survey, conducted in partnership with the US Census Bureau and released last year, is the nation’s largest, most representative study of arts participation among American adults. Since 1982, SPPA has measured American adult participation in activities such as visits to art museums or galleries and attendance at jazz and classical music concerts, opera and ballet performances, and musical and nonmusical plays. SPPA categorizes these as “benchmark” activities, providing a standard group of arts activities for more than two decades of consistent trend analysis. Audience 2.0 takes a closer look at how audiences use electronic media to engage in these benchmark activities.

In an agency first, the new report is being released only in an electronic format that includes multimedia features. Chairman Rocco Landesman’s video greeting is accompanied by a video commentary on the report from Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis. Additionally, each chapter will open with videos from arts organizations that represent each of the benchmark disciplines tracked by the report. Arts organizations can use findings from Audience 2.0 to better understand their audiences’ uses of technology and electronic media.

As part of its ongoing analysis of SPPA data, the NEA is making raw data and detailed statistical tables available to researchers and the public. The tables highlight demographic factors affecting adult participation in a variety of art forms.

The Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), a federal agency in the Executive Office of the President, seeks opinions on how the federal government should enforce copyrights and handle infringements. In a two-part survey, IPEC not only solicits written submissions about economic costs associated with intellectual-property violations, but also requests specific recommendations on how such violations can be dealt with. All comments should be sent by email.

Public Knowledge, a digital-issues interest group based in Washington, DC, writes, “The request for comments seems geared to take in complaints from big media companies and other major holders of copyrights, patents, and trademarks,” but also that it is “open to everyday consumers, citizens, and members of the public.”

An area that art historians may wish to address, for example, is the way that copyright controls on images have made it difficult for electronic texts to include copyrighted art images. For artists, an area of concern is the high cost of registering copyright in a visual image, and lack of good bulk registration tools at the US Copyright Office for visual-image rights holders.

Read more about the issue on the Public Knowledge website, which also includes a sample letter that you can tailor to your needs. Deadline: 5:00 PM on March 24, 2010.

Rescue Public Murals invites artists and arts organizations to contribute photographs of American outdoor murals, to be deposited in a special collection in the ARTstor Digital Library and made available for educational use.

The images in the Rescue Public Murals (Heritage Preservation) collection will serve as a valuable record of murals in the United States and place them in the context of other works in the arts, architecture, and humanities. Your photographs can join the more than five thousand catalogued mural photographs already contributed by Rescue Public Murals cochair, Timothy Drescher.

Images may be submitted online and should be high-resolution TIFF or JPEG files at 3,000 pixels on one side. Assistance is also available to scan slides. The online submission site includes fields to complete with identifying information about the mural, including artist name, title, date, location, medium, dimensions, photographer, and copyright information. Rescue Public Murals staff will facilitate their inclusion in ARTstor by providing cataloging and technical assistance.

Submissions are accepted until March 31, 2010. Artists and arts organizations that are considering submissions can email Kristen Laise or call 202-233-0824 for more information.

In 2006, Heritage Preservation launched Rescue Public Murals, an initiative to bring public attention to US murals, document their unique artistic and historic contributions, and secure the expertise and support to save them. While much of the effort is focused on the physical preservation of community murals, it is inevitable that some important murals will not survive. As another means of preserving this distinctive American art form, Rescue Public Murals also collects photographs and archival documentation related to murals.

Funding for this project comes from the Getty Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Rescue Public Murals has also received support from the Booth Heritage Foundation, Friends of Heritage Preservation, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

CAA invites members in the tristate area of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey to attend an upcoming panel on orphan works, entitled “Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works.” The program is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Meeting Hall, New York City Bar Association, 42 West 44th Street, New York

How should the law treat “orphan works”? Please join us as we discuss proposals that would enable copyrighted works to be used when their owners cannot be located to obtain necessary permissions. What should be the obligations of potential users with respect to searching for copyright owners? How should infringement claims be handled if a copyright owner emerges? Do different types of copyrighted works present unique issues? What roles might registries and recognition and detection technologies play? Our speakers will address these and related questions, focusing on orphan images.

June M. Besek, executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts, is the panel moderator. Speakers are:

• Brendan M. Connell, Jr., Director and Counsel for Administration, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
• Frederic Haber, Vice President and General Counsel, Copyright Clearance Center
• Eugene H. Mopsik, Executive Director, American Society of Media Photographers
• Maria Pallante, Associate Register for Policy and International Affairs, US Copyright Office
• Charles Wright, Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Legal and Business Affairs, A&E Television Networks

“Lost and Found” is sponsored by the Art Law Committee (chaired by Virginia Rutledge) and the Copyright and Literary Property Committee (chaired by Joel L. Hecker) of the New York City Bar Association, in conjunction with Columbia Law School’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts.

Drawing on a system developed by France’s Ministry of Culture and Communications, the MICHAEL project, which stands for Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe, has developed an electronic system to access, manage, and update digital records of Europe’s collections, including museum objects, archaeological and tourist sites, music and audiovisual archives, biographical materials, documents, and manuscripts. MICHAEL will provide a multilingual online service allowing users to search and examine cultural collections throughout Europe by linking to existing collections. Eleven countries are participating in MICHAEL. A launch is planned in Italy, the UK, and France in May 2007, and in other participating countries in November 2007. For more information, please visit www.michael-culture.org.