Why Bank of America really cancelled its funding for the Celebrity Series

On Soho the Dog, Matthew does some back-of-envelope calculations and concludes the bank pulled its $600,000 annual donation not out of any sense of tough love for the series (bank officials talked of forcing the series to broaden its base of support) but because it simply gets more of a marketing bang out of similar donations to the MFA and BSO. And it will only get worse, he writes:

... As corporations get bigger and bigger, and are frequently operating far away from their own home base, corporate visibility and brand promotion will become the main goal of all non-operational activity; the personal relationships and local civic pride that support smaller, less splashy causes will become more and more abstract until they disappear completely. And if visibility is the key, let's face it: music is not the most visible of art forms. It would appear that the transitory, elusive nature of music has a real-world financial cost, at least in a society where the free market reigns, and philanthropy is just another front in the war for eyeballs. ...