State of the Arts

There is a really fascinating article in the Gotham Gazette this month (It came to my attention via Artsjournal.com)about the arts funding process in NYC.

What makes it fascinating is the history of politics that must be behind the process to have it turn out the way it does.

There are 34 institutions that are guaranteed to share 80% of the funding year after year (ranging from $750,000 to $2 mil). Then there are 175 line item organizations that appear year after year by name that get a smaller piece of the money ($22,000 to $115,000 at this point).

Then there are about 200 groups chosen by city council members to receive money this year with no promise of money next year.

Whatever money remains is available via the Cultural Development Fund. Organizations must fill out a 25 page form that is subject to a peer review panel.

What is really strange though is who are the haves and who are the have nots. The Metropolitian Museum is among the 34 who are guaranteed large amounts of funding ($22 mil this year), the Metropolitian Opera, with a similar budget and high regard, is not (they get $134,000).

The Bronx County Historical Society is among the 34 guaranteed. The historical societies of the other boroughs are not. The Vivian Beaumont in Lincoln Center has as many visitors in a week as the Bronx Historical Society has in a year and the society gets $200,000 to the Beaumont’s $17,000.

The answers to many of these puzzles is politics. According to one commentator, the difference in the classifications is that someone lobbied 25 years ago to be numbered among the 34 and others did not.

There are other elements that come together in this situation that I haven’t mentioned and there are attempts by some to overhaul the system (apparently some defunct groups were awarded money because they were on the automatic funding list).

The whole article is worth reading. I can’t imagine that New York City is alone in this sort of arrangement. It may be educational for people to realize the power of politicking, as demeaning and smarmy as it may feel, could yield funding for life.

Back in the late 80s, early 90s I read Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E.D. Hirsch. While I felt his list was a little on the conservative side politically and basically ignored or glossed over important figures and events in our history, I have come to feel he did have a point.

Though I haven’t read the book in at least 15 years, I clearly remember that he wrote that at one time, he could use the phrase “There is a tide” and business associates would know exactly how things stood without explanation. (The quote is from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.)

He bemoaned the fact that he could not do that in the 1980s because of the way students were being educated and the lack of emphasis by families that children be exposed to culturally important things. But times change and old cultural touchstones give way to new.

Just recently I found myself similarly mourning the loss of channels of common culture. Or more precisely, the literal increase in the number of channels. When I was a boy, television was comprised of seven stations the three networks, PBS, two independent stations that 20 odd years later become Fox, WB affiliates and the original WWOR. Because there were so few stations, chances were you were watching the same shows as your neighbors and had something in common to talk about.

When I was in 5th or 6th grade, West Side Story was on Sunday afternoon. The next day at recess, my friends and I had a rumble and I got my first black eye. (Matt Mays ducked when James Barry and I were trying to grab him and I hit my face on James’ head). The inspiration of violence aside, there was no need for explanations about how to conduct ourselves because we all saw the musical the night before. (Well, actually, the dancing was beyond us so we skipped that part and went straight to rumble.)

I have noted the problems advertisers face these days reaching audiences (here and here) because there are so many television channels as opposed to the handful back in the old days.

While cable television and the internet allow more people to become familiar with new ideas than would have been possible when a handful of stations dictated what we knew, the weakness of this system is that now only a comparative handful of people can become familiar with a particular new idea. A smaller segment of the population witnessed the fall of Bo Bice on American Idolthan watched Roots.

Even worse, with more channels competing for eyeballs, the programming is even more mainstream and pitched to appeal to the widest audience possible so even fewer new ideas are being introduced to the country. Though granted, A&E, the History Channel, Discovery Channel, TLC, etc do give me an opportunity to learn about more than that single PBS station I watched — but even they have repositioned themselves to appeal to the most people since they arrived on the cable line up. Their stuff is interesting, but doesn’t challenge general attitudes and thinking.

Honestly, I am a little confounded by the recent brouhaha over Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chair, Kenneth Tomlinson, attempting to scuttle PBS. Or rather, I am confused by the actual attempt. With so many fewer people watching PBS these days than in Nixon’s days when he attempted to interfere with the network of stations, I have to imagine PBS is pretty much preaching to the converted and bringing few new people over to whatever way of thinking he feels is unbalanced.

With all the attention the attempted makeover of PBS is getting, I think more people may start thinking that maybe there is something on the stations that they should be watching. It is that old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. It might have been better to leave well enough alone and let the station be continually overshadowed by competitors rather than give people a reason to yank it into the light, dust it off and examine a lost treasure more closely.

I am not suggesting that cultural values and knowledge be standardized and everyone learn them because you quickly fall into the argument about who decides what is important. I know that the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities is controversial for this reason. The same is true with the programs where everyone in a city reads the same book over the summer. If you are picking one artist or one book, you are excluding so many others whose equal value can be argued.

At the same time, these program fill a desire in our lives to touch upon the time that humans lived in close knit communities where we found joy in our shared values, stories and traditions. Yes, times change and we have to face that inevitability.

But there is also something noble about thinking back to things like the family traditions of our childhood and wanting to share and create similar memories for others. Comfort and security can be found in these type of practices. The mistake comes when we grasp on these things as the only true ways to find comfort and security and insist on the same to others.

I don’t know where and how this common base can be built or found. I don’t believe the Shakespeare initiative and all Chicagoans reading A Raisin in the Sun was intended as a declaration of the true things citizens should know about the exclusion of all others. I am not as sure about Hirsch’s book, though there are certainly things in there worth knowing. With so many options for entertainment and information, I don’t know that any of these programs could have a wide enough an influence to create a common base.

It would sure be nice if we had some stronger common cultural ties beyond reality TV these days though.

Having never lived in a place that had such a vibrant arts community that theatre companies were clamoring to carve out new spaces, I read this article on the licensing of new spaces in Chicago with some interest.

(Have to credit the Improvisation blog Making It Up As I Go for bringing it to my attention. Author linked to me, I followed it back and read some entries.)

The League of Chicago Theatres and City of Chicago announced a new set of guidelines for establishing licensed Off-Loop Theatres (Loop Theatres are located downtown in the area encircled by, the “L”, elevated train system.) The League had hoped to have the licenses approved by now but the hurdle they face is the city’s resistance to “the theatre industry’s request for zoning modifications that would allow certain types of theatrical community centers ‘i.e., Off-Loop theatres’ to open for business in neighborhoods not currently zoned for them.”

The new license will only apply to venues with fewer than 300 seats that don’t serve alcohol. According to the article, to be licensed, “a company must supply legal, financial and organizational documentation and then must pass a comprehensive inspection of the facility. Standards for public safety-code regulations will not change under the new PAV.” The changes manifest themselves mostly in the simplified application process-9 pages rather than the 23 under the previous system. Requirements for background checks and length of lease have also been relaxed.

The licenses will be administered out of the newly formed Dept. of Buildings rather than Dept of Revenue. The department will do pre-inspections of buildings for theatre groups to apprise them of the severity of any existing code violations they may have to address if they sign a lease. Also, Freedom of Information Act information on violations, liens, court proceedings on the buildings is available for people to do due diligence searches.

The new department head announced the office phone number and promised that his office would end the incessant passing off of calls and conflicting answers people got from City Hall.

The whole article was very interesting to me since I have never had to deal with some of these issues in my own experience. It was also encouraging to see that Chicago was making efforts to help theatre groups find proper facilities and make informed decisions.

The one caveat in the article though was that now that the city was facilitating the process and loosening restrictions, everyone would be expected to be licensed. The practice of enforcers looking the other way and theatres hoping to fly under the radar would be coming to an end.

To go off a little tangentially. The website that featured the story, PerformInk Online, (It “provides a wide range of news and information for professionals in the Chicago theatre industry”), has recently stated that in the near future, they will only accept press releases online and only at a specific email address. Everything else sees the physical and virtual trashcans.

Added to the stronger requirement of licenses, this is another sign of how theatre folks gotta get their operations disciplined and in order.

Cultural Commons website has an article on their home page Are Culture Wars Inevitable? I don’t think the author, Arthur C. Brooks, really answers the question but mentions some things to think upon.

Essentially, he talks about the state of affairs and then makes some suggestions about changes for the future, but doesn’t really provide any new insights to either area. He says it might not be inevitable, but the statistics he offers seems to show the numbers are against the arts.

This point lurks in the background of my recent study in Public Administration Review with Greg Lewis, which shows that, on an extremely wide range of cultural issues, supporters of the arts bear little resemblance to the rest of the population. For example, we have found that arts donors are 32 percentage points more likely than the general American population to say they have no religion, 18 points less likely to see homosexual sex as wrong, 10 points more likely to describe themselves as politically left-wing, and 12 points more likely to support abortion on demand.

These differences make cultural policy difficult, as long as any of the subsidized content is controversial. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a satisfying policy for any activity if one part of the population perceives efficient treatment of it to involve subsidies, while for the other it involves censorship (or at very least, that it not be government-funded.

The only solace one might find with those numbers is that a greater percentage of the population in the US hold these attitudes he cites who are not attending the arts. (His assertion that “supporters of the arts bear little resemblance to the rest of the population” is therefore false in this regard. Though certainly people who hold these attitudes AND support the arts do stand apart.)

The solution, at least in a public policy realm, he says “come in four types: elimination of direct arts funding; controlling publicly-funded content; and shifting funding from arts supply to arts demand.”
If you are like me, you immediately noticed that there are only 3 options here. The fourth appears 3 paragraphs later–

“a final alternative to these policies is to do nothing. It may be the case that culture wars skirmishes in the arts are inconsequential, compared with the importance of the art subsidized. Whether or not this is the case, however, should be the focus of responsible ongoing assessment of the benefits and costs of art and arts policy.”

His discussion of the ethics held by a portion of arts donors reminded me that some people combine the fact they feel uneasy about how to approach art with the idea that museums, theatres, et. al. are places where people of low morals frequent. Nevermind that these people stand next to them on the bus and behind them at Starbucks. Far more graphic situations occur in movies thanks to digital effects than could ever appear on stage (though granted, part of the thrill of live performance the lack of insulation). Still, there is a stigma attached, deserved or not to the arts by some quarters.

On the other hand, movies rarely combine that lack of insulation while challenging audiences by employing religious icons in unexpected ways. (Joe writes diplomatically.) The experience can be jarring enough without having deeply held beliefs shaken. You have to respect those who face that experience honestly.

You don’t have the respect those who damn it on hearsay and rumor or who approach the experience anxiously awaiting the end when they can enumerate their shock. More than ever, the internet allows people to be insulated from the experience, be no less shocked and appalled and express their disgust to their representative all from the comfort of their homes.

People have always had the ability to choose to avoid and ignore that which did not interest them. Now it seems people’s main interest is seeking out and calling attention to these very things. The groups you fear will be adversely impacted by these horrors have a hard time not being facinated by something everybody keeps pointing at.

Personally, it seems like the conflicting view that comprise the culture wars are an inevitable part of being alive. I am sure there have been plenty of people who were vocal about their disapproval of the type of art the DeMedici’s or the Catholic Church was commissioning. The difference, people will say is that the art was being privately subsidized rather than publicly.

Given that the NEA budget is about 64 cents per person in the US, anyone tithing to the church back then was probably paying more than the typical citizen does today. (Though the church’s holdings were far vaster than they are today so the subsidy may just be as insignificant.)