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Deserve Is Not Part of the Equation

March 22, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

Yesterday I speculated on the possibility of an arts education tax credit in the U.S. that mirrored one being proposed in Canada. Someone commented anonymously asking why the arts don’t just produce a product people will pay to see and support themselves.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but whether you can or should support yourself is not a primary criteria for tax credits and subsidies. Taxes and subsidies are a matter of politics and policy. The United States provides subsidies to every segment of the energy industry- oil, coal, gas, nuclear, ethanol, wind and solar. Now I just paid over $4.00/gallon for gas. Exxon/Mobile earned $30 billion in 2010 and paid $19 billion to their shareholders during that year. So why are subsidies needed? They cost the government over $20 billion a year and 70% of it goes to oil, gas and coal. Less than 5% of that goes to solar, wind and geothermal. I read a piece a few months back suggesting getting rid of the subsidies so that the renewables can operate on a more level playing field.

The same is true for farm subsidies, which also total $20 billion a year. Most of that goes to large corporations rather than supporting the small farmer.

No one would claim that energy and food producers aren’t generating products that people won’t pay for so why is it that the arts keep getting held up to this criteria? Why is no one squawking about these big expenditures to fuel and food producers? Granted, President Obama has proposed cutting about $4 billion in fuel subsidies and $2 billion in agriculture subsidies in 2012, but there is still a lot of money left on the table. A lot of it was put on the table in the first place and complaints about it were generally muted as a result of strong lobbying efforts and political pressure. The arts lack this and end up repeatedly demonized even though the benefits they realize are eclipsed by those of these other industries.

Tax credits are also a matter of policy. I did my taxes yesterday and among the tax credits available on the state and federal level were solar heating, film production and first time home buyers. Now given the big mortgage crisis only a few years ago, is it responsible for the government to continue to encourage people to buy homes? And doesn’t that discriminate against renters like myself? The production of Lost was successful enough that didn’t need tax credits, but they were available.

Hawaii, like many other states, wanted to attract productions and provide employment to residents. (Though it is something of a zero sum game.) Home ownership is seen as a sign of economic health and so the government encourages their purchase.

It will be the first to admit that it is rather cynical to say that it doesn’t matter whether you deserve a subsidy or not, it matters whether you have the political clout to get it and political will to pursue it. Like it or not, that is the fact of the matter.

Saying that there are worse things to have subsidized than your child’s piano lessons, tuition at arts summer camp, or trip to the museum, is a pretty weak rationalization to encourage people to advocate for such a subsidy. But you know, even outside the context of everything else that is subsidized, that is kinda true too.

Art(ist) Education, Government Relations, State of the Arts

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Looking North: Tax Credits For Arts Education

March 21, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

Americans for the Arts blog has just finished up a week long blog salon on arts education. On the last day of discussion, AFTA staffer Tim Mikulski reported that Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the government would provide a tax credit to parents whose children participate in some form of arts education. I tried looked around the web trying to find out more details, but there really isn’t much more than what Mikulski notes. There was a similar tax credit passed for children’s fitness programs in 2007 and that the arts education tax credit was promised during the 2008 election campaigns but hadn’t manifested.

Mikulski wonders what would happen if the President introduced a bill like this to Congress at the close of his entry. Actually, off the top of my head, I would say it shouldn’t be too contentious. Tax credits and rebates seem to be a tool Congress likes to use at the moment. The culture wars have always been about having tax monies spent on things that one finds offensive. In this case, one is making their own choices. The arts have always received a bigger subsidy via tax deductible donations than through grants from the NEA and NEH. In this situation, unlike with most donations, you would receive a deduction even though you had received a service in return and presumably, it would not matter if the money was spent at a non-profit or for-profit entity. If the NEA is suggesting that people’s arts experiences outside of a formal setting should be regarded as participation, then it only seems fair that all educational efforts be eligible regardless of the vendor’s tax status.

While making any arts education expenditure deductible might mean all that money won’t get directed to non-profits, it has the potential for increasing audiences for the non-profit sector if purchase of tickets to performances and museums count toward the credit. And it gets younger people in the doors. It could even increase demand for the arts in K-12 schools if purchase of supplies for art class, make up and costumes for drama, shoes and clothes for dance and instruments for music were all eligible.

What I think would be most important is the way the tax credit was structured. As one of the commenters to this story on the CTV website points out, this type of policy can tend to favor those with the money to provide their children with lessons. Just as there are those who don’t make enough to ever qualify for a tax rebate, there are going to be people in the lower end of the income bracket who will never be able to provide their children with an art experience. On the other end of the spectrum are those who will provide for their children in the absence of any sort of tax credit.

A well designed program would target those who can do so, but aren’t, or are doing so but would certainly be able to afford it better with a credit. A good sized credit and a low enough threshold to earn it, (need to spend at least $100, but you get $30 credit, for the sake of an example), that makes it easy to decide to arrange for some classes can help eliminate the perception that this is a policy that rewards an elite class. At a certain level of expenditure, the credit would cease to be applicable.

While it would be great to have parents required to expose their children to a diversity of experiences rather than spending $300/ticket to see Spiderman on Broadway and earning a big credit for a single experience, there really is no way to legislate people’s choices.

Art(ist) Education, Government Relations, Terms and Ideas

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Art and Fabric Softener, Perfect Together

March 16, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

Earlier this month, Huffington Post featured an article about a group that is definitely out in the streets serving the community. The Laundromat Project arranges for artists to do residencies at different laundromat’s around NYC. They allow people to make art while they are waiting for their clothes to get done. When I first saw the video below, I mentally smacked myself in the head for never recognizing laundromats’ obvious position as a social gathering place to reach out to people.

You just have to make sure no one has paint on their hands when they go in to take their clothes out! Watch the video because their ambitions for their constituencies are to get them involved with projects much bigger than using finger paints and sparkles. I have a cousin who owns a laundromat in the greater NY area. I sent her information on the group to see if she might want to host them.

The Laundromat Project from The Quotidian on Vimeo.

While we are on the subject of finger painting…

There was an amusing piece in Psychology Today addressing the perennial claim that your kid could replicate the work of abstract artists. A study was conducted in which:

“30 paintings by abstract expressionists. Each painting was paired with a painting by a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant. The images were matched on superficial attributes such as color, line quality, and brushstroke, and subjects were asked which piece they personally liked more, and which they thought was a better work of art.”

They did some tricky things like obscuring or mislabeling the signatures on the pieces to test if judgments changed. The labels did influence the psychology students but not the art students. Though, “In all conditions, both art students and psychology students chose the professional works as more preferred and of better quality most of the time. (See the attached chart.) And preferences were pretty immune to labels.”

In the images they provide with the article. I could tell the difference between the profession piece and the one done by a child. However, I preferred the one done by the child. I was not alone.

“Even the art students preferred the child’s or animal’s painting over the professional’s-and judged it to be objectively better-30 to 40 percent of the time. And that’s even when they were labeled correctly.”

So there you go, for what it is worth.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Terms and Ideas

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Stuff To Ponder: Social Media Policies And Arts Orgs

March 15, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York City Ballet is becoming one of the first major performing arts groups to create a social media policy due to some impolitic tweets by one of their dancers. The proposed policy would:

“…require dancers to include a disclaimer specifying that their comments are not employer-sanctioned, according to a copy of a draft reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

It would also ban them from disclosing another dancer’s injury or illness, and from posting photographs of company events, or of “persons engaged in New York City Ballet business without their consent.”

“Additionally, in order to protect its interests, NYCB reserves the right to monitor…postings that are available to the general public or those that are not privacy-protected about the company, its employees and its activities,” the draft says.”

According to the article, the union representing the dancers doesn’t see a need for a policy. But as many other arts management bloggers (and probably not a few lawyers) have written, it is good to have a policy of some sort and make sure everyone is aware of it.

Even if it is a very relaxed policy, you should have at least engaged in a decision making process about what your approach will be, what place social media will have in your organizational goals, how social media practices mesh with your corporate culture and what possible consequences may arise for your company should people reveal information or make offensive statements.

As I read the City Ballet’s policy I think some of it may be a little overly protective. I was reminded as I often am, of the Chris Lavin article about art and sports that I wrote about in one of my first blog posts. Specifically, I am recalling his comments about how performing arts organizations’ approach to providing access was “like a cross between the Kremlin and the Vatican.”

We read about athlete injuries all the time. Is it a trade secret that dancers sustain injuries? We hear about people performing while they are ravaged by sickness. Heck, the one phrase familiar to people who aren’t really interested in the arts at all is, “the show must go on.” It is almost a foregone conclusion that people will soldier through pain and sickness. It isn’t that a dancer’s career is any more precarious than an athlete’s if news of chronic injuries becomes public. Though granted, the athlete has often accumulated a fair bit more money by that time.

The bit in their policy about reserving the right to monitor with the unspoken “and take action we deem appropriate” hanging there may appear to be counter to efforts to use social media to broaden the City Ballet’s appeal. The real proof though is in how great their degree of tolerance for what is posted and how strictly they enforce consequences. A phrase like that is almost a given in a social media policy for most companies, a fact the Wall Street journal acknowledges. It lets people know you will be watching so no one can claim ignorance.

The tricky part though is in uniformly applying whatever criteria your organization has about what subjects and language are permissible. If a person is fired for saying something they feel an earlier incident that went unpunished created a precedent for, they may have a basis for claiming they were improperly dismissed.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Management Philosophy

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