The Fine Art of Funding the Arts
That staff and shield of public speakers, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, contains 237 citations for art, mostly favorable, and 134 citations for money, mostly unfavorable. That's a horseback opinion survey of the best minds of recent millennia. So, it's no wonder that hardly anyone interested in the arts -- including most artists, scholars, and critics -- has any sense of the finances underlying any artistic endeavor.
Magazines and newspapers seldom carry stories about arts funding ... unless an orchestra is failing or a dance company runs a deficit. Ask people on college campuses or wherever arts lovers gather, "What is the financial condition of the arts?" They will either run away from such a nerdy question, or grimly tell you, "Things are terrible. They need more money."
Then often follows a tirade about this country's miserly treatment of the arts, its poor showing compared with civilized European places, Italy, Germany, or France. You will have flung at you some number like 46 cents in public spending for every American or 53 cents or 49 cents. These are figures trumpeted by the National Endowment for the Arts. These pitiful numbers are arrived at by dividing the $100 million or so in its annual appropriation by the population.
These figures are a sham and a deception.
They ignore the amounts spent by the states, about double the federal contribution, and also the amount of local arts funding, about five times the federal money. But most deceptive is the silence about invisible funding our government has provided since 1913, the tax deduction for contributions to charitable endeavors. The biggest beneficiaries of this deduction are religious organizations, medical facilities, and higher education institutions. Although the arts comprise a far smaller segment of the philanthropic pie, our government forgives taxes on more than $11 billion contributed to arts by individuals and corporations each year. This is about $11 per person, an amount similar to spending in those civilized European places.
The results of private patronage can be seen all over this country. We have half the professional orchestras in the world. We have thirty-five major performing arts centers, hundreds of smaller complexes, and thousands of auditoriums, church sanctuaries, club facilities, and college halls hosting cultural events, and no end of museums. The N.E. A. is currently emphasizing "underserved" (which I always mispronounce as "undeserved") pockets in this vast land that are deprived of arts. This program has helped many a small town in presenting arts -- Sun Valley, Idaho; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Vail, Colorado, and various other culture-starved resorts for the rich.
I live diagonally across the country from our cultural capital, New York, in San Diego, a place renowned for the Navy and the Zoo. Yet, I could easily spend every single evening at a concert, theater, dance, or lecture. New classical music alone will be offered this month at twenty-two concerts; seven are free, and seven cost less than $10. At least that's what the San Diego New Music Society newsletter tells me; the society gets a city grant -- $1196. Perhaps more money would encourage more concerts, but, honestly, how many new music concerts can even a willing traveler down atonal byways absorb in one month?
Let's look at a couple of performing arts centers that don't get any public funding.
In Orange County, California, where reckless investments led to bankruptcy and indictments of public officials a few years ago, the Orange County Performing Arts Center is thriving. Some 75% of its $27 million budget comes from ticket sales, compared with the usual 50%; the rest from direct fund raising, $6.5 million last year. The center's programs and literature teem with pages and pages of donor names in tiny type; there are about 7,000 of them, with a substantial percentage giving every year. In its 13 years, the center has also accumulated a $20 million endowment.
Of 35 major arts centers, Orange County has the sixth-largest budget, but the fewest seats, a 3,000-seat concert hall and a 250-seat cabaret space. But this is about to change. A drive is now under way to raise about $200 million to build an 1,800-seat concert hall with some private boxes and a 500-seat music hall, plus rehearsal halls and a cafe and restaurant.
Donors will be treated to private lounges, as just another perk for those who give. Since it gets no public funding, this arts center treats every visitor as a potential donor. Greeters, ushers and all others meeting the public are trained to treat each contact as an investor or family. Recently, the center contacted mid-range donors, $1,000 to $10,000 per year, just to ask, "How are we doing?"
Volunteers apparently love "working" at the center. Once, there was a public call for ushers, but never again, as the jobs were passed around to families and friends. Even though it takes 6-8 hours of training before a docent can say as much as "boo" to the public, recruitment is no problem. Three staff people do nothing but manage volunteers.
The founding board insisted on superior quality in all ways -- buildings, amenities, staff. While most centers have to replace carpets and seats after about six years, nothing here needs replacing after 13 years. Traveling dance and theater companies find the backstage amenities "unrivaled." While the center derives no income from adjacent parking facilities and restaurants, it does have working agreements with nearby hotels to house visiting artists and their staffs, and with restaurants for cast parties.
When the center received its first gift of land from the Segerstrom family, the county's population was 1.8 million. By the time the new facilities open, the county will have more than 3.5 million people. To cultivate new audiences in a county where 25% of the population is Latino and more than 10% Asian, the center is spending $1.3 million this year on for 650 nearby schools. It has five certificated teachers on staff to develop classroom arts opportunities, and invites some 300,000 kids to performances.
Vice president for development J. Terry Jones cheerfully declares: "There's no business like show business -- and it is a business."
A different approach to arts funding comes from East Lansing, Michigan. There the director of the Wharton Center on the campus of Michigan State University, reversed a six-figure deficit within two years and has enjoyed an annual surplus for the last five years, while making capital improvements and a steadily growing endowment.
"My philosophy on the performing arts is pretty simple," executive director William Wright recently wrote me. "First, make the center as accessible as possible by presenting something for everyone and keeping ticket prices affordable. Second, while continuing to present all facets of the performing arts, let the market determine the shape and size of the program." He described the resistance of "purists" to popular events: "In their view, I have corrupted the arts," he said bringing vulgarity to the center.
While vigorously seeking private and corporate money, Wright believes that injections of federal or state money "tend to add life to things that should either die a natural death," or "become more responsive to the public and current life styles."
Like Orange County, the Wharton coddles its donors (carefully graded according to amount given) with dinners, special performances, participation in trips to Europe, receptions, and sometimes a free CD. It also coddles those who subscribe to series, by giving substantial discounts. It also hosts traveling Broadway shows whose profitable runs in the large hall (2,500 seats) help pay for cultural offerings in the intimate 600-seat theater.
Unlike Orange County, however, the Wharton must give Michigan State University some access to its facilities in return for 8% of its operating income. Its annual budget is less than a quarter of Orange County's, and everything else is proportionately more modest. However, director Wright sees "a vote of confidence" that "lets us retain our independence," in the $800,000 privately raised last fiscal year, in "a market of fewer than $500,000 souls."
What's special about these arts centers?
1. They make far wider use of their facilities than those getting public money, for example Lincoln Center in New York or the Kennedy Center in Washington. Orange County Center often schedules two successive performances: jazz at 7:30 p.m. and again at 9:30 p.m.; matinees of theater plus evening performances; a chamber trio on Sunday at 11 a.m.; a song recital on Sunday at 4 p.m.; a dance company or a brass band on Saturday at 11 a.m. and again at 1 p.m. And, since these Saturday events sell out almost immediately, the center is planning a third performance at 3 p.m. According to industry standards, the current facility is operating at more than 100% of capacity.
[Of course, it doesn't hurt that the Orange County center adjoins the largest shopping mall south of Los Angeles, and that the developer of that mall, Henry T. Segerstrom, is the center's founding chairman and a principal patron.]
2. These self-supporting arts centers reach out to all sorts of other cultural institutions in the vicinity. For example, Orange County last year sponsored a seven-month long Beethoven Festival. All nine symphonies were just the beginning. Six more recitals filled in string quartets, chamber music, and piano solos, a UC extension course with four sessions examined the genius of Beethoven, six audio-visual lectures delved into the European scene during the composer's life, his place in the history of music, the underlying structure of his symphonies, and a renowned ear surgeon diagnosing Beethoven's deafness. Meanwhile, an exhibition at a nearby museum featured "musical instruments from the age of revolution and romance."
3. Dependent on patrons, they fill many pages of their programs with names. Corny, but it seems to work ... people part with large sums to be named "Patron of Eminence," "Center Ambassador," &, of course in descending order, to "Center Associate." Each category receives various rewards -- invitation to canapes and drinks during intermission, dinners, first-class seating, etc.
Diametrically different from these thriving places is a run- down remnant of a formerly segregated library in San Antonio, the Carver Center. An energetic, single-minded neighborhood woman had seen to the building's conversion into an arts center and, for 23 years, had kept it marginally afloat. Suddenly, in 1997, a star basketball player for the NBA championship San Antonio Spurs, dropped $5 million into her lap.
The gift from David Robinson was contingent on matching funds, and included construction of a private, rigorous academy for neighborhood children. This challenge sent everyone connected with the center into a tizzy. The current director spent a month in the hospital in treatment for bipolar disorder and may never return to work. The aging neighborhood offers few resources, either financial or managerial. The city, with some 55% Hispanic population and only 8% blacks worries over evenhanded allocation of funding, and major donors like Southwestern Bell don't want to displace neighborhood people from management of the center.
The benefactor, David Robinson, frankly told a New York Times reporter: "I'm not an arts guy." He majored in math at the US Naval Academy. Nevertheless, in fits and starts, the Carver Complex is turning into a reality. Architects are designing, the city is acquiring land, an invigorated board is considering a new manager, and an opening is scheduled for the fall of 2001 (the space odyssey year).
Why tell you this story at all? Because it illustrates the checkerboard quilt of American culture, a diversity that has less to do with race, gender, or ethnicity, and more to do with local and regional arrangements people devise for themselves. In the arts, as in clothing store fitting rooms, one size, definitely does not fit all.
Our arts universe is populated, just like the universe of outer space, with bright and faint stars, milky ways (not the candy bar) and black holes. Why are museums and operas attracting new audiences, while dance, theater, and symphonic music barely hold their own? In the case of museums, the tourist aspect is one ingredient. People are traveling more than ever before ... and once they are at their destination, they need something to do, especially in the daytime.) Places that attract tourists are well aware of the drawing power of museums and find it easy to sell the public on spending taxpayer money to stimulate the local economy.
The director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Glenn Lowry, attributes the crowding of his museum to intense educational efforts and inexpensive admission fees. But this doesn't account for the burgeoning of the opera audience, which is willing to pay more for a seat than it would for any other kind of high art entertainment.
The works collected in museums and the multi-media drama of opera remind us that the arts have been a part of civilized life on this planet for many millennia. Wherever there was an economic surplus, patrons supported artists. Aid came from religious institutions, despotic rulers, the rich, and the frivolous. Their motivations included making work for the poor and unemployed (the pyramids, the Parthenon), showing off wealth and power (Versailles), glorifying various religions (Chartres), elite entertainment (classical music and opera. More recently, governments subsidized the arts, either directly, as in Europe, or our indirect mechanism of allowing donors a tax deduction.
In a diverse society, like ours, direct government funding, especially at the national level, poses many pitfalls.
1. Public funding introduces a political process into the creative realm. You might wonder why the state of Montana has 173 museums. The N.E.A. helped to fund this glut because ... the chair of the subcommittee reviewing the N.E.A.'s appropriation was, for many years, the single Congressperson from Montana. Indeed, the N.E.A.'s annual budget battle resembles a sled traveling through a pack of hungry Siberian wolves. To survive, the driver keeps tossing fresh meat -- grants and favors -- to those ravening beasts.
2. Public funding allows a small number of arts bureaucrats to decide what is art. NEA grants peppered the American cityscape with masses of unattractive, unfriendly, even unwanted, welded steel sculptures. Many of these works became an eyesore and a laughing stock. In Hartford, Connecticut, Carl Andre got $100,000, half from the NEA and half from the city, for arranging rows of rocks on what had been a pleasant green triangle park. In Flint, Michigan, a similarly funded sculpture, canary yellow aluminum angles piled 40 feet high, collapsed four months after it was dedicated. Rebuilt at further expense, this work wobbled dangerously after a storm, and the city even had to pay for its demolition. I believe that the public lost its taste for the N.E.A. largely because millions of Americans hated these arrogant displays. The National Inquirer even took note: "Sculptor Gets Your Tax $$ for Putting Rocks in Rows."
3. Public funding maintains politically well-connected institutions on life-support, even when their audiences are diminishing. The US has 50% of the world's professional symphony orchestras. Practically all the public money given to orchestras in the last 35 years has gone only to increase the musicians' pay. Yes, orchestra musicians were underpaid, but many orchestras suffered when they expanded their seasons beyond what the audience would absorb. This audience is graying ... so fast that when I attend a concert it pulls down the average age. Hardly any American orchestras now record CDs; recording fees are too high, and classical CDs market share too low -- 4 percent.
4. Public funding distracts artists from exercising their talents into grant-writing and political lobbying. It also pressures artists into producing work that is likely to attract grants, rather than pursuing their own vision.
5. Public Funding encourages an academic establishment of musicologists, art historians, theater scholars, and other specialists who thrive on intellectual work. The experts bring an intellectual appreciation to the arts, standards based on analysis and scholarship, rather than aesthetic content. The most interesting fallout from the Brooklyn Museum fiasco is a revelation of the chasm between even the museum-going public and the presenters of contemporary art.
6. Public funding promotes proliferation of artists who see government grants as a welfare program of last resort. The mass crowds out the class, in a Darwinian struggle. The artist who ends up with a gig, a part, a show, is not necessarily the most talented, but rather the most articulate, the most shameless self-promoter, or, quite often, the luckiest.
7. Public funding attempts to counter the judgement of a multitude of donors -- individuals, corporations, and foundations -- which contribute overwhelmingly more to the arts than does government. In its propaganda, the NEA frequently cites its "leverage" with private donors. Leverage ... means that this basically bureaucratic institution wants to tell us what is art and to channel as much private money as possible to whatever it has sanctioned.
These are the everyday injuries to our cultural environment inflicted by public funding. But there is also cumulative destruction.
Public handouts have divorced many artists from their audiences. Subsidies allow the arts to drift into realms that audiences detest. Earlier in this century, modernism in all the arts insisted on challenging and even overthrowing previous notions of art, it broadened the definition of art, and sometimes shocked the devotees of traditional art. Public funding, however, has helped to promote post-modernism a notion of art that scoffs at talent or craftsmanship and depends entirely on shocking the public. Hence, explicit photos of sado-masochistic sex, a crucifix in a jar of urine, the lady smeared with chocolate, and the latest circus in Brooklyn.
Worse than the scattered incidents that attract media attention is the takeover of non-profit theaters and museums by a shrill crowd of ideologists that have virtually no public beyond their peers. Presenting themselves as "experimental" or "cutting edge," theater companies infuse unexpected meanings into old plays -- a Shaw drama transferred to Bosnia, an O'Neill classic suddenly a harangue about race problems -- plus a steady diet of new plays about deviant characters, transgressive behaviors, and lessons in politically correct attitudes.
Who cares if you listen? This is a challenge no composer before the mid-20th century would issue. Public funding is not totally responsible for composers like Milton Babbitt abandoning audiences, but the phenomenon of OPM (other people's money) is. Babbitt and most other avant-garde composers hold tenured positions at universities or music schools. So they feel no obligation to write listenable music. Instead, many of them march off some experimental cliff, virtually unheard except by their peers.
This mass suicide occurs because a good deal of tastemaking in art has been transferred from educated amateurs (amateur ... a lover) to specialized professionals, mostly academics, who are often recruited to judge grant applications. This system has strengthened artistic cliques that operate outside the high art marketplace, beholden only to the agency dribbling out the money.
From the arts institution's perspective, dependency on public funding exposes the arts to censorship. The first amendment guarantees an independent institution's right to present whatever it wishes. But when taxpayers are picking up some of the tab, all sorts of special interests intrude. The pressure to censor comes from elected politicians trying to please their constituents. The Brooklyn Museum fracas illustrates how, in depending on public funding, the museum pawns its liberty for money. The day will always come when the money people dislike what you do, and cut you off.
Finally, the cost in time and money of acquiring public grants is seldom balanced against the grant itself. At the national level -- filling out an extremely time-consuming application, plus filing a report on how the grant was spent. At the state level -- strong organizations go right to the legislature for direct funding; weak ones fill out voluminous applications for piddling amounts. A whole profession of grants consultants has developed; sometimes most of the grant goes to pay that person's fee. The arts are always needy. Even in these prosperous times, when they are enjoying record-size budgets, you will never encounter an arts organization that can do with less.
The cultural issue here is that someone, aside from an audience decides what is high art that deserves public funding, and what is low art that does not. The European model is often trotted out in behalf of traditional high art, but this model does not fit American reality. It leaves out the most important contributions this country has made to world culture. In an arts establishment in thrall to European standards, Scott Joplin died a pauper's death, Martha Graham struggled virtually alone, George Gershwin was persistently denigrated as "just a Broadway songwriter," and Duke Ellington was denied a Pulitzer Prize for composition. The NEA never did recognize jazz as worthy of its support until the civil rights movement insisted.
Through the years, the NEA has sponsored stacks of shoddy research in support of its efforts. Predictably, it repeats surveys that seem to support Americans' devotion to high arts. Easy to do, when the polling questions are worded to elicit a "good" response: "Did you attend a musical performance in the last year?" Of course, that includes a band at the neighborhood bistro or a church choir. Did you visit a museum or historic site in the last year? Certainly; who hasn't been to the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge, the St. Louis Arch or some other tourist landmark?
To learn who is the real audience for culture, let's look at a recent audience survey by the Wharton Center in East Lansing, Michigan. Remember, this center offers broadly middlebrow programs, not many of which would attract public funding. Yet, almost half of subscribers have incomes over $76,000 per year; only 11% listed classical music as their favorite cultural pastime, while 75% preferred Broadway musicals. More than 30% of the classical music audience was over 65. Women comprised around 70% of all audiences. Among subscribers, 78% had at least a bachelor's degree, and 44% had an advanced degree.
These statistics have substantially held up in every other study of who consumes culture. Advanced age, high income, superior education, and, to some degree, feminine gender have been the keys to culture consumers since the end of the Second World War. No amount of outreach, proselytizing, or propaganda piffle has altered these audience characteristics.
The latest ploy of the public fund proponents is arts education, certainly an area neglected in public schools, but only one of many other areas, like math, reading, and history which are also neglected. Recently we were treated to "research" that seemed to indicate that infants who heard Mozart's music developed into children of superior intelligence. (The Governor of Georgia rushed to insure that the state gave a Mozart CD to the parents of every newborn.) Now the research, like most educational research, was found invalid. The children benefiting from "the Mozart effect" actually benefitted from superior parenting.
Is all public funding therefore bad? Not necessarily. There are many ways governmental agencies can promote the arts.
1. Government agencies can maintain community calendars as a planning resource for arts institutions. This would help performing arts groups in scheduling to avoid conflicts or competitive appeals to basically the same audience. An online calendar would help the cyber-literate, which includes almost everyone interested in culture, find the events they desire.
2. In the same vein, government agencies could maintain an inventory of all regional venues for performances and exhibitions. At present, the preponderance of such spaces are considerably underused. I'm thinking of churches and synagogues, schools, shopping malls, parks, airports, community centers and any other space where an audience can gather. Government could help artists utilize these spaces, and perhaps pay for insurance or cleanup.
Regional or state arts councils can also act as booking agents for a variety of performers. In California, the state arts council maintains a register of musicians, dance groups, and other performers and their fees. When a local group books anyone in that register, the state pays a portion of their fees. 4. Artists are often too preoccupied with their vision to take care of business. Government agencies can help by sponsoring business seminars for artists. They can provide nuts and bolts data for building audiences, maintaining financial records, acquiring insurance, and other tasks artists often consider menial but which support their talents.
All this may sound trivial. Maybe, but it could make a real, not an illusory contribution, to bringing art to the public. Many proponents of public funding for the arts still couch their message in the vocabulary of religion: outreach to the underserved, exposing youth to worthy activities, uplifting the careworn.
But we live in a democracy, enjoying not only political and personal liberty, but the right to spend our spare time and money however we please, whether testing the slots under a fake baroque ceiling in Las Vegas, or savoring six recitals surveying all of Chopin's published piano music. I did that last summer at a nearby music and arts library. The 34-year-old pianist, Gustavo Romero, had first played in the same room as an 11-year-old child prodigy. Many patrons at the country club, where his father was a bartender, contributed (without getting a tax deduction) to Gustavo's education, eventually sending him to Juilliard and other advanced training. The audience for the Chopin series, all 123 people, stood and cheered even at intermission. Each person there was aware of a triumphant aura, inspiring, transcendent, a never-ending mystery.
Such experiences can never be generated, enhanced, multiplied, or purchased by any amount of money. From time to time, they just happen.
Alice Goldfarb Marquis is a frequent contributor to The Idler. This essay is adapted from a talk first presented at the Hanover College symposium: "Art, Society and the Millennium: The Future of Public Art," November 1-3, 1999.
