This posting is an addendum to the one below about the closing of the Rose Art Museum. From the New York Times on Monday, Robin Pogrebin’s piece highlights the issues regarding support for the arts on a national level.
As the Obama administration tackles the challenge of shoring up the economy through infusions of capital and job creation, cultural leaders are urging the president not to forget arts institutions, which are also reeling from the market downturn.
“We wanted to make sure arts were not left out of the recovery,” said Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a national lobbying group. “The artist’s paycheck is every bit as important as the steelworker’s paycheck or the autoworker’s paycheck.”
For the moment eyes are largely turned to the National Endowment for the Arts. Dana Gioia, the outgoing chairman, officially stepped down on Inauguration Day and President Obama has not yet named his successor.
In Congress the American Recovery and Reinvestment bill, approved last week by the House Appropriations Committee, includes a $50 million supplement for the N.E.A. to distribute directly to nonprofit arts organizations and also through state and local arts agencies.
The bill is expected to go to the full House for a vote on Wednesday before proceeding to the Senate. It could reach the president’s desk as early as mid-February, an N.E.A. spokeswoman said.
Arts groups, meanwhile, are urging federal departments like Transportation or Labor to factor culture into their financing. A transportation enhancement program, for example, could pay artists for related public artworks; through the Labor Department displaced arts professionals could receive new training to stay in the work force. “Every one of these places is a vehicle through which the money is going to flow, and we want to make sure the arts is part of it,” Mr. Lynch said.
Much of the clamor arises from anticipation stirred by Mr. Obama’s campaign remarks about the importance of the arts. One of the few candidates with an arts platform, he called for a young “artist corps” to work in low-income schools and neighborhoods; affordable health care and tax benefits for artists; and efforts at cultural diplomacy, like dispatching artist-ambassadors to other countries.
The president is considering the establishment of an arts-and-culture portfolio within the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, according to Bill Ivey, who served as the administration’s transition-team leader for the arts and humanities, including the future of the N.E.A., the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Some cultural figures have even been calling for a cabinet-level arts czar. In a radio interview last fall on WNYC’s “Soundcheck,” the music impresario Quincy Jones said that when he next spoke to Mr. Obama he would “beg for a secretary of arts” along the lines of the culture ministers in many European countries. His comment inspired an online petition that now has more than 199,500 signatures.
Americans for the Arts has proposed appointing a senior-level administration official with an arts portfolio, along the lines of Leonard Garment of the Nixon administration, August Heckscher under John F. Kennedy or Roger L. Stevens under Lyndon B. Johnson. “Someone to connect the dots,” Mr. Lynch said. “We don’t have that right now.”
But what arts executives are most eager for, they say, is additional direct financing and a president who sends the message that art is important. The country’s 100,000 nonprofit arts groups employ some six million people and contribute $167 billion to the economy annually, Mr. Lynch said. “I don’t think of this as a bailout for the arts,” he added. “It’s an economic investment in the arts.”
Funds for the N.E.A. have declined to $145 million in fiscal year 2009 from $176 million in 1992. Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a New York Democrat who is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Arts Caucus, said she would seek more in the next fiscal year. “I’m more encouraged than I’ve been in a very long time,” she said of Mr. Obama. “He has said many times how important the arts are to him.”
Mr. Ivey is director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University and a former N.E.A. chairman. “There has never been an administration that looked at the cultural agencies as a partner in advancing big, overarching policy objectives,” he said in an interview. “That’s a real unfulfilled opportunity and I think this administration is poised to do a better job.”
On Jan. 15 Mr. Ivey convened a meeting of about 20 arts organizations at the transition team’s headquarters in Washington. Among those attending were the chief executives of groups like the Association of Art Museum Directors, Chorus America and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.
“We were invited to talk about our ideas and hopes for the endowment,” said Andrea Snyder, the executive director of Dance/USA, a national service organization. “It was more than just, ‘We need more money.’ ”
She said that she hoped the N.E.A. would focus on issues like health insurance for artists, “how we support individual artists in this country, and reframing the importance of the arts in this society.”
Since a Jan. 16 report in The Los Angeles Times much of the speculation about the agency’s next chairman has focused on Michael C. Dorf, a lawyer who served on Mr. Obama’s arts-policy team during the campaign and was an adviser to the transition. The newspaper described him as the leading candidate for the post. Mr. Dorf declined to comment on his candidacy.
As special counsel to the long-serving Illinois Congressman Sidney R. Yates, who died in 2000, Mr. Dorf helped develop national policies on arts financing. During the culture wars of the 1990s he advised an independent commission that sought to preserve the N.E.A. after accusations that it had supported some projects that ran counter to patriotic or moral ideals.
Other possible N.E.A. candidates mentioned include Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center; Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Minnesota state Senator Richard J. Cohen; or a return of Mr. Ivey. It is unclear when the administration will make a selection, though some arts professionals said they expected a decision in the next few weeks.
Arts groups said that they would seek to drive home the idea that culture is an economic engine. “Arts jobs are jobs,” said Marc A. Scorca, president and chief executive of Opera America. “We see opera companies cutting health care, administrative staff — these people are taxpayers and rent payers and mortgage payers, just like every other employee.”
For many, the inaugural celebrations and the inauguration itself — with Michelle Obama and her daughters dancing to pop music at the Kids’ Inaugural, and Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and others performing at the swearing-in — demonstrated a new administration’s recognition that culture matters.
Arts professionals sense that the Obama administration is “open and desirous of partnering with the arts community,” said Jesse Rosen, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras.
“That bodes well for what will happen next,” he said. “It’s important that our voices be heard.”
The general crisis cannot but be reflected in the arts, which have seen enough commoditization to be especially vulnerable. Unfortunately, the art world takes everything crazy about casino capitalism and distills it, so that the backlash against what Damien Hirst and the Chapmans can be seen to stand for may be very harmful across the boards.
At the best of times, fewer than one percent of American college graduates with a BFA or MFA in any discipline under the Fine Arts heading are making a living doing what they studied and got credentialed to do — writers writing, dancers dancing, etc. Fewer than twenty percent of same make a living doing anything associated with their disciplines — painters teaching art, artists doing graphic design, dancers teaching aerobics. Those were not, at the level of public policy, considered troubling statistics when there was prosperity in the land, yet they reflect the devaluation of the arts, and their economic irrelevancy in all but a handful of stellar cases, as accurately as a drastic NEA budget cut for 2009, or the sudden closing of a small museum.
Does it take wide-scale struggle to throw light on how the arts have become a zero-sum game? Not an esteemed part of national life expressing what is unique about ourselves, but a special hellish corner of national life where — even more than elsewhere — there is either obscene reward or extinction.
In 1987, the art market underwent a substantial correction. There had been artists getting, for one painting, “entry level” prices that resembled an annual income, and most of those artists did not survive the correction to enjoy an Act Two. This time around, I hope some of what’s wrong can be addressed at a level above that of discouraging silliness by making sure the ranks of high-earning artists — so offensive they are, in hard times! — are properly winnowed.