State of the Arts in California

Being in California for two weeks for my art showings, I came across this interesting article on the current state of art in the "Golden State." It was written by Steven Winn and published a few days ago in the San Francisco Chronicle. In short, the outlook here for the arts appears to be a bit bleak as the arts compete against 5000 TV channels, X-Boxes, and other such diversions.
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THE ARTS MATTER - AND SO DOES DRAWING CROWDS
by Steven Winn

The arts are essential, everyone seems to agree. Seventy percent of Californians say artists make for a better community. The state mandates the arts as a "core subject" in public schools. San Francisco arts organizations, with an aggregate budget of $350 million, attract more patrons in a year here than all sporting events do. So why is it getting harder and harder to pay the bills?

"Crisis" may be too easy a word to throw around, when it comes to the perennially dicey business of arts funding, but things are at a pretty bad pass now. The once vibrant California Arts Council has all but disappeared during the state's fiscal free fall. Very few public schools can actually afford to meet the state arts-education mandate. Shrinking city and county arts budgets around the country mirror the problems. While federal funding has held its own, the Bush-era National Endowment for the Arts has become centrist and highly risk-aversive in its grants.

Corporate, foundation and individual giving, meanwhile, has not recovered from the dot-com portfolio meltdown and merger mania that followed. Who knows if the stock market-driven bounties of the late '90s will ever return? The recent crash-and-burn of Alberto W. Vilar, a munificent donor to New York's Metropolitan Opera, Chicago's Lyric Opera and others, is an extreme but emblematic sign of the times. Unable to meet his pledges, the fallen tech- stock titan was arrested on fraud charges last week for filching $5 million from a client. That story must have induced a few shivers and nervous sideways glances in arts boardrooms around the country. It's not only the will and wherewithal to give that can erode arts funding. Social needs, priorities and sensibilities change. A museum or new theater that was exciting to build and open isn't necessarily as thrilling to fund five years later, when it's up and running. A tsunami hits in Indonesia and commands attention and checkbooks around the world. Foundations decide to deploy their dollars differently, beaching organizations that lived on their largesse. Columbia University recently announced that its National Arts Journalism Program has been able to find no other means of life-support after the Pew Charitable Trusts pulled the financial plug a few years back. The highly regarded program, which fostered meaningful coverage of the arts in the media, is shutting down.

Last week, in an early morning forum at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a group of fretting Bay Area arts administrators gathered to discuss their collective plight. The meeting's title, "Why Business Should Be Concerned About Arts & Culture in the Bay Area..." posed a wishful, unfinished thesis. The ellipses, at the end of the line, captured an air of what-next uncertainty. Should business be concerned?

A controversial Rand Research in the Arts study, commissioned by the Wallace Foundation and published earlier this year, touched off the latest onset of anxiety. According to the study, "Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts," the oft-touted social and economic and social fruits of the arts (more jobs, bigger tax revenues, higher test scores for arts-enriched children) may not be so solidly provable after all. Previous research on the subject, says the study's authors, lacks "empirical rigor as well as a comprehensive theoretical explanation for the claimed benefits." Better to focus on the "intrinsic," ostensibly personal value of the arts (aesthetic pleasure, captivation, enchantment), the Rand report proposes. From there, the study's somewhat fuzzy argument continues, the arts foster a continuum of "instrumental" assets, from empathy and cognitive growth to the creation of social bonds and the expression of communal meanings. The Rand authors go on to recommend early and sustained exposure to arts experiences as the best means to ensure the flow from intrinsic (personal) to instrumental (social) benefits.

Arts advocates who have had been selling the arts as a direct economic and social boon to their communities blanched and restated their views. Conservative commentators seized on the report's findings that seem to question art's social utility, and sneered at the feel-good, all-art-is- wonderful thesis. Dressed up in 21st century buzz-words and catch-phrases, "Gifts of the Muse" does raise an important, ancient question: What good, besides pleasure and diversion, do the arts demonstrably do? Plato, as one of the forum's panelists reminded the audience, said they didn't do much. Aristotle countered that the arts important teach universal truths. The 19th century critic Matthew Arnold, in his magisterial "Culture and Anarchy," maintained that great works of art instill the "desire to remove human error, clear human confusion and diminish human misery."

Inspiring as such notions may be, most of the forum's participants had bottom lines, financial strategies and lobbying efforts on their minds. There was a lot of talk about "making the case" for the arts to funders. "We have to make it so simple that even a Congressman can understand it," half-joked Robert Lynch, president and CEO of the lobbying group Americans for the Arts.
Barry Hessenius, executive director of Alonzo King's Lines Ballet and former director of the California Arts Council, proved to be the most provocative member of the panel. "We've made great cases," he said. "What we lack is political muscle." Hessenius challenged his colleagues to work for arts-friendly candidates. You could almost feel the air go out of the room. For beleaguered administrators who are busy struggling to pay their vendors and put bodies in seats, the idea of leafleting for the right kind of city council member or mayor sounded too daunting to contemplate, especially at 9 o'clock in the morning. Hessenius had one more unsettling thought. "We're overbuilt in the arts," he said. "We haven't done what we need to downsize and streamline" and deal with the "oversupply" of arts organizations.

That sort of Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest thinking may have alarmed some people. But it's healthy to have it out in the air. The culture is constantly evolving, under the pressures of changing demographics, audience behavior, seductive new technologies and the nature of making and consuming art. No organization, no artist can afford to assume that anything that's working today will do so tomorrow.

In his audacious, imbalanced new book, "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," Steven Johnson explores the cognitive merits of everything from video games to "The Sopranos" to "The Apprentice." You don't have to buy everything he says to feel the traction of Johnson's argument. Increasingly, people have compelling reasons to stay home - to get lost in the virtual space of their Xbox instead of an art museum, to sort out the politics of "The West Wing" instead of a G.B. Shaw play.

Research studies won't matter a bit, no matter what they conclude, if the arts can't win this battle. If nobody comes to see and hear the work, all the self-scrutiny in the world won't matter. It's getting the bodies in the seats and through the museum turnstiles that counts. One way or another, those bodies will figure out for themselves what they're doing there and whether they want to come back.