Hat-tip: AllBusiness.com
Bill Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (1998-2001) and now director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, at first seems to position himself clearly in his essay “America Needs a New System for Supporting the Arts,” published in February in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He seems to say, in essence, that the problem of underfunded nonprofit organizations, such as theatres, cannot be solved by hoping for new donors or by making new, stronger arguments for government appropriations.
“If I had titled it,” Ivey says, “I would have called it ‘It’s Time for America to Reassess Its Approach to Intervening in the Cultural System,’ and I use the word ‘intervene’ rather than ‘fund’ because I don’t know that all questions involving the vitality of America’s cultural landscape are all about money.”
In fact, he says, the problems of the arts in America are not all money-related. “In the past,” he says, “there has been an automatic assumption that if an organization is small that it is less excellent. This allows those who care about culture to use an institution’s size as shorthand for quality. I think there’s also a point at which, given the array of possible destinations for philanthropy or public money, you bump up against the maximum level of sympathy and support your sector can generate. When institutions compete for limited resources, you end up scaling back operations to ensure survival, which makes it hard to create or be adventurous.”
He is especially worried that as fiscal pressures on the arts have grabbed most of the headlines in recent years, signal events on the political and legislative fronts have remained relatively underexplored by the arts community. In his essay, he notes how “the 1996 Telecommunications Act laid the groundwork for the consolidation of radio stations” and how “the Digital Millennium Copyright Act toughened criminal penalties on unauthorized duplication of recordings, films, and software code, and extended the penalties’ reach into the homes of average citizens.” Both measures, Ivey fears, may undermine the ability of artists and arts organizations to foster creativity.
He also states in his essay that he has been made “slightly queasy” by the “disconnect between the priorities of the cultural sector and the reality of the arts system” and therefore asks this question: “Had those of us who cared about the health of America’s system for supporting the arts, by concentrating narrowly on cultural nonprofit groups and the agencies and nongovernmental organizations that help them, overlooked the policy interventions that were really shifting our cultural landscape?” It’s not that Ivey doesn’t applaud the growth in the nonprofit arts during the last 40 years—from 7,700 groups in 1965 to over 40,000 today. It’s that those statistics are deceptive: “Financial gains associated with early growth in the nonprofit world have flattened over the past decade.” Thus, as the sector has grown, it has not grown richer, and therein is the problem.
“Again, I think there’s a point when you use up your moral claim on the public and private wallet,” Ivey repeats, “and that’s true whether you fund programs for the homeless, for global HIV/AIDS relief, or culture. I think the limit is reached more quickly with culture, though, because in our society especially, cultural concerns are seen as secondary or tertiary. [Americans for the Arts president and CEO] Bob Lynch would say the fallout from the dot-com bust has hurt culture funding and that when the economy gets its legs, we’ll expand once more. I’m not so sure.” Far healthier, he writes, would be for the arts not just to devise “new tactics for pumping up venerable nonprofit revenue streams,” but to “stop thinking that the potential for societal support for the current nonprofit arts agenda is limitless, constrained only by our inability to craft the ‘right’ argument or motivate the ‘right’ financial partners.” While we’re thinking about minimizing “the erosion of our gains,” we should also “draw a bigger, more inclusive map of America’s arts system.”
Arts Policy and Political Action
What does he mean by “more inclusive?” Ivey often emphasizes, with little prompting, that the current political atmosphere demands such an attitude change. After all, this is an America in which “what passes for cultural policy is focused almost exclusively on the agenda of cultural nonprofits, while copyright legislation, media ownership deregulation, and the question of the value of cultural diplomacy—things that transform the cultural landscape as much as $50 million or $100 million here or there—have not been addressed.” In so doing, “we’ve let the horse out of the barn. We need to be at the table when such policies are discussed so the interests of artists and arts organizations are preserved. To me, the biggest looming threat is tax reform. When I see the White House appointing a commission to restructure and simplify the tax code, I’m concerned that the cultural community, in an era of fiscal constraint, will not be perceived as providing a public service, thus undermining the value of the ability to make tax-deductible contributions.”
Perhaps more audaciously, Ivey is also calling on corporations to think more deeply about their responsibility to society and for the nonprofit arts sector, in turn, to study examples from the commercial realm for innovative new models to consider: “When Goddard Lieberson was president of Columbia Records, he viewed a record label as a public trust: He knew it would always have a vibrant classical division even if it didn’t contribute to the bottom line, because it didn’t operate as a subset of a subset of a multinational corporation. Today, with boards of directors harassed by shareholders each quarter, they don’t have the flexibility to take risks that produce great art.” HBO, by contrasting example, “sells subscriptions and produces content that generates buzz and a perception of quality, which is how you get ‘Angels in America,’ certainly one of the most important TV events of the last 24 months.” Should it prove unable or unwilling to study new models, the arts will be “ignoring the fact that both the nonprofit and commercial business models make it very tough to make creative decisions. Among nonprofits, it’s budget constraints, the inability to grow new revenue streams. Among for-profits, it’s parent companies chasing stock prices and the inability to think of artists’ development over the long haul.” Neither of which, he says, are healthy for our culture.
Similarly unhealthy is the notion that if we can just convince government officials of the great economic and societal benefits of the arts, an attitude adjustment will begin at the top: “In some ways I wish [the Bush administration] cared so much as to discuss the arts. But I don’t think this administration is significantly different from any other since the Kennedy years, when the NEA was just a gleam in some people’s eyes. What you basically have is a government defining cultural stuff as marginal, without any pushback from the American people. I’ve used the example from time to time that the connection between the NEA and the president is always the first lady. Hillary Clinton’s office recruited me for the NEA. Last year, Laura Bush’s office pushed for an $18 million funding increase for the agency. Back in the ’70s, Joan Mondale—’Joan of Art,’ as she was known—was the great one in the Carter administration. The problem is culture is not perceived as real public policy.”
Is there any area of the arts already well-poised for innovation? Curiously, he says it’s the theatre: “It’s the only institutionalized form that really has exact mirror images in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Look at record companies—they’re almost all for-profit. Museums are almost all nonprofit. Theatre is unusual because some institutions are in one world and some are in another, and that makes you wonder about the value of nonprofit status. Some parts of the arts system—like design, architecture, and, for the most part, book publishing and fashion—lack much of a nonprofit presence yet are vigorous parts of the cultural landscape, which they retain without getting grants. So it would be interesting to back up and look at the system without the old assumptions.”
Smartly done, he says, such an attitude change could eventually lead to more pro-arts policies and legislation: “I recently read a New York Times piece about the importance of ‘Law & Order’ to the vitality of the New York acting community. If ‘Law & Order’ and soap operas underpin the New York acting scene, we need to know that because there may be policy implications. So let’s take a look and see if we need a different set of interventions in the arts. And if we do, let’s start adding them in.”
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