Parabasis

The Future of the Nonprofit System

By Isaac Butler

I apologize in advance for how angry this blog post is. I normally try to be somewhat restrained (while still spunky!) with my rhetoric but sometimes you just gotta unload. 

Richard Dare, CEO and Managing Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is kicking off a series of posts about the need to replace the nonprofit tax code and the system of "begging" that it has created with something else.  He hasn't outlined what the something else is yet, but his initial post is worth reading, if you can stomache it.  Personally, I had to try a couple of times to get through it because the pathological twinning of self-aggrandizement and self-pity inimical to the ruling class was on such vivid display right at the beginning of the piece:

On my first day in the nonprofit world, I was introduced as "the new suit." Short shrift indeed for the years I'd spent undergoing rigorous formal musical training. My decades of hard-won success in the for-profit sector, it seemed, had marked me with a sort taint in certain corners of the art world -- had made me seem somehow less artistically chaste than I had been considered in my younger days. After all, I must have sold out by choosing to create companies rather than compositions over the intervening span of years. And now here I was suggesting we, as artists, ought to figure out a better way to pay for what we do. What nerve. What gall.

For Richard and the other Arts CEOs out thers who voice attitudes like this, I'd just like to say this:

You have created, maintained and empowered a system in which you make a considerable salary and benefits. That system is predicated on artists not making a considerable salary and benefits. This is true even if the artists you personally hire are well compensated. (A) they are likely not as well compensated as you are and (B) their wages are depressed because jobs in their field are so scarce and thanks to the conservatory system, you keep cranking out more labor than the field needs. You profit off of all of this, off of a deeply exploitative system, regardless of whether it's intentional. 

One of the reasons why artists will participate in such a system is that they are raised to believe that what they do is noble.  Or, maybe, cool. Or, maybe, virtuous. (There are other reasons too, but let's set those aside). 

So I'm sorry, but you don't get to have all of the money, power and health benefits and also get all of the emotional satisfaction that is the main compensation keeping people in your terrible fucking system, alright?I'm sorry the cool kids didn't want to eat at your table, and I'm sure this looks to you like ingratitude from the plebes, whom you are enriching with your fucking gold-plated benevlolence, but suck it up.

Alright. (Just a quick equivocation: I recognize that basically everyone in the arts could probably make more money doing what they do somewhere else.  And I don't personally think that the antipathy that artists voice towards administrators, or the weird condescension that arts folks have towards the people who do the "dirty work" -- note the loaded phrase there-- of making the money and keeping the lights on is a positive thing. I think it's childish.  I simply also understand this rage and condescension and don't really see where the wealthy heads of organizations get off complaining about it.)

Now that that's out of the way... I actually agree that we need to rethink the nonprofit system. I think you'd have to be an idiot (or blind) not to see that the system isn't working and is on the verge of collapse. But Dare's hinted at solution-- using the nonprofit system to incubate starter groups and then at some point reach "a sustainable place where we earn our own unrestricted revenue"-- is ahistorical at best.  Patronage has always been an essential part of vibrant arts movements.  This was true in Ancient Athens-- where tickets were subsidized by the goverment and productions were subsidized by wealthy individuals-- Elizabethan England to our own post-mid-century artistic reneissance in this country.

So the question that needs to be answered is "why is here and now suddenly different?" 

 It's not enough to highlight that the Nonprofit system doesn't work. We have to talk about why it doesn't work before we can figure out how to fix the problem.

And the reason (for me) why the Nonprofit system doesn't work is because the system relied on a good faith assumption that the stewards of these institutions would abide by certain values. That the nonprofit system meant that people involved in them would think carefully about the demand that they serve the public good. What has happened is that the leading organizations in this industry were taken over (or founded by people who turned out to be) egomaniacs and frauds who wanted to build temples to themselves and thought that the 501 (c)3 tax code simply meant there was an additional revenue stream open to them to do so.    And because they did this, and because they were often the largest or most influential organizations, these maneuvers became the industry norms for what success looked like and so the incentives shifted.  And with those incentives shifting, the ethics underpinning the entire field gradually changed to be closer to the ethics of Wall Street. 

(There are, of course, not the only problem facing our field. Declining government support is another, declining ticket sales too. So is the end of the Monoculture.  So is the fact that all of our Brows are collapsing and basically no one believes that "high brow" culture is superior anymore etc. etc. and so forth.)

If we're going to solve this problem, then we need to find a way to move the arts away from capitalism not closer to it. Dare claims that one of the problems with nonprofits is that they end up chasing the almighty dollar.  But he also talks about making arts organizations self-sustaining and capable of earning their own unrestrained revenue.  Unless his solution is "therefore, arts organizations should begin counterfitting dollars," I'm not exactly sure how these two positions are going to square with each other.

BUT! This is the first in a series, so maybe there's some great ideas floating around out there that he'll get to.  And I do, honestly, appreciate people thinking hard about how to solve this problem. But when someone comes at artists trying to sell them on a bunch of buzzwords from a cut rate MBA program (entrepreneurship! unrestrained revenue! America Is Awesomesauce!) I get suspicious. 

UPDATE: Now that I've taken a few deep breaths... I think i should partially clarify the above here to say that part of the problem with all of this is also simply that many of the companies that decided to gut their missions, buy bigger buildings, move into bigger spaces, alienate their core audiences and jack their ticket prices up were also bad at business. They bought big buildings whose running costs they couldn't really afford. They built their finances assuming the real estate bubble wouldn't burst, taking their endowments and donors with them. Etc. and so forth. I don't have a problem with an organization that does excellent work and also is good at making money. I don't have a problem with organizations expanding when they need to. I do have a problem with them behaving irresponsibly, expanding in a way that forces them to change their missions, diluting themselves because they have more seats to fill etc. 

Artists, Supply and Demand and Crowdsourcing

By Isaac Butler 

Createquity's awesome Ian David Moss has generously posted his entire article for 20UNDER40 over at his site.  Co-written with Daniel Reid, it's a vital look at several issues near and dear to Parabasis writers and readers hearts. In it, they examine what some of the implications and drawback are to the enormous number of art and artists produced by this country and what this means (or should mean) for the funding community.  It's called "Audiences at the Gate" and I'd say it's your non-Wisconsin, non-Middle Easy/North Africa reading of the day. Here's the abstract:

Spurred on by major technological advances, the number of aspiring professional artists in the United States has reached unprecedented levels and will only continue to grow. The arts’ current system of philanthropic support is woefully underequipped to evaluate this explosion of content and nurture its most promising elements—but we believe that the solution to the crisis is sitting right in front of us. Philanthropic institutions, in their efforts to provide stewardship to a thriving arts community, have largely overlooked perhaps the single most valuable resource at their disposal: audience members.

We contend that by harnessing the talents of the arts’ most knowledgeable, committed, and ethical citizens and distributing funds according to the principles of what we have termed guided crowdsourcing, grantmaking institutions can increase public investment in and engagement with the arts, increase the diversity and vibrancy of art accessible to consumers, and ensure a more meritocratic distribution of resources. We envision an online platform by which a foundation may crowdsource philanthropic decisions across a wide-ranging network of aficionados, aspiring critics, artists, and curious minds, bolstering its capacity to give fair consideration to the full range of artistic talent available and ensure that the most promising voices are heard.

Point your browsers here to RTW (awesome) T!

Answering My Question (Part III)

By Isaac Butler

One of the surprising (and pleasant) things that's happened in between writing Part II and now is that both Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have responded to this series.  They both raise really interesting points that I'm going to try to address here. I'm concerned about this conversation going off in like ten thousand directions now, but we'll see.

Before we begin, though, I just want to say that in reading through Kevin and Matt's comments, I see that there is a widespread misunderstanding about how the NEA works (and what it has achieved).  You see a lot of "name one great work of art between 1965 and 2000 that the NEA is responsible for," when historically very little of the NEA's money has gone to fund individual artists or projects (and now they are forbidden to do so by law) and you see a lot of mention of "government bureaucrats," &c. So, although this post is already topping out at over 2K words long, let me just stat real quick with...

HOW THE NEA WORKS

(1) NEA grants are administered through partnerships with other organizations, many of whom are state arts agencies. In his post, Matt asks why we need federal arts subsidies. One of the reasons is so that we can have local, city and state arts councils to begin with. 40% of the NEA's money goes into that pot. I'm sure there could be more efficient ways to do this, but it's worth saying that it's not that we face an either/or choice when it comes to federalism and arts funding.

(2) NEA grants are largely given out in the form of matching funds and challenge grants. This is important for two reasons. First off, it means that the organization that receives the grant has to have community support (or is attractive to the market, if you want to think about it that way).  Second, it also means that you get a lot of arts funding bang for your NEA buck because it multiplies on itself and snowballs. 

(3) The grants given out by the NEA are not decided upon by a bunch of General Schedule 10 functionaries better suited to an Eastern European satire of Soviet bureaucracy. Rather, grants go through two stages where they are evaluated by people in the arts (not government employees) for merit and one final stage where they are decided upon by the NEA Chair, who is a government employee, but tends to either be an artist or come from a life of experience in the arts. In particular, round II involves the National Council On The Arts.  You can read all about them here.  The only government employees on the council are the non-voting members of Congress.

It's easy  to get spooked out by the specter of the government determining what art you should like. This view is an inaccurate picture of the NEA. The NEA is our way as a society of pooling resources (in the form of taxes) in order to support the arts (for reasons I'll get into below) and entrusting that money with a group of experts with decades of experience in the field. 

GOVERNMENT ARTS SUBSIDY WORKS

It's also worth saying that the NEA/nonprofit system of subsidies has been wildly successful over the past few decades, while in terms of per capita spending having far less money than its  counterparts in other countries. It helped build and sustain both the regional theater movement and the orchestra movement in the United State. It gave the seed money to start the American Film Institute, the Vietnam Memorial design competition, the Sundance Institute and the Spoleto Festival.  

If you want to be truly impressed by what the NEA has done, go ahead and load up this PDF and jump to page 171. There you'll find a series of essays, one about every major American art form the NEA has impacted. 

One of the NEA's key functions historically has been creating and giving seed money for these kinds of projects. Many of them have gone on to be quite successful, some of them haven't, some of them aren't in business anymore. Having the government be that first major funding risk-taker is important for getting these projects off the ground. I personally worry a little less about current projects running aground without the NEA than I do about tomorrow's project that never reaches its audience because there isn't that first bold yes.

In the interest of complete honesty, yes there are areas where capacity building has been too successful. I am not sure we need 1800 symphony orchestras in this country, and there are many areas where the supply of a particular form of art outstrips the need for that art.  But this is not an argument against government arts subsidies (in either the NEA or tax break form). Rather, this is an argument for taking honest stock of where we are and figuring out what areas (both in terms of geography and genre) could use more focus on demand and what could use more capacity. Luckily, it appears that the Chairman of the NEA wants to do exactly that. 

ARTS JOBS ARE JOBS, ARTS MONEY IS MONEY

Taking those aforementioned 1800 orchestras for a moment, in their 2003-2004 season, they provided work for 76,000 musicians.  As one op-ed writer put it, arts jobs are jobs. Government arts subsidies helps create jobs for people, just as arts events (largely, but not entirely put on by nonprofits) bring all sorts of money into communities ($103 billion annually!) when people go to participate in the arts.

For example, in San Francisco (a city I happen to have the numbers on), the non-profit Arts and Culture sector accounts for $1.03 Billion in expenditures. Around $460 million of that is generated by arts organizations themselves, while $570 million of it comes from audiences. The non-profit arts/culture industry in San Francisco employs 27,837 full time employees, generating a total household income of $548 million. (UPDATE: This figure above needs to be clarified, if you see comment below from Marissa.  This sentence should read: "the San Francisco arts community contributes to the creation and support of the equivalent of 27,837 full-time jobs, generating $548 million in household income and delivering $93.1 million in local and state government revenue." which comes from an article on this issue in the San Francisco Examiner.)

Nationally, arts patrons spend about $27.79 per person per arts event they attend, not including transportation, lodging and the price of the event itself. Non-local attendees spend twice as much as local ones ($40.19 to $19.53). Arts Orgs around the nation generate $166 billion dollars in spending, $103 billion of which is from the audiences not the arts orgs. (Much of this information is available at the Americans for the Arts website, if anyone is interested in digging deeper).

Even if you disagree with everything I'm about to say, I think it's worth pausing here and thinking about these numbers. We're talking about government money being spent fairly efficiently in partnership with private money to create large numbers of jobs and lots of economic activity. Even if  you don't really care about the kinds of projects it funds or why, we should care about the money it generates and the jobs it creates. 

ART, ENTERTAINMENT AND THE COMMUNITY

Now, I want to discuss Kevin's post in response to mine for a moment, because it demonstrates a clear difference in the way he and I view the arts. Kevin espouses what's loosely labeled the "arts and entertainment" view of art: 

Now, I, Kevin Drum, happen to like classical music but not jazz. I like film but don't really get much of a kick out of theater. I love novels but have never developed an appreciation of poetry. Etc. etc. If it turned out that my tastes were broadly shared, would that mean there's a market breakdown in jazz, theater, and poetry?... If serious modern composers produce music that the public has to be bribed to listen to (usually with a post-intermission performance of a popular old warhorse), does that mean there's a breakdown in the market for serious modern music? Or does it mean that serious modern composers ought to rethink the kind of music they write? How do you know?...  I view the decline of live theater with equanimity because I think that modern film, video, and multimedia performances are better than live theater on virtually every level. Obviously Isaac disagrees, and that's fine. The question is, why should the federal government adjudicate our disagreement?

Basically, by this view, art and its various mediums and subgenres is a category of entertainment, just like any category of entertainment.  By this point of view, most of us in the arts are essentially laboring in the creation of luxury goods and asking the federal government to help us by giving us enough money that we can price our luxury goods cheap enough to get people to buy them.

I have a lot of sympathy and understanding for this worldview. A lot of people I know agree with it.  And I think we artists bear an enormous amount of responsibility for this worldview through our lack of community engagement and sense of entitlement, through our reducing of everything we do to marketing language and our using of the language and logic of the market to pervert our principles. 

This is why 99 and I get so pissed at what we see as the betrayals of the foundational ideas of the non-profit system because ultimately, those betrayals are contributing to a world in which art is simply something made for and by upper middle class people who have conned the government into giving them a handout to do it. Guy is right that part of answering the concerns of natural allies like Kevin should involve reform on our part. 

I don't think the federal government is adjudicating our disagreement, actually. In order to do that, it would need to keep Kevin from seeing movies while allowing me to see theatre. Instead, it's taking a broad view of what our culture needs in terms of the arts and providing it at very, very low cost to us ($164 million! less than the cost of Avatar!) while creating and sustaining jobs and bringing huge amounts of economic activity to communities all over the country.

This is because (if I may get ephemeral for a moment here) the arts aren't just about entertainment.  A society's cultural output is the way it speaks with itself and the broader world, with history and to the future.  Given the high barriers of access to and the very small number of stories tellable by more market driven art forms like film and television, having other channels where voices can participate in that conversation is vital.  Investing as a society in something ephermal, non-rational, something that can't be easily commodified is important to our humanity.  

Additionally, different art forms work in different ways, communicate through different means and have different effects. I love the movies. I love going to them and seeing them and being swept away by them. But they are a fundamentally different experience from going to see a live show in which social engagement and the use of one's imagination are paramount. And both of these could be more different from photography, and photography is something entirely different from painting, or jazz.  More kinds of voices means a more complex conversation, a deeper song for us to sing.

Finally, arts have an impact on communities that goes beyond both economics and individual enjoyment.  We have a vision in this country that "the arts" is a big gala at the Met where everyone's wearing scarves and they all look exactly the same.  And while the Met is of course part of the arts, the arts are also The Bronx Academy Of Arts and Dance, a queer-friendly performance and visual arts space in the South Bronx. It's the Guthrie here in Minneapolis, yes, but it's also Pillsbury House, a community center run by the theater it encloses. 

Ultimately, I don't think the arts are about the individual benefit of my being able to see theater and not pay an arm and a leg for it, or of there still being new jazz music composed.  The entertainment/consumer view of art is certainly part of the picture, but the larger one, the more vital to our society and therefore more worth funding is the way arts help make communities unique, inspire civic pride, reach underserved populations and create community wide participation. Eliminating government funding for the arts makes all of this harder to achieve. 

PS: Guy Yedwab has been blogging up a storm on this issue.  Tons of good thoughts to be found there.

Answering My Question (Part II)

By Isaac Butler

So, in Part I I mentioned that for my next post I'd try to unpack some of Drum's assumptions about direct funding for the arts. I know this is a bit slow and a bt thoroughgoing, but I think in these types of conversations, we tend to talk past each other, so I want to better understand someone's POV before responding to it. Alright, here goes.

Drum writes:

As for direct federal subsidies to the arts, I agree with Jon Chait that there really isn't much of a market breakdown here: the current market for art, broadcasting, and entertainment seems pretty robust to me without government help. The United States isn't the Florence of the Medicis, after all.

So what's going on here? What does Drum mean when he says "market breakdown"?

This gets back to what I was saying yesterday. There are certain things that we believe are a public good that the market does not do a very good job of supporting effectively.  When that happens, we use the levers of government to subsidize them.  So Drum's not saying that art isn't important which is the common argument that we end up arguing against.  What he's saying is that the market is doing a good enough job of supporting the arts and therefore, government intervention is not needed. And furthermore, arts patronage is a distortion of what the government should do (hence the Medicis crack.)

I think it is within these arguments that the clearest counter-arguments are available.  First off, Drum is simply wrong about the historical background of government arts support, which goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, who subsidized ticket prices for poor attendees of the City Dionysia. Our own public support for the arts goes back to the WPA not the NEA, and several other nations' arts patronage goes back further than that.

Now, there's a counter to the historical argument, which goes along with the Rocco kerfuffle of a few weeks ago, namely that the WPA and then the NEA (with some help from some private foundations like the folks at Ford) did a really good job of creating a burgeoning arts scene, massively increasing both supply and quality of the American arts all over the country and now that that mission is accomplished... maybe we don't need them anymore.  

This leads us to Drum's point about a market breakdown. In order to support his point about a market breadown, he lumps together broadcasting, "art" (by which I believe he means studio/visual arts) and entertainment. These, he believes, are doing okay, and therefore don't need government support.

What he leaves out are things like Jazz, "Classical" Music, Theatre, Dance etc. In other words, it may in fact be true that some art forms are supported well by the market.  But others are not theatre, the one I happen to know the best, is suffering an insane level of market breakdown. It is simply too expensive to make (most) theater to be able to price it accurately. Even now, thanks to lack of support, it is still overpriced in most major markets.

Furthermore, it's worth saying that (at least in theatre) we are still suffering the aftershocks of the government not making good on its promises in the 1960s.  The regional theater system was seeded by the Ford foundation on the promise that it would be watered by aggressive NEA funding.  The NEA was supposed to sustain it.  It never did.  We've been spinning plates ever since.  There's a reason why theatre always seems to be in crisis.  It was built and designed on certain assumptions that turned out not to be true.

Drum does not appear to be saying that he thinks the arts are only worthwhile if the market will support them. he's saying he thinks that market does support them.  If we believe that art is important to society and meaningful and valuable regardless of its capacity to make money or work within a market framework, than at least those art forms that are not well supported by the market are deserving of government support.  Furthermore--in terms of artistic quality-- it's important to have a counterweight to the market because it is not necessarily true that what people want to buy is the same as what is artistically valuable. 

Also, it's harder to separate out these threads than one would like.  The robust film and tv markets, for example, are partially buttressed by having playwrights work on writing staffs, many of whom came up through NEA supported theaters.  And film and television work is highly subsidized on the local level through all kinds of tax breaks and incentives used by cities and states used to lure shoots to their areas. Just because you can't see the government support, doesn't mean it isn't there. 

Up Next: A Final Post Suggesting What a Response To Drum Might Look Like

Trying To Answer My Question (Part I)

By Isaac Butler

So, having thought about this post yesterday about trying to convince center-left policy wonks that supporting the arts is worthwhile, I realized how tough a challenge it really is. Where do you even start? I mean, Kevin Drum isn't even raising the really ethically thorny stuff like "why shouldn't I give that money to stop AIDS in Africa" or whatever. 

Here on Parabasis, over a couple of posts, I'm going to try to come up with an answer for the Drum/Yglesias/Chait axis of people who are ambivalent-to-negative about arts funding but also possibly persuadable. 

It seems to me the best place to start are with the assumptions underlying Drum's argument. Drum is arguing that, in order to help balance the budget (etc) we should eliminate both federal subsidies for the arts and tax deductions for charitable contributions.  I want to take both of these separately.

First let's do the big one... eliminating all tax breaks for charitable contributions.  Drum writes "an awful lot of charitable contributions seem to me like "charity" only in the most technical sense, and I don't especially see why you should get a tax break for, say, contributing money to your own church or giving money to your alma mater for a new basketball arena to be named after you. Besides, I suspect that if this tax break were done away with, we'd reach a new equilibrium fairly quickly in which charitable donations weren't affected very much."

Here, Drum is claiming several things:

(1) Many things designated as charities aren't really charities.

(2) Eliminating the tax deduction for charitable contributions would not have much of an adverse affect on charitable giving.

The first one I agree with. But-- and I think this is important-- without an agreed upon working definition of what a charity is, there's no way to say whether arts organizations fit under the title or not. This is why Guy Yedwab lays down some ideas here about how to make arts orgs more like what he thinks of as charities.  But not knowing Drum's definition, I can't really speak to this portion of his argument.

To me, arts organizations are called "charities" when most of them aren't. And I agree with Guy that more of them should be. But it seems to me that we call them charities simply because that's a big umbrella word in our tax code. What we really mean is that there are some things which we have decided as a society provide a civic good and arenot feasible if left exposed to the bitter winds of the market without any kind of protection (think about trains and public transportation here as a rather concrete and obvious example).

We provide the arts two kinds of protection: hidden subsidies in terms of the non-profit status and explicit subsidies in terms of the government funding. That is because for the last five decades or so, there's been a rough consensus that art is an important part of a healthy society and that it can't thrive (particularly aesthetically) without some help.  There's plenty of historical precedence for this, but we'll get to that later.

The second assumption in Drum's argument is that funding for current charitable organizations would not be substantially altered. It would instead reach some kind of "new equilibrium."  I'm not 100% sure what Drum means by this.  It sounds to me like he means, essentially, the market would correctly decide which organizations are truly charitable and give them donations, with the other less deserving organizations (like, say, Harvard) falling off.  I'm not sure. I'd need to ask him. 

Because if it is in fact that case that Drum believes that doing away with the charitable contributions deduction would lead to less money going to "charities" like Harvard's basketball team and more money going to charities like your local food bank, I'd like to hear how that's going to happen.  It strikes me as a fairly unsupportable conclusion that doing away with the charitable contributions deduction will lead to people donating their money in some kind of better way. But then again, I'm not sure what the new equilibrium is that Drum's predicting here, and I don't want to put words in his mouth. 

As to the impact of doing away with the deduction... I know there are quite a few people from the arts advocacy and funding sector who read this blog, so I have to ask: are there studies out there that can tell us whether Drum is right?  Has anyone reliable gamed out what the potential impact of doing away with charitable deductions would be? Because I think this is the kind of scenario where data is really going to drive the argument.

Third, it's worth saying that here, Drum is summing up all charitable donations as either donating to your church or donating to your alma mater to have a basketball team named after you. It's a fun little rhetorical flourish, but it's also wildly inaccurate.  Charitable organizations do everything from feeding hungry families to providing medical care to people affected by war. I think Guy's point about perhaps refining and strengthening the requirements to be a charity stand.

Next post: Looking at the assumptions about direct funding to the arts. 

An Arts Advocacy Exercise For You

By Isaac Butler

As you may know, threats of Republicans destroying the NEA and the Corporation for Public have once again reared their ugly heads.  I'm surprised that anyone's surprised by this.  The Republicans are extremely conservative and have an extremely conservative base to pander to. John Boehner won't even publicly chastise the birthers. It's a pretty obvious move. They try this every few years. Our job when dealing with people like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor is not to try to convince them of the value of arts subsidy. That is never going to happen. Instead, we need to defeat them when they try to.

Because of this, the thing that worries me most is the lack of support for arts subsidies in Democratic policy circles.  Recently, subsidizing the arts has come up on a few lefty wonk blogs, with the authors all pretty much weighing in on the side of getting rid of it, both in terms of the NEA and in terms of limiting tax deductions for contributing to the arts. This is far worse-- and far scarier-- than what someone like Michelle Bachman thinks about it.

So here's the challenge.  Mother Jones blogger (and widely respected left-of-center policy wonk) Kevin Drum falls into the camp I'm talking about. He says he's "open to being persuaded" but at the same time:

For what it's worth, I'd actually be happy to get rid of both the tax deduction for charitable contributions and federal subsidies for the arts. On the former, an awful lot of charitable contributions seem to me like "charity" only in the most technical sense, and I don't especially see why you should get a tax break for, say, contributing money to your own church or giving money to your alma mater for a new basketball arena to be named after you. Besides, I suspect that if this tax break were done away with, we'd reach a new equilibrium fairly quickly in which charitable donations weren't affected very much.

As for direct federal subsidies to the arts, I agree with Jon Chait that there really isn't much of a market breakdown here: the current market for art, broadcasting, and entertainment seems pretty robust to me without government help. The United States isn't the Florence of the Medicis, after all. I'm going to annoy my sister for repeating this, but direct spending on the arts is mostly a subsidy to the upper middle class and CPB funding is mainly a way for the upper middle class to avoid the indignity of having to listen to ads. I'm not sure that's a group that really needs this special treatment. The money could be better spent elsewhere.

So tell me, dear reader, how would you convince him that supporting the arts is something he should care about without condescending to him or getting self-righteous about it? If you were having coffee with Kevin Drum and he said why should I support supporting the arts... what would you say? 

UPDATE: Just to drive home why I think this conversation is more important than forwarding a e-mail petition that reads like it could've been written at any point since about 1982... President Obama is proposing cutting the NEA's budget next year. True, he's pretty much just scaling it back to the levels before he took office, but still. It's $21 million dollars. That's one third of a Spider-Man! (In all seriousness, that's around a 12% budget cut. Yikes!)

UPDATE II: Finally, someone takes a crack at answering the questions above.  Point your browsers over to CultureFuture to read his take on this. 

More On Our Problem

By Isaac Butler

This is an addendum to 99's great post the other day about condescension amongst arts advocates.  Let's look at that video again, for those of you who don't feel like clicking back and reading about it:

 

I think the problem with this video in general is that the patron is asking a bunch of questions and raising a lot of points that we haven't come up with good answers for.  Once you strip away the derision at the heart of the script, what you're left with is the patron raising the following issues:

• I can get equal (or greater) entertainment value elsewhere for less money, why should I pay so much for your tickets?
• I can download this music for free, why should I buy a CD?
• Why should I prioritize donating to the arts over donating to needy people?

As a sector, we haven't answered these questions in a way that satisfies anyone other than ourselves. We're bad at answering these questions, so bad I'm routinely surprised at how many "natural allies" we miss out on. Ticket price again (sorry to beat a comatose horse) being a big one of them. 

So yes, they're difficult questions. Not only because they're tough to answer but because  empathizing with the unconvinced enough to come up with a convincing argument for them is hard. 

But still, we ain't gonna convince anybody with condescension and lecturing.

A New Arts Nonprofit Support Initiative

There's a new campaign underway to support the arts.  It's called The Arts Appreciation Campaign, and its a joint effort of GreatNonprofits, Guidestar and Intersection for the Arts. I just got an e-mail in my inbox about it which I'll quote here:

We’re asking people who have personal experiences with organizations (volunteers, clients, board members, donors) to nominate their favorite Arts nonprofits on GreatNonprofits. They can nominate them by writing a review about them.

Nonprofits that get at least 10 positive reviews during the campaign will be featured as top-rated arts nonprofits. These organizations will receive exposure to potential donors in the media, GreatNonprofits and via Guidestar, the premier site for philanthropic research on the Web.

To read and post reviews go here. To read more about the initiative go here.

Today's Must Read

...(via Mike Daisey) is David Muthafuckin' Byrne with a modest proposal of his own:

However this mess ends up, my thoughts are that maybe it’s time to rethink all this museum, opera and symphony funding — and I refer mainly to state funding. A bunch of LA museums just got a bailout from LA real estate king Eli Broad, and that’s great, but I suspect there will be county money involved there somewhere too. I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future. Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys. Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring — but funding for arts in schools has been cut to zero in many places. Maybe the balance and perspective has to be redressed and restored just a little. Plus, there are plenty of CDs and DVDs of the dead guys out there already, should one be curious.

RTWT here. Your thoughts?

Another View On The NEA Participation Study

Don't worry, folks, reasons the LA Times, at least Arts aren't as bad off as movies or live sports!:

The arts' share of the potential audience of all Americans 18 and older shrank 4.4% overall since 1982, having actually risen a fraction of a percent before a decline over the last six years. The movies' share of adults plummeted more than twice as fast from 1982 to 2008. As for sporting events, the percentage of adults who attended has fallen four times faster since 1982 than for the arts.

The full story can be read here. This reminds me once again of the really incredible efficiency of the arts.  Just think about how much money the government pours into sporting events.  Huge tax waivers!  Big subsidies! Huge construction projects!  And for all that money, attendance at sporting events is falling four times faster than attendance at arts events.  Maybe our new slogan can be: The Arts! Not Quite As Much of a Waste of Government Money As Sports.

The Flaw I See in the NEA Report

So like everyone else in the arts blogosphere, I've been reading the NEA's fascinating 2008 Survey on Public Participation in the Arts. You can check it here. 

Interesting stuff, and scary too.

But there's just one little problem with it, and that is that it's quite restrictive in what it defines as "art" in some old-school totally snobby ways that render it less useful.

So for example, there's lots of charts about audience attendance... but only in certain arts! Those are limited to:

"Jazz, classical, opera, musical, play or ballet performance". That those numbers are down is scary stuff, don't get me wrong, and I'm glad they're reporting on them. But I gotta ask.. why only jazz and classical? Why only plays, musicals, operas and ballet?  Why not modern dance? Why not rock music concerts? 

Furthermore, while it wouldn't fit under the rubric of performing arts necessarily, any study of arts participation that ignores television and film (Which are both art forms, even if they are popular ones) is incomplete.  What are the numbers?  ARe we losing people to Hulu and cable and HD and blu-ray?  There's some really obvious questions that this study about arts participation is missing because it largely appears to be mired in ideas about what "high culture" is that date from its origins over a quarter of a century ago.

Movies and television are only mentioned briefly, the former only in terms of people making films themselves (and even then it gets lumped in with photography) and the latter in terms of it being a vehicle for people to watch the aforementioned higher arts. 

Not that there isn't lots of other stuff to unpack. I just wish they didn't define arts in such a fuddy duddy limiting way. Look, I think declining participation in theatre, classical music etc. is a problem.  I just want a more comprehensive picture!

Fox News Vs. Pig Iron

No one with integrity who cares about the arts should have a relationship with this propaganda channel. 

Seriously tho, here's the deal... Pig Iron theatre (besides being awesome!) employs X number of people.  If they cannot continue to do shows up to the standards of quality their audience expects, they will close, and employ 0 people.  Money that allows them to do their shows up to the standards of quality their audience expects enables them to stay open which saves jobs.  If they can't employ good people (the grant went to save a job), they won't be able to do good work. What Pig Iron does is hard, and involves special skills, not everyone could do it.

Furthermore, it's worth noting that the $25K that the Minneapolis Puppet Theatre got might sound "silly" to a grandstanding blowhard like John McCain, but that money wasn't for actor salaries or operating costs.  It was for manufactured goods like paper. What that means is that $25K goes immediately into the local economy.  $25K of paper is a lot of fucking paper.  It will help save someone's job.  It will help keep local GDP up.  And in the meantime, theatre companies will be able to stay open and in business partially because of the grant, which in turn will spur more economic activity. In Pig Iron's case, it did, in fact, save a job.  Which is what it's supposed to do.

Now Arts Council Philadelphia: Can you get someone with a spine to appear on Fox News?  When the first thing out of your mouth is "We had nothing to do with this" you've conceded the opposition's point immediately. He seemed completely unprepared! 

Quote of the Day

"If I have to edit every remark I make because someone somewhere might misunderstand, I’m going to become very dull very fast."

-- Rocco Landesman on The NEA's blog (which has comments)

Glenn Beck Starts Targeting Rocco Landsman

Here's the video.

For an explanation of what a Connect-4 set is doing on Beck's desk, read this.  I warn you, it makes about as much sense as The Chewbacca Defense. 

Some Good News For The Arts!

The House and Senate have passed a $12.5 million increase in the budgets of the NEA and NEH! (In case you're wondering, that's roughly an 8% boost). The budgets for both agencies will now be $167.5 million.

According to the e-mail I just received, this brings the NEA's budget to the highest it's been in 16 years. In 1995, the NEA's budget was $162 million dollars, but adjusted for inflation, it was $224 million dollars. In other words, this is a victory (particularly in this climate when the Republicans are looking for basically anything remotely demagogable), but it's not quite as big a victory as Americans for the Arts' might have you believe. 

We have a long way to go if we're to reach either the funding goal of $1 per capita arts funding ($300 million) or if we are going to restore the NEA to its funding height, adjusted for inflation ($470 million), but this is a start. 

Yosi Sergent Resigns.

Grr. Ian David Moss, as usual, has a lot of great stuff to say here. 

I would just say, because it comes up in the post, that I know here on Parabasis I've gone back and forth between talking about tactically what some of the considerations are for the White House and talking about my frustrations with this NEA "Scandal".  So let me just make it clear: Although I think I get what some of the considerations are, I find what's going on with the NEA, and the administrations cave-in on it completely frustrating and infuriating. In other words, I don't think we should just feed the NEA to the wolves but, given the lack of organized and concentrated political power by arts funding supporters, I understand why it's being offered up like this. 

 I'd have more to say, but Ian does such great work on this at his blog, really just read what he says.  here's the link again!

Things I Agree With

99Seats edition (that should surprise no one):

 To hear the conservatives and certain other folks tell it, this call was a search for a new Leni Reifenstahl, with the NEA providing the funding muscle to tempt those weak-willed (and, let's face it, already degenerate) artists into creating loving, hagiographic tributes to Dear Leader and his socialist designs on the country. None of that is true. At all. To begin with, the main sponsor of the call is United We Serve, the federal service initiative. Buffy Wicks and Yosi Sargent were very clearly guests on the call, joining in briefly to talk to artists they clearly knew (though there were obviously people they didn't know on the call) and to talk up serving. The main thrust of the call was about service, getting artists excited about doing service for their community. And, yeah, since apparently many of the artists had been involved in the campaign, there was clearly an assumption that the people on the call shared the same priorities and want to help the administration acheive its ends.

That was dumb. Absolutely. And probably improper. And like some, I think clarifying the rules for this kind of thing would be a good thing... But anyone who is beating the drum that this was troubling or dangerous or a slippery slope to government-sponsored art is just plain wrong. I'm sorry. Depsite my anger about this and my usual flamethrowing 'tude, I do hate to just flat-out call people out. But this call wasn't anything like that. After listening to it, I really feel that. It was a call for artists to get engaged in community service and in speaking to their communities. That is all. Really.

RTWT Here!

Zombie Memes Won't Die!1! OMG TEH STOOP1D!

Rush Limbaugh yesterday decided to do his bit to make sure the NEA-non-story becomes The Major NEA Scandal.   I'm sick of reiterating this, but here goes... As Anonymous Liberals says (h/t Andrew Sullivan, hardly a friend of subsidized art):

The post claims, as Beck did previously, that this call proves that the Obama administration is using the NEA for partisan political purposes, and strongly implies (without actually saying so) that NEA money is somehow being funneled to progressives causes.

But the call is actually far more benign. It appears to have been organized by a group of progressive artists who want to, through their art, raise publicawareness about various issues they care about. Invited to participate on the call were a low-level staffer from the White House Office of Public Engagement and the former Communications Director at the NEA (he was apparently transferred to another position at the NEA after this story broke).

When asked to speak, the White House staffer gives some boilerplate talking points about how the art community can really make a difference politically if they put their minds to it. The NEA communications guy is then given a similar chance to talk and says much of the same things, indicating how happy he is to be working at the NEA and encouraging the artists on the call to get involved.

In terms of optics, it was certainly not a good idea for the NEA communications director to participate in such a call (which is probably why he is not the communications director anymore). That organization is not supposed to be involved in political advocacy.

But unless Breitbart's got a lot more, this is the political equivalent of jaywalking. Neither the NEA nor the White House organized this call and the staffers on the call basically gave boilerplate cheerleading remarks. There is nothing in the call that suggests that NEA money or grants were being funneled to progressive artists or anything of the sort. And the White House is of course free to participate on calls with supporters and encourage them to be pro-active. That's what the Office of Public Engagement does.

RTWT here.

99Seats Has His Howard Beale Moment

And you can read it here. I'm pretty steamed about the Yosi move, the Glenn Beck assault on the arts (and on administration "Czars" in general) and the people who purport to support the arts who fell for it.  

I've been pretty preoccupied with MilkMilkLemonade over the past two weeks and it's been hard for me to focus on this, but I guess my thought is this: On some level, it's never going to be worth it to an American administration to stick up for the arts.  There's always going to be "something more important" that we need to "move beyond this issue to address". This is going to be particularly true with the Obama administration because Obama has made it extremely clear that he's a very ambitious President w/r/t public policy.  In one year, he was hoping to tackle a bailout, financial regulations, cap and trade, a stimulus package and health care reform. Two of those big ticket issues (the regulations and cap and trade) have been moved at least until next year and probably won't get taken up until after the mid-term elections.  

This state of affairs w/r/t the arts is upsetting to me, and disappointing. And like 99, I'm pretty fucking pissed off.  But being from the "Don't mourn, organize" school of thinking, my mind immediately goes to: It's going to take a lot work on our part to make sure the arts aren't just a convenient and controversial horse to trade. Or if they are, if that's going to be the arts' role in the legislative process, we need to get something out of it in return.  

In the meantime, if this issue pisses you off, write a letter. A real one. You probably know the address already, but in case you don't it's:

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Wasington, D.C. 20500

According to the website, they want you to include your e-mail address with your letter.

The NEA Non-Scandal

I was going to write a big long post about how nothing that was going on at the NEA was scandalous, how it was all manufactured bullshit and how people need to stop falling for this crap. Then Ian David Moss did for it me.  Phew!  The always amazing Createquity's take on the matter can be found here.