Fifty million reasons that a 'victory' is a defeat

Last week Congress included $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the federal stimulus package. Artsfolk, from advocacy groups that flooded my inbox on Friday to museums -- very few of whom will see a penny -- declared victory.

"It was not politics as usual in Washington, as the Congressional conferees' final version of the bill seized the opportunity to provide much-needed stimulus support for the nation's creative workforce," Americans for the Arts director Robert Lynch trumpeted in a press release.

Hogwash. As the recent Mapplethorpe symposium hosted by the ICA Philadelphia reminded me, the NEA is now mostly representative of how successfully culture has been purged from the federal sphere.

How silly is $50 million? In San Diego alone, the two headline arts institutions, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, have between them cut about 30 jobs. That represents the loss of around $2 million in annual salary (and benefits) at just two art museums in just one medium-sized city. If I were to total up the cutbacks at San Diego's other cultural institutions, such as The Old Globe Theater, the La Jolla Playhouse, Lamb's Player Theater, the San Diego Museum of Man, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Symphony, the Mingei International Museum, the San Diego Opera, the Timken Museum of Art, and on and on, I could probably spend most of that $50 million in just San Diego, America's 17th largest metropolitan area. Christopher Knight has reported that 100,000 non-profit arts groups around America sustain six million jobs.

How small is the NEA's $145 million annual appropriation? The National Gallery of Art and the Kennedy Center receive more federal dollars through the normal federal budgeting process than the NEA does. The NEA is supposed the be the primary arts protagonist for the American people, yet a single arts philanthropy, the J. Paul Getty Trust, spent 50 percent more than the NEA did in the Getty's most recently reported year. (Imagine if one charitable foundation spent more than the federal government does on environmental research. It would rightly be a national embarrassment.)

The self-perpetuating NEA debate is a continuing admission of defeat by both progressives and cultural organizations. The right won: The NEA is timid and ancillary. Progressives have been cowed into failing to substantially supporting one of their most reliable constituent groups: Culture lovers and workers.

So culture lovers should give up on the NEA once and for all. The problem is, what replaces it and how should the federal government be engaged in and supportive of American culture? There is no ready answer. Solving the federal-involvement-in-culture problem will take time.

So here's a first suggestion: The arts community should take a lesson from how policy is made in Washington, from the policy-driven infrastructure of the city. The first step: The arts should join Washington's think-tank culture. Arts philanthropists should fund arts policy fellows at major think tanks, places such as the Center for American Progress and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Smart arts thinkers would have the opportunity to be involved in policy debates, to develop new ideas about how government should be involved in the arts (and not just in one little agency, but across the federal apparatus).

Joining the Washington policy-making set wouldn't result in immediate, FY 2010 policy changes, but over time it would lead to new ideas and new ways that the federal government could engage with and support the nation's cultural vitality. Just as importantly: It would burrow cultural thinkers and backers into the culture of Washington influence, building a baseline of support for the arts amongst policy-makers who work in a range of fields. Perhaps, finally, a great nation would have the federal involvement in the arts that it deserves.

Related: In favor of a White House arts adviser.