Fellow blogger Tyler Green calls out the growing commerce-friendly focus of the Smithsonian Institution in this LA Times editorial. Says Green:
The Smithsonian’s leaders and their congressional overseers are allowing too much of our national museum to be transformed into a series of pavilions where, in exchange for sponsorship money and other deals, corporations may determine what parts of the American story should be told.
Faced with a budget crunch and a growing need for capital improvements, the Smithsonian is turning to creative incentives for corporate funds. Green wonders at what point those creative incentives supercede the institution’s public purpose for balanced and scholarly inquiry.
Of course, the line between content decisions and commerce pressures isn’t unique to the museum or even the nonprofit world. Even that bastion of commercial hucksterism, network television, is struggling with the boundary, as well. KCRW’s ”The Business” devotes an entire episode to the question of product integration — the weaving of branded moments into television content (like the whole family on ”Seventh Heaven” chattering about Oreo cookies, or the contestants on ”Treasure Hunters” turning to ASK.COM for clues). It turns out that network television is also feeling the financial pressure from a fractured audience and a more competitive marketplace for corporate attention.
The difference between the Smithsonian and the networks is the tenor of the struggle. For the Smithsonian, it’s a question of violating public trust and public purpose…especially when the majority of its funding comes from our federal taxes. For the networks, it’s a question of how much the audience will tolerate before switching attention to any one of a thousand other media choices.
Credibility and trust are key variables in both equations. It should be fascinating to watch how both the nonprofit and for-profit industries find their feet.
Two points:
1) Most developed countries (and many “developing” ones too) have ministries of culture, which hire artists or arts administrators to fund arts and culture. When done right, there is no political agenda behind the money and artistic merit is the determining factor in disbursing this money. It’s a disgrace that in a country as rich as the U.S. the arts and culture depend on corporations trying to advance their commercial and political agenda.
2) Having said that, there used to be some government funding for the arts and culture. But as the Bush government continues implementing its program, money for everything but war and tax cuts to the rich is drying up, forcing organizations to look more and more for corporate support. It would behoove arts administrators and artists to raise their voices in opposition and protest of this process.
As an arts manager in the public system who passionately believes in the arts, I would argue that Esty Dinur’s criticism of corporate control versus artistic integrity needs to take into account the problems the arts have themselves in determining where their allegiance should lie: watering down and corporate control with commercial funding prestige or purity of artistic merit and control by the few with limited public funding support.
Unlike many, I see the way forward not as an either / or question, but in sharpening up our interaction with commerce and society to argue the case for merit. After all, commercial clout is only sustained through tried and tested strategies for arousing public desire for material consumption. Let’s look to commerce to learn to argue the merit of our mind services.