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Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

Tackling an inequitable arts funding system: A response to the report, Not Just Money

Helicon Collaborative, with a grant from the Surdna Foundation, has recently published a second report, Not Just Money, examining where US arts philanthropic dollars go. Some may recall that when the first report was published it set off a small quake across the arts and culture landscape—with many shaking their heads at the inequitable funding picture that emerged in the report and some (like me) finding it curious that this was news to anyone since these inequities are not only longstanding but, to a great extent, by design. (You can read my Jumper post on the 2011 report here.)

Here’s how the most recent report describes the issue, which is worsening:

Just 2 percent of all cultural institutions receive nearly 60 percent of all contributed revenue, up approximately 5 percentage points over a decade.

The 2 percent cohort is made up of 925 cultural groups that have annual budgets of more than $5 million (NCCS). These organizations are symphonies, opera companies, regional theaters, art museums, ballet companies and other large institutions – the majority of which focus primarily on Western European fine arts traditions. While most of these institutions have made sincere efforts to broaden participation in the past decade, their audiences remain predominantly white and upper income (NEA Research Report #57).

If the goal of the first report was not only to raise awareness but also to spur a shift in funding away from large, (historically) white, major metropolitan fine arts organizations to smaller, community-based, or culturally specific, or rural arts organizations … it appears to have failed, thus far. The winners have gotten richer and the losers poorer since the first report; and this is despite considerable attention having been paid the past handful of years to issues of diversity, equality, and inclusion by Grantmakers in the Arts (the national service organization for arts funders) and several individual philanthropies.

Helicon has published three posts on its key findings, which I highly recommend as an introduction to this discussion. The third post is focused on how to move the needle and recommends that private foundations: (1) set explicit goals for change; (2) engage wealthy donors to address equity with their funding; and (3) commit to collaborative actions.

These are great recommendations but I’m going to suggest that it may also be beneficial to focus attention on a few other players on this field if we want to see a more equitable distribution of funding for arts and culture in the US: government agencies (whose funding already tends to be more equitable than that of private foundations in large part because of the obligation to serve the public interest), small family foundations (many of whom do not currently fund the arts), and the winners in this winner-take-all system (the large, historically white, fine arts institutions).

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To the National Endowment for the Arts: Graduate the Largest Institutions Out of Your Portfolio

As many know, the NEA does not have all that much money to distribute once the largest portion of the pie is sent to the states and the remainder is divided across the different programmatic areas. One consequence of this is that very large institutions often get NEA grants that represent a laughable portion of the budget (e.g. an orchestra with a $50 million budget might get a grant of $40,000). When I was a philanthropoid at the Mellon Foundation I would sometimes muse to colleagues:

How would it change the sector if there were a wholesale shift in funding from the largest organizations to the next tier down? What if organizations over a certain size (say $5-$10 million) were simply no longer eligible for certain pots of government money—on the argument that once government funding represents 0.1 percent of your budget (a) you no longer need the “imprimatur” of government to secure other funding; and (b) you can easily replace government funds with dollars from other sources?

In other words, rather than seeing all pots as pots over which all should compete for funding, what if government adjusted its priorities in light of the fact that individual contributions, private foundation support, and corporate support have proven over time to flow toward larger institutions? What if government recognized that–given its capacity to make grants that are more diverse on a number of dimensions–its primary value is to invest primarily in promising small and midsized enterprises, providing them with both an imprimatur and the early capital needed to grow their operations to the point where they might attract other sources of funding?

Having read the most recent Helicon report, I think it’s time to consider something along these lines. As a thought experiment: what if policies were instituted whereby organizations would “graduate” from NEA funding? That is, what if they would become ineligible for NEA funding once, for instance, any of the following conditions applied?

  • Total annual operating budget is greater than e.g. $10 million three years in a row;
  • One or more staff members has an annual salary greater than the president of the United States (~$400,000);
  • The wage ratio between the highest and lowest paid employee exceeds 1:5.
  • More than 50% of its end users (e.g. visitors, audiences, students, or artists) earn more than $50,000 a year (or perhaps more than the median income in the MSA where they are located).

One benefit of this approach is that it would not only begin to redistribute some arts dollars in the system; but it would blunt the tip of the sword of conservatives whose leading arguments for eliminating the NEA are that (a) multimillion dollar arts organizations can easily survive without it; and (b) it is essentially welfare for cultural elitists.

In a sense, the shift I’m proposing would put the federal government in the role of providing much-needed fertilizer to the most promising of the hundreds of Davids in the bottom and middle of the sector hourglass rather than sprinkling the equivalent of magic pixie dust on the handful of Goliaths that tend to dominate the top of the hourglass.

And, as we all know, none of this would preclude larger institutions from receiving other forms of recognition from the NEA (e.g. awards), or from tapping into other public pots (in addition to continuing to be the greatest beneficiaries of the indirect subsidies to the arts). Since driving place-based tourism and anchoring cultural/creative districts are often their highest value to cities-at-large, perhaps larger institutions should be beneficiaries of larger tourism grants, or economic development grants, rather than traditional arts funding?

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To City/State Arts Agencies: Broker Relationships between Family Foundations and Small Arts Orgs

Helicon’s most recent report indicates that while private foundations seem to be acknowledging the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity they are still defaulting to funding the same (large, white) organizations as always.  How to square these two findings? An all-too-familiar anecdote relayed in a recent brief article in American Theatre magazine covering the Helicon report, points to one possible reason why. AT reports:

The course of true fundraising never did run smooth. Just ask Randy Reyes, artistic director of Mu Performing Arts in St. Paul, Minn. In 2015, Mu applied for an arts access grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board to teach audiences about the history of Asian-American theatre. Though Mu’s mission and audience is Asian-American, they didn’t get the grant. “We were disappointed in that,” Reyes admitted.

But one organization that did get an arts access grant was St. Paul’s much bigger Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which received $86,039 to present Notes From Asia, “a series of performances, films, conversations, and an exhibit that will highlight arts and culture of Eastern Asian communities for East Asian, Asian American, and broader audiences.”

This is, of course, a long lament of smaller, culturally specific organizations who quite often feel either co-opted or eaten alive by larger organizations—who will sometimes lightly affiliate with smaller, community-based or culturally specific organizations in order to get access to diversity funding, or simply emulate the longstanding practices of such organizations in order to snag limited “diversity dollars” available. More dedicated pots of money, or dedicated philanthropies, probably need to be established to pay attention to small and midsized organizations.

As I’ve written about here, more than a decade ago (after changing the tax laws to make it easier and more beneficial for individuals to set up small trusts and foundations), the Australia Arts Council started an arm’s length organization whose role was to broker relationships between small and midsized arts organizations and small private family foundations and trusts. This intermediary met with donors, talked to them about the importance of supporting the arts, and identified organizations that might fit with their values; it mentored arts organizations to help them develop realistic funding strategies and prepare effective proposals; and it made matches between the two.

I have long wondered whether that same model could be transferred and modified at the city or state level in the US. Again, as a thought experiment, could state or city arts agencies make use of a similar, arm’s length lightly staffed brokerage service designed to spur increased arts contributions from small family foundations (many of which do not presently fund the arts)–to SME’s, in particular. At the same time, like the Australia program, could these matchmakers provide mentoring to small organizations to help them prepare more effective proposals?

Attention might be more productively turned to speaking to a new generation of individual family foundations and getting them each to adopt, say, 10-15 small-to-midsized arts enterprises, while we wait for the older institutional philanthropies to catch up with changes in the world; modify their values, aesthetics, boards, presidents, staffs, and systems; and presumably launch new strategies, programs, or organizations, designed to help them reach beyond the 2% to organizations that will necessarily require different metrics, application processes, etc.

However broadminded and whatever their good intentions, it is clearly operationally or philosophically or emotionally difficult for large philanthropies to shift money away from large institutions, particularly when they keep knocking on the door and seeking funding.

Which brings me to my last provocation.

To Large arts organizations: It’s time to recognize your historic privilege and the physics of pie slicing

I’ve observed several times that when discussions in the field turn to expanding resources for under-privileged groups incumbent beneficiaries (and their trade/advocacy organizations) are often quick to say, “Yes, of course, philanthropies and government agencies must fund the smaller organizations. But they shouldn’t do so by taking away funding from the large institutions. That’s not fair.”

One is reminded of the phrase: To the privileged, equity feels like oppression.

Given that new money is not gushing into the NEA’s coffers or the arts budgets of most foundations, it would stand to reason that making more, or larger, grants to arts organizations with budgets less than $5 million will likely require taking some money away from larger organizations—who have many more sources to which they can turn to make up the difference.

It is time for large organizations to exercise some moral imagination: to recognize that they are the take-all winners of an unjust system and that aggressively (and generally successfully) competing for every single $5,000 or $10,000 or $25,000 grant available is greedy behavior that contributes to the starvation of other parts of the arts ecosystem.

Period.

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A report came out 5 years ago intended, I think, to goad or shame arts philanthropies into adopting more progressive funding strategies. It appears most didn’t. San Francisco emerges as the North star in an otherwise bleak report. While it’s troubling that since Helicon’s first report, money has not shifted away from the 925 organizations with budgets greater than $5 million, it’s not surprising. One can imagine various reasons why the needle may not be changing.

It may be because this is a progressive political agenda that Helicon is proposing and some foundations are simply not interested to see their arts funds used to support what appears to be social activism. It may be because these things just take time given the nature of grant cycles and how long it takes to change policies, priorities, and guidelines. It may be because private philanthropies, a lot like individual donors, have a lot of ego in the game and quite often want to fund and be affiliated with arts institutions that they and their peers perceive to be “winners,” or “excellent,” or “prestigious” (qualitative valuations that are deeply tied to the culturally based aesthetic judgments and values of foundation decision makers). It may be because it’s hard to say no to organizations you have been funding for a long time, whose ADs and MDs have become close friends with program staff and board members. Or it may be because large organizations are quite savvy about how to exploit the system to secure funding no matter what the priorities are (yesterday it was innovation, today it’s diversity and inclusivity, tomorrow it will be something else).

Nevertheless, I applaud Helicon Collaborative for keeping the heat on this issue and pressing for discussion and change in the sector. I have no doubt the 2011 report spurred the leadership of Grantmakers in the Arts, much of the race-bias and implicit-bias training programs in the philanthropic community over the past five years, and many new grant initiatives aimed at diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Evidently, more is needed.

Perhaps it’s also time for the philanthropies who are presently allocating the majority of their resources to the 2% to more transparently address the questions and concerns raised in Helicon’s report? Perhaps Surdna (the funder of the most recent report) could host a roundtable of private foundation presidents to respond to the report? I, for one, would love to hear whether change is happening (but is just not showing up in the data yet because of the nature of grant cycles), or whether (and, if so, why) this is an area in which they are unlikely to implement changes anytime soon.

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The role of the arts in our interdependent world: hopeful signs but there’s still work to be done

Detail of "1000 Canoes," by Marsha McDonald at the Watrous Gallery, Madison (2015)

Detail of “1000 Canoes,” by Marsha McDonald at the Watrous Gallery, Madison (2015)

While in NYC last month I attended a forum produced at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts aimed at exploring the role of the arts in an interdependent society. The forum was held in conjunction with the 13th annual Global Interdependence Day. To be honest, when I received the invitation I had no idea such a day existed and felt a bit sheepish that I had missed the first twelve. Global Interdependence Day is an initiative arising from Benjamin Barber’s Interdependence Movement. (Again, I had no idea there was such a movement afoot, although I was familiar with Benjamin Barber’s perspectives on globalization). The five-hour forum was quite worthwhile, albeit, woefully under-attended—an outcome I chalked up to timing and weather (it was held on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon).

At the same time, it’s also possible that I’m not the last person in the arts and culture sector to be made aware of the Interdependence Movement and Global Interdependence Day. If you’re also in the dark about this movement, read on.

Interdependence and Vulnerability

What is the Interdependence Movement? Here’s a description I grabbed from the take-home literature:

The Interdependence Movement, founded by Professor Benjamin Barber, is a network of citizens without borders, including artists, educators, students, politicians, entrepreneurs, civic and religious leaders and other activists, who recognize the interdependent nature of our world and advocate for new forms of constructive interdependence. They aspire to solve the multiple cross-border challenges in economics, ecology, technology, war, disease, and crime that confront us. They are doing this by imagining, creating, and practicing new, just, rewarding, human, social, economic, cultural and governance relations, and stewardship of our common climate. (Emphasis added.)

In his introductory remarks at the event, Benjamin Barber several times used the phrases “bad interdependence” and “good interdependence.” Intrigued by this framing, I did an Internet search and came across a speech by Bill Clinton published in the Interdependence Handbook (edited by Barber and Sondra Meyers) in which he gives an example of each and then talks about strategy implications. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe we live in an age normally referred to as globalization, sometimes referred to as the global information society. I prefer the term “interdependence,” because it goes far beyond economics. There’s good and bad in it. I have a cousin that lives in the hills of northwest Arkansas that plays chess over the Internet with a guy in Australia twice a week. They take turns figuring out who’s got to stay up late. On the other hand, 9/11 was a testimony to the power of interdependence. … The Al Qaida … used open borders, easy travel, easy access to information and technology to turn an airplane into a weapon of mass destruction, to murder nearly 3,100 people, in Washington, Pennsylvania and New York from 70 countries. It’s a story of global interdependence, the dark side of global interdependence.  …

So if interdependence can be positive or negative, it’s obvious what we ought to be doing. … We need a strategy that builds up the positive and beats down the negative. We need to recognize that interdependence is inherently an unstable condition, and we need to move the world toward a more integrated global community defined by three things: shared benefits, shared responsibilities and shared values.

I then went in search of a neutral definition of interdependence.

The concept, of course, means different things depending on the field (biology, economics, international relations, etc.). The most common basic definition seems to be “mutual dependence between things.”  I also came across an interesting distinction made by political science/international relations scholars between sensitivity interdependence, which refers to mutual influence, and vulnerability interdependence, which refers to mutual need fulfillment that would be costly to forego.*

That word–vulnerability–caught my attention. Perhaps because I’ve watched all those Brené Brown TED Talks. (Yep, I’m a fan.)

Bear with me here.

Though Brown has been Oprah-fied over the past couple of years (and, as a result, some may be inclined now to dismiss her as a celebrity more than a scholar) she is a legit researcher and professor at the University of Houston (her field is social work) and she has spent more than a decade studying vulnerability in individuals. If you’ve watched any of her TED talks then you know that one of her research findings is that there are two basic responses to vulnerability: people can either become fearful,  distrustful, closed-off, even aggressive in relationship to others; or they can stay courageous, authentic, open, and compassionate–what Brown calls “wholehearted.”

(It strikes me that the same could be said of countries.)

Putting this all together, here’s where I come out: there is a tremendous need for the arts in our interdependent (read: vulnerable) world. As the five projects discussed at the Lincoln Center event (below) seem to attest, the arts can be an effective tool in the face of injustices, apathy, mistrust, ignorance, and fear. The arts foster understanding, connection, empathy, a sense of common humanity, and the imaginative pursuit of beautiful solutions to our most pressing systemic problems.  Here are the five quite inspiring projects that were discussed:

  • Actor Kathleen Chalfant read excerpts from the play Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Freedom, and then discussed with event moderator James Early its varying reception and impact in the UK and the USA several years back.
  • Producer Anne Hamburger and Lt. Colonel (retired) Art DeGoat showed video from, and discussed the impacts on various audiences of, the ongoing project Basetrack Live, an exploration of the impact of war on veterans and their families.
  • Mohsin Mohi Ud Din talked about the project Me/We Syria which uses handheld cameras to activate storytellers and change-makers in Syria’s Zaatari refugee camp.
  • Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq showed excerpts from their acclaimed documentary, These Birds Walk, about a runaway boy in Pakistan and the humanitarian efforts of Abdul Sattar Edhi to save tens of thousands of orphans and abused women.
  • Michelle Moghtader discussed the collective project of Shared Studios, Portals, which places gold shipping containers in cities and villages around the world and, using immersive audio and video technology, enables individuals across the world to meet face-to-face and have a conversation as if in the same room.

We need to “keep looking and looking, until at last we see and we feel”

As I walked home from Global Interdependence Day 2015 I began mulling over performances or exhibits I had seen in the course of my life that fit this bill. The first that came to mind was  the six-hour work of French theater-maker Ariane Mnouchkine—The Last Caravansary (Odysseys)—which I saw at Lincoln Center Festival a decade ago. Based on letters and images taken from refugee camps, its epic theater approach effectuated Mnouchkine’s desire that “we keep looking and looking, until at last we see and we feel.”[1]  One of the most touching and salient techniques of the piece was that all the characters, as well as the sets and props, were transported across the massive stage on large dollies operated by stagehands/actors. Here’s how Charles Isherwood described the effect of this in his review:

These questing Kurds and Chechens and Iranians and Russians are forever in transit, drifting between familiar homes left behind and a hoped-for-refuge, and at the same time frozen in place, immobile, paralyzed by their powerlessness to shape their destiny, or event place two feet on firm earth.

Mnouchkine’s theater collective is known for using aesthetically beautiful, massive theater works to make social and political critiques of particular local and global conditions. Her work is dynamically rooted in, and responding to, the present world.

Clearly not all art is aimed at such ends–for instance, some quite justifiably simply wants to entertain and lighten the weary heart. But I would argue that in these times we desperately need courageous artists (and producers, presenters and funders who will give them a platform) and beautiful works that hook our attention, draw us out of ourselves, and compel us to look, and to keep looking until at last we see and we feel. I can name a number of experiences I have had over the past year or so that have done this (for me) including: The Public Theater/Broadway musicals Fun Home and Hamilton; the exhibition America is Hard to See that opened the new space of The Whitney; an On the Boards TV download of Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment; a stunning solo piece by the choreographer Crystal Pite called “A Picture of You Falling,”performed by Jesse Bechard of the Hubbard Street Dance Company; a cozy exhibition on how water shapes us, called Waterways, at the Watrous Gallery in Madison (pictured above) and one at the Chazen Art Museum (also in Madison) on the human figure in contemporary Chinese art; an exhibition by South African artist William Kentridge, If We Ever Get To Heaven, at the Eye Museum in Amsterdam; and the books Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.

As I think about these art works, those discussed at the Lincoln Center event, and many others–and their potential influence–I am inspired and hopeful.

And, yet, there is still work to be done.

Nurturing “public spaces that are not marketplaces”… 

Global Interdependence Day ended with everyone signing copies of the Declaration of Interdependence, which reads:

We the people of the world do herewith declare our interdependence as individuals and members of distinct communities and nations. We do pledge ourselves citizens of one CivWorld, civic, civil and civilized. Without prejudice to the goals and interests of our national and regional identities, we recognize our responsibilities to the common goals and liberties of humankind as a whole. We do therefore pledge to work both directly and through the nations and communities of which we are also citizens.

  • To guarantee justice and equality for all by establishing on a firm basis the human rights of every person on the planet, ensuring that the least among us may enjoy the same liberties as the prominent and the powerful;
  • To forge a safe and sustainable global environment for all-which is the condition of human survival—at a cost to peoples based on their current share in the world’s wealth;
  • To offer children, our common human future, special attention and protection in distributing our common goods, above all those upon which health and education depend;
  • To establish democratic forms of global civil and legal governance through which our common rights can be secured and our common ends realized;
  • To foster democratic policies and institutions expressing and protecting our human commonality; and at the same time,
  • To nurture free spaces in which our distinctive religious ethnic and cultural identities may flourish and our equally worthy lives may be lived in dignity, protected from political, economic and cultural hegemony of every kind.

Reading this statement I recognized that we need something more than the creation of bold, beautiful, socially relevant artworks.

Arts organizations in the US, in particular, must also more earnestly pursue the goal of being a “free space” (the last bullet of the Declaration of Interdependence above)—a space where people of in any given community can come together across divides and exist in relationship to one another on equal terms. Economic, cultural, geographic, and social barriers, misunderstandings, wrong beliefs, and biases persist despite much talking about them for a handful of decades, at least.

As Culturebot’s Andy Horowitz wrote recently in his post, The NEA at 50 and the Death of the Public Good:

In the absence of a meaningful commitment to, or belief in, the public good, all art – high, low, or otherwise – becomes merely entertainment product to be marketed to consumers. When we abandon the idea of the public good, we undermine our ability to create public spaces that are not marketplaces. This includes not only theaters, museums and concert halls, but also schools, libraries, and public broadcasting networks (as Sesame Street’s recent decampment to HBO reveals). The real crisis in the performing arts is the sector’s wholesale capitulation to a set of values that is inherently antithetical to the actual benefit of the arts to citizens in a democracy.

“… transforming us into people who care.”

The past couple of weeks, since attending the event at Lincoln Center, I have been thinking about my own work as a researcher, lecturer and blogger and what I am doing (or not doing) to advance the values of the Interdependence Movement.  Of everything I’ve worked on the past five years, since leaving Mellon, I have to say that the course on beauty and aesthetics that I taught last spring strikes me as being most directly aimed at fostering transcendental values like social justice, equality, sustainability, and a world of beauty. In between writing chapters of my dissertation on the American theater, I find myself daydreaming about returning to this work and thinking about what it could mean for every high school or college student to have the chance to take such a class–a class that one student characterized as, “transforming us into people who care.”

Transforming us into people who care could be one of the most critical functions of the arts vis-à-vis our interdependent world.

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What are your perspectives?

  • Did you know about this movement? What are your thoughts on it?
  • Would you or your organization sign the Declaration of Interdependence? Or have you already? Why, or why not?
  • Do you consider yourself to be working in pursuit of goals like social justice, equality, democracy, and a world of beauty? If so, how? If not, what are your goals?

[1] July 19, 2005 review by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times – http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/theater/reviews/never-touching-the-ground-in-a-constant-search-for-refuge.html?_r=0

*David A. Baldwin, “Interdependence and Power: A Conceptual Analysis” (1980).

 

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