In a recent post comparing the White House’s proposed “compact” with universities to the situation facing the nonprofit arts in the United States, I wrote:
The administration’s interventions into the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian museums have received a lot of press, and these “anti-woke” interventions have a lot in common with the Compact. But you might have noticed, we don’t really hear much about the rest of the art world. Why not? Because the federal funds received are so small. The last time I looked (feel free to fact check me on this), the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra receives in the ballpark of $50k a year from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m not sure that amounts to even a third of the annual salary of a principal player. It’s walking-around money, nothing more. And so if the NEA draws up a Compact for applicants for grants, arts organizations can take it or leave it. Indeed they can, and I’m led to understand have, been able to increase fund raising by multiples over what they might have lost in federal funds.
In the US, there are very few arts organizations in which the federal government has any ownership, or much financial clout – our theatres and opera companies and orchestras and museums are for the most part independent nonprofit firms. And in an era where the federal government has decided to pursue “wokeness” and “DEI” to the death, it can influence some institutions in DC, and information at national parks and historic monuments, but not much else. In another post from the archives I said it was a good thing we don’t have a Minister (or Secretary) of Culture, and I’m going to say my argument holds up well.
But there are people in the arts world upset by what the Trump administration is doing, and believe that as a response arts organizations need to get together and Do Something.
At artnet, Brett Egan, of the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management, writes:
It’s time U.S. arts leadership acknowledges that President Donald Trump and Russell Vought, his director of the Office of Management and Budget, have initiated a national arts strategy of seismic consequence, and to decide: will it answer with a collective strategy of its own? If so, authored by whom? Implemented how, and when?
The Administration’s arts strategy parrots tactics deployed in other arenas: a cascade of executive orders (EOs), grant rescissions, terminations, and threats designed to “flood the zone,” disorient leadership, sow division, compel self-censorship, and halt effective response.
This salvo has been largely successful. In fact, merely nine months in, the Trump administration is poised to become the most consequential, effective arts presidency in American history—peerless in impact since at least Johnson, whose pillars this administration has toppled with surgical efficiency.
I would argue that Nixon was the most consequential arts presidency, but that’s a debate for another time. More to the point, I think Mr. Egan vastly overstates the effects of the current administration on the nonprofit arts sector. It is a DC-centric view that I don’t think captures the calm, at least relative to other areas of policy where people’s lives really are taking a hit, in the art sector in Omaha or Milwaukee or Buffalo.
My suggested strategic response to all this is to let sleeping dogs lie. I think what Mr. Egan suggests is profoundly non-strategic:
What’s needed now is an independent, nonpartisan, national arts policy of a sweep and potency on par with Trump’s. In this effort, four difficult but attainable tasks are urgent:
1. Author an independent sector national arts policy, by and for the American people
A plain-language platform is needed to articulate the importance of arts, culture, and creativity to democracy, economy, and healthy society; commitments to free expression, universal access and equal representation; future roles for the arts in education, health, and urban renewal; pathways for artificial intelligence to become an ally, not adversary, to the arts and artists; and optimal roles for government, the private sector, and the people in the advancement of these goals.
2. Form an effective leadership entity
Representatives from the aforementioned institutions can form a hub entity, or “congress,” with a mandate from their memberships to forge, then operationalize this policy through collective action. This congress would encourage—but not compel—its memberships to support national policy objectives. Semi-annual meetings would function as a platform to organize, initiate new campaigns, promote new voices, and debate policy amendments.
3. Define messaging
Concise, comprehensive, compelling messaging on the value of the arts in America—to a thriving democracy—should be defined and distributed through all willing vehicles aligned with this congress.
4. Stand up an independent, nonpartisan national arts fund
The congress can appeal to national foundations, corporations, and individuals to develop a nonpartisan nonprofit to supplement (not replace) public funding, perhaps as defined by my July proposal, through a vehicle such as that proposed by Alan Brown, a combination of the two, or another, better model.
In such an effort, there would surely be vigorous contest over the nature of leadership, particulars of policy, and who speaks for whom. But we must be candid about the alternative: without a shared policy, backed by capital, and implemented at scale and en masse, Trump’s policy will deliver, effectively unchecked, the most consequential arts presidency in American history.
Why non-strategic? Because it takes a nonprofit arts sector made up of many different organizations with different goals, different environments, different artists and audiences, and attempts to create from that pluribus an unum of cultural policy, something that for almost all of the history of public arts funding in the US since the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 the country has studiously, and wisely, avoided. If individual arts presenters want to make statements about how they contribute to the health of their communities (or, to use the current buzz term, to a “thriving democracy”), fine, knock yourselves out. Americans for the Arts has been around for donkey’s trying to make a national case for the economic value of the arts, but it’s lack of any actual policy impact ought to serve as a sort of caveat to the creation of another national lobby.
The strength of the arts sector in the United States is that it doesn’t have a national association issuing guidelines on what values to uphold. If the Springfield Symphony Orchestra wants to use its programming to pursue political advocacy of some sort, and the Shelbyville Philharmonic does not, fine, that’s okay!
But for Mr. Egan to suggest a unified policy response, one which he clearly has ideas about how it should look, is to make the art world something by nature it is not, and, additionally, to say to the Trump administration, “hey, look at us, over here!” Which I don’t think is wise.
Trump is a bad hat, and no need for me to write yet another piece explaining why. We get it. But there are better and worse ways of riding this out, and I don’t see how trying to form a collective action on this issue is one of those better ways. Who knows, individual museums and theatre companies might even start to ask questions internally about whether the pursuit of non-art goals has, all things considered, worked out well for them. But best leave this at the local level.
Cross posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
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