COUNTY TO BE SITE OF FUTURE ART CONGRESS

The California Confederation of the Arts is recognizing Orange County’s increasingly assertive cultural identity by choosing the county as the site for its October, 1988, Congress for the Arts, the executive director of the advocacy group announced Thursday.

Susan Hoffman made the announcement at the Newport Harbor Art Museum during a breakfast symposium attended by about 60 local arts managers, legislators and trustees, organized by the museum, Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory, and Opera Pacific. Harvey Stearn, chairman of the California Arts Council, the state arts agency, also spoke.

The confederation, a 2,000-member lobbying group, has already held 12 congresses in such major California cities as Los Angeles and San Diego, Hoffman said. Next October, at least 400 arts administrators and advocates will gather in an as-yet-undecided site in the county to discuss the media’s role in broadcasting the value of the arts and other issues, Hoffman said.

“The Congress on the Arts always highlights an area,” she said, “and given where Orange County is in its own development, we are hoping that it will give broader recognition to what has been going on here.”

“The impact of (the three-day) congress on Orange County would be tremendous,” said Martin Weil, managing director of Opera Pacific, a new confederation member. “It will really provide an opportunity for local organizations to have their work exposed to their colleagues. I think the arts field will be very surprised at what is going on down here, because it is very serious and it is very good work and it is happening at a lot of different places. It will spread the word that things are moving in Orange County.”

Erich Vollmer, executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, was less effusive. “I don’t think (the county) is a great cultural mecca yet, so I don’t know what they’ll think or say when they leave here,” he said after the meeting. “I think we’re making wonderful strides, and I’d say that this Congress was wonderful, but I don’t know anything about it.

“I think that anything that brings administrators and trustees and whatever can only enhance our efforts here. If they have it at a nice time of the year and the weather’s nice down here, then they’ll have a nice time here, and they’ll tell people they had a nice time.”

All the speakers on Thursday morning’s program praised the county’s cultural growth, citing the new Performing Arts Center.

Stearn and Hoffman differed, however, in the emphasis with which they evaluated public funding for the arts.

Stearn stressed the “extremely high percent” of state funding that Orange County arts groups received when compared with the amount they collectively sought from the council.

The $218,000 distributed this fall to 11 Orange County applicant-organizations was 80% of what they had asked, while 60% is typical for other counties, Stearn said.

Hoffman, though, urged arts officials present to fight for a greater share of the CAC budget, which she described as 2% of the total $14.5 million, even though the county has 8% of the state population.

“You have five prominent organizations with budgets over $1 million,” she said. “You can get recognition.”

Stearn talked about a $3.1 million increase the council is seeking to its budget, including $200,000 in $5,000 grants to 40 individual artists statewide.

Hoffman decried California’s “abysmal” record of funding for the arts, in contrast with most other states. In New York, she said, $3 per capita goes toward the arts, contrasted with about 42 cents in California. She spoke about the conference’s 5-year-old effort to persuade the Legislature to raise the state figure to $1 per capita by 1990.

Stearn was overheard discussing Hoffman’s New York comparison in a conversation with Tom Santley, director of public affairs for C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the Costa Mesa development company whose managing partner, Henry Segerstrom, is also chief executive officer of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“New York is a welfare city,” he told Santley. “I’m not saying New York is a welfare state, but New York is a welfare city.”

In an interview afterward, Stearn said he was trying to distinguish between attitudes toward public funding in California and those in New York: “I didn’t want to speak negatively of New York, but there is a lot more feeling in California in favor of citizens getting involved and helping out whenever they can. . . . In California, we accomplish a lot with the dollars we have.”

After the breakfast, State Sen. Marian Bergeson, R-Newport Beach, said: “I like to think we can make the private and public partnership stronger, and I think that’s the direction we want to go in. I think that was the message that Harvey was giving this morning. We should take the lessons of Orange County and apply that as a model statewide.”