Arts Agencies Urged to Ask New Questions

Keynoting the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies’ convention here, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Frank Hodsoll departed from his prepared text and borrowed a leaf from the communications book of President Reagan:

“Ask a different kind of question,” he urged 450 state agency officials from the 56 states and territories here. “Particularly when you are most proud of a program you’ve just created, ask yourself: ‘Are people out there better off as a result of your program? Are the arts better off?’

“Because, if they are not,” Hodsoll continued, “all the inputs and all the dollars and all the press releases mean nothing.”

In his only reference to the recent election, Hodsoll, a Reagan appointee, said, “The arts are crucial to building what President-elect Bush called ‘a kinder, gentler America.’ ”

The three-day conference, at which Los Angeles Festival Director Peter Sellars presented an alternative view of art and politics, ends today.

While Hodsoll quoted Reagan as saying the arts “teach us who we are and what we can be,” the irrepressible, irreverent Sellars asserted that the recent election campaign shows that “culture has failed in America.”

American culture, Sellars said, has “prepared people to take a passive role in society, not only the Hollywood version of whatever sells goes, but art that tells lies.

“If you tell people what they want to hear,” added Sellars, “they will like you more and buy your product, but it’s not good for them, and it’s bad for a sense of national health.”

What counts more than ever in art, Sellars said, is accuracy.

“Artists must now become political,” he added, because art has to “pick up the slack” left in the nation’s civic life. “Art must go into that realm where politics was once able to do something.”

Hodsoll expounded on a populist theme, asserting that “the best of the arts” is for everyone, not just the “better-educated” elite.

Long a proponent of education in the arts as a basic, the Hodsoll called for “new strategies” and “innovative options” to “bring new audiences in and make them comfortable with the variety of art outside the popular culture.”

“All Americans--not just the audiences of established artists and arts organizations--must be encouraged to take up the opportunities to learn from art,” he said.

Quoting statistics from the Economist magazine saying that on the average it costs $20 million to make a major studio film in Hollywood and another $7 million to distribute and market it, Hodsoll noted: “A big Hollywood studio will release about 15 films a year, so that’s about $105 million spent by that studio each year to cultivate its audiences. In other words, one Hollywood studio spends more in one year on audience development than the endowment spends on all its arts discipline programs combined.”

For fiscal 1989, which began in October, the arts endowment’s overall budget was $169.1 million. Of that, just over $100 million goes toward arts organizations and artists in roughly a dozen arts categories.

Although Hodsoll noted that there is “no way we can begin to match the vast expenditures used by the commercial sector to promote its wares . . . what is clear, is that we, the public agencies, have got to do more, we’ve got to think more, and we’ve got to spend more.”

Asked later whether he was calling for an increased arts budget, the chairman said that for the last several years he has privately asked the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for more funds, and indeed more than Congress eventually appropriated. “Every year we ask for more money and we end up getting what we get,” he said.

Financing the new strategies to attract audiences to the fine arts “may or may not require more” money, but, Hodsoll said, he was also talking about “outside” or private-sector help. “We are still constrained by the budget deficit,” he said.

“But there isn’t any more money in the till . . . We don’t have a lot more money, not for this, not for education, not for health care, not for defense . . . “

In his speech, Sellars mocked what he considers the condescending concept of “outreach” to multicultural audiences as “racially offensive.” It is as if, he said, there’s only “La Boheme” and equivalent art from other cultures.

As he urged his audience to make sense out of “the confusion of glitz, glamour and glomming onto things versus content,” Sellars was striking a theme not all that different from Hodsoll’s.

“It’s very important we don’t begin funding art on the glamour quotient . . . famous people that we’ve heard of and something that feels like a glamorous event. That is not real culture, “ Sellars contended.