Commission’s Arts Funding Plan Strives for Excellence

With about $5 million in city grants on the line, local arts officials are eyeing a proposed new funding evaluation plan with cautious optimism.

The new process, approved Jan. 21 by the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, falls somewhere in the middle ground in a national debate over how or even if the artistic quality of an arts institution should be reviewed. The San Diego City Council is expected to vote on the new plan in February.

“We want to have quality,” commission chairman Milton Fredman said last week to clarify remarks he made when the commission unanimously approved the plan. “We will not have a peer review. We will have at least four commission members and other people from the community who have expertise on the (review panels) to evaluate quality.”

Fredman said that because the evaluation process is new, the commission would move slowly the first year, taking into account how awards were made in the past, and would not immediately impose a formula that limits the amount of money that can be applied for by a cultural institution.

“You can’t be too radical with organizations if they’ve had a history of funding,” Fredman said. “You can’t say, ‘We have a new formula, and now we’re going to cut your funding in half.’ We’ve been working awfully hard on this thing. It will not be perfect the first year, but at least we’re happy that we’re going in the right direction.”

In some cities such as Dallas, artistic quality is a funding criterion for smaller arts institutions but not for larger ones. In St. Louis and Los Angeles, panels that include arts professionals evaluate the artistic quality of all applicants, big and small. The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs distributed $1.8 million this year and will allocate about $6 million next year.

“We use a peer panel process for everything we do,” said Al Nodal, general manager of the Los Angeles organization. No arts organization is assured of specific funding from year to year, he said. “Every year is a new ball game.”

San Francisco takes a different approach entirely.

“We don’t use a peer panel,” said Kary Schulman, director of Grants for the Arts, which parceled out about $7.5 million in hotel tax funds to 151 applicants for the current fiscal year. Grants for the Arts evaluates applicants, using a broad-based advisory committee of citizens that includes representatives of the hotel industry and neighborhood communities, as well as “people knowledgeable in the arts,” Schulman said. This type of panel is similar to that proposed for San Diego.

“San Francisco really considers this money as an investment in livability as well as in the visitor industry,” Schulman said. “And we get a return on it.”

The plan proposed by the 6-month-old San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture does not call for artistic peer panels per se. But it does require an evaluation of artistic excellence among several criteria, including administrative quality, impact on the city and its communities, outreach, role in building the city as a tourist destination, and ethnic diversity of board members.

In past years, the city doled out its arts allocations through several channels. Some funds were annually set aside for museums. Others were funneled to a limited number of institutions through COMBO (Combined Arts and Education Council of San Diego County). And arts institutions applied directly to the City Council, in some cases getting as much as $1.5 million.

The new plan consolidates the process and requires that all applications receive a recommendation from the 15-member cultural commission, established last February, before going to the council.

Anne Farrell, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s fund-raising chief, said she is generally happy with the new plan, which she said appears to “establish a rational approach. Hopefully, it won’t be a political process the way it has been.”

Farrell said she does have reservations about how much attendance would be weighed. Although attendance at the La Jolla museum has increased substantially in recent years, it is significantly below that of the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park.

“I believe that numbers don’t tell the whole story,” Farrell said. “I think there is a way to exaggerate those numbers. Quantity does not necessarily represent quality.”

Alan Levey, managing director of the La Jolla Playhouse, said he has been closely following the process of developing the commission’s allocations plan, which he called “a good first step. It won’t be what everybody wants, (but) I’m confident that in the process of evolution, it will be perfected.”

Levey noted that it has taken 25 years for the National Endowment for the Arts to perfect its peer panel process of evaluating grant applicants. And he was adamant about the chief goal of an arts evaluation program.

“Artistic excellence (is) a very important part,” Levey said. “I can’t imagine how they could review proposals without taking that into consideration.

“It’s like saying a Ferrari isn’t fast because we’re not going to look at it from the point of speed. You can’t separate it--why have an arts organization if the goal isn’t to maintain the highest artistic integrity possible and develop the reputation as the best in your field? I think arts organizations and Italian sports cars have a lot in common.”