In Search of Arts Patrons : The Question Is How to Create a More Perfect Union of Culture, Commerce

Recent news items:

The United States Senate approves an amendment that would bar the National Endowment for the Arts from funding “obscene” artworks.

The California Arts Council recommends distributing $16.6 million in 1989-90 to arts groups throughout the state, including somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 to about a dozen and a half Orange County organizations.

Fountain Valley High School music students and their parents raise nearly $14,000 to retain the contract of an outstanding choral teacher whose job was threatened by budget cuts.

The Costa Mesa City Council creates a new city agency that would provide a more stable source of funding for the growing number of local arts groups seeking financial help from the city.

Interested in forming a new organization to promote the arts on a countywide basis, Orange County arts leaders meet to explore whether such a group should be funded privately or publicly.

The issue that seems to run through all these stories is that We, the People say we want high culture in our lives. The question is how to create a more perfect union of culture and commerce.

The problem is that the high arts, like classical music and ballet, generally aren’t profit-making ventures, unlike such low arts as movies, TV, rock ‘n’ roll and ladies’ hot oil wrestling. And in contrast to Europe, where many governments heavily subsidize arts endeavors, here in the world capital of capitalism, the profit motive rules.

So where does that leave those arts that don’t generate their own black ink?

Consider the Kirov Ballet, which today is winding up its nine-day run at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the last of four stops on the company’s U.S. tour. This most celebrated Soviet company has been playing to capacity audiences in 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall. Even with full houses and a top ticket price of $65, officials expect that the cost of the engagement will run “in the low six figures” beyond what they figure to make at the ticket window. Somebody has to make up that difference.

In the Center’s case, that gap will be filled from private sources. Officials there take great pride in the fact that their $73-million arts emporium was built and still operates entirely without a cent of direct public money.

But in most cases, the rest of Orange County’s arts groups--indeed those across the country--don’t have that luxury.

The Newport Harbor Art Museum recently mounted a pair of exhibits that were sent out on tour. They cost the museum $140,000 to produce and put on the travel circuit and, as is typical in the visual-arts world, they recouped only a minuscule portion of the expense from admission charges.

At Newport Harbor, it costs $2 to get in. They pulled in $8,000 from admissions, another $4,000 from the sale of catalogues for the show. The bulk of the tab was picked up by the Irvine Co. via a $100,000 grant. That was great, but the company gives only one such major grant for direct support of an exhibit each year.

Let’s face it: unless the museum has a show of Andy Warhol’s restaurant receipts, it’s not going to motivate as many people to come rushing through its turnstiles in a full month as Disneyland is going to draw in one day to the new $70-million Splash Mountain ride (even though getting into “The Happiest Place on Earth” costs 10 times as much).

Nevertheless, most Americans agree (in principle at least) that art is a good thing to have around. Somewhere.

Is it right to look to governmental agencies to help underwrite the arts? And even if it is right, is it a good idea?

Uncle Sam’s deep pockets can look very attractive for picking, but as the folks found out at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina--they’re the ones who put together the exhibit that included Andres Serrano’s controversial photograph of a crucifix submerged in a container of urine--there’s no such thing as a free grant.

To some members of Congress--and many of their constituents--no amount of artistic license could justify Serrano’s sacrilegious treatment of Christianity’s central icon. The fact that taxpayers’ money was supporting the exhibit was the last straw.

In the flap that ensued, Orange County congressmen Dana A. Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) and William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) were vocal members of a Capitol Hill minority urging the elimination of all federal funding for the arts.

Serrano and museum operators who objected to perceived censorship apparently forgot that no government money comes without strings attached. But what the Rohrabachers, Dannemeyers and their supporters don’t seem to recognize is that there isn’t any Iron Curtain separating the free world from the tax-supported world (though, if they get their way, there certainly will be an Orange one).

And lest they (or we) forget, government isn’t some independent entity that exists in Never-Never Land. It is, by design, an instrument through which we citizens turn our priorities into realities.

The Costa Mesa City Council, which voted to create a new Tourism, Arts and Promotion Council this week, seems to recognize that there can be a mutually beneficial link between the public and private sectors when it comes to the arts.

With the strides that the Performing Arts Center, South Coast Repertory and other such facilities have made in recent years, they are helping make Costa Mesa--once famous only as “Goat Hill”--a more attractive tourist destination. Visitors mean money to operators of local hotels, restaurants and other businesses; they, in turn, kick a percentage of that take back to city coffers to support arts groups and further spur tourist trade.

Bottom-line-minded elected officials who get offended by artwork that benefits from taxpayers’ money should take a hard look at the happy partnership that Costa Mesa seems to be forging.

Arts types elsewhere, meanwhile, should use this example and change the way they lobby for money.

Forget the arguments relating the noble attributes that art is supposed to have, that it gives something more stimulating to do with our waking hours besides eat, work and shop. Forget about trying to communicate how a great piece of music can immortalize the struggles, the frustrations or the joys that inspired the composer to write it. Forget the young artist’s scene of urban squalor that make the viewer feel the pain of society’s disenfranchised--or the sense of victory for one who has overcome adversity.

Forget all that do-gooder stuff. Just stick your hand out and tell ‘em the arts are good business.

DR, Steve Lopez / L.A. Times