COMMENTARY : Undisclosed Grants for Arts Raise Issue of Favoritism

Are public grants awarded by the much-heralded Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts subject to private political pressures, either real or imagined?

That unfortunate question surfaced Saturday, when documents obtained by The Times showed that $352,000 in previously undisclosed discretionary grants had been awarded to 32 area organizations by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. By far the largest of these awards--$50,000--was made to a museum whose regular application had been turned down for funding by a duly appointed peer-review panel, but whose board of trustees includes a prominent city councilman. The undisclosed grant was also for substantially more money than any award made by the peer-review committee.

Misconduct has been adamantly denied. The Cultural Affairs Department has explained that a late-term increase in its budget, received long after regular applications had been reviewed by review panels, made additional funds unexpectedly available for awards. Department staff, reportedly responding to a request from the City Council, decided to distribute those funds to a variety of organizations, including unsuccessful applicants, chosen by themselves and by City Council recommendation.

These discretionary grants may well have been made with perfectly benign intent. Heaven knows, there are dozens of worthy cultural organizations that desperately need the money. And from the list of both peer panel and discretionary grants I’ve seen, the unusual $50,000 grant at issue is for a program of the very highest merit, both in its own right and in comparison to those the panel did recommend for funding.

Still, the episode leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. The reason is that even the appearance of cronyism jeopardizes the integrity of the new Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts and of the system of peer-panel review that is its very lifeblood.

Peer-panel review means an independent jury of peers selects grant recipients on the basis of disinterested evaluations of merit. Cultural Affairs Department staff obviously cannot be regarded as impartial observers; nor could the City Council or any other political office. Like my own impression of the relative merits of specific grant recipients and rejects, their opinions are largely academic--and ought to remain that way.

The July 11 announcement of peer-panel awards came at a crucial moment in the cultural life of the nation. The peer-panel system is at the center of the political assault on the National Endowment for the Arts. Chairman John E. Frohnmayer’s cancellation of grants awarded by peer-review to four controversial performance artists is widely seen as an appalling capitulation to the endowment’s political opponents.

In Los Angeles, the situation would seem to be quite different. At first glance, it appears grants are being distributed more widely, not withheld. But distributed to whom? Discretionary grants are not, after all, given to everyone; ipso facto they’re “withheld” from some.

The important question is: Who is doing the giving and withholding? A jury of artistic peers? Or politicians and insiders?

In the past, arts grants administered by the Cultural Affairs Department were widely perceived in the visual arts community to be a joke. With panel recommendations regularly ignored, the department’s grant allocation was commonly regarded as a fund for councilmanic districts, all under the unassailable guise of cultural beneficence.

But the July 11 press conference announcing recipients of the L.A. Endowment peer-panel awards, at which Mayor Tom Bradley loudly blasted political interference in the NEA’s system of peer-panel review, signaled something unusual. Clearly, the outcry over the political manipulation of the national endowment was being used to assert and bolster the necessary independence of the youthful local program. Things appeared to be looking up.

Now, they’re looking out of whack.

Because the Los Angeles Endowment is in its infancy, unforeseen hazards should be expected to arise. And only time brings experience. Refinements of procedure ought to develop out of practice rather than theory.

For example, it now seems silly to have big, internationally known institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art competing head-to-head for exhibition funds with, say, the Boys and Girls Club of Venice, as was common in the current round of grant deliberations. It’s apples and oranges.

And because independent peer-review is crucial to the process, it is important that, in the future, panelists be drawn from outside Los Angeles as well as from within. The breadth of informed decision-making should be maximized, parochialism minimized.

In the resolution of these and other issues more than one solution may be appropriate. In its happy dilemma over unexpected surplus funds, doling out discretionary grants was not the only resolution available to the Cultural Affairs Department. An emergency peer panel--composed, say, from the chairmen of those that did the initial review of applications--could have been convened to figure out what to do. Or, each organizational recipient of a peer-panel grant could have been given an unrestricted windfall, based on a percentage of its individual grant equal to the ratio of surplus funds to total grants.

Surely, still other solutions existed. But the one chosen was inapt.

A disinterested rather than discretionary method should have been found. Discretionary grants open wide the door to favoritism. If indeed the city has a legitimate interest in geographic distribution of its cultural funds, or in the health and welfare of this or that specific institution, then clear and accountable structures for addressing those aims need to be developed. Ad hoc handouts just won’t do.