Where Is Arts Support Coming From? : Funding: Cultural leaders conclude that collaboration is the key to survival at a workshop on ‘Support for the Arts in Unsupportive Times.’

Arts funding is in big trouble and collaboration is the ticket to survival, according to cultural leaders who convened last week in Los Angeles. They put their heads together at “Support for the Arts in Unsupportive Times,” a workshop sponsored by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation at the Century Plaza Hotel.

“We don’t have an agenda,” said foundation director Henry Hopkins before the group launched into a wide-ranging discussion of financial matters that also considered such issues as censorship and multicultural representation.

Neither did the foundation expect the 20 participants to arrive at conclusions or a plan for action. They didn’t. A few of their number even took issue with the workshop theme. Artist David Ireland said he had been “generously taken care of by different foundations,” and philanthropist Max Palevsky contended, “If there is any time in the history of the world that the arts have been supported, it’s now . . . If you look at numbers, dollars and activities, these are far from unsupportive times.”

The prevailing view held that most arts organizations are dangerously overextended--and some are endangered. As the talks evolved, several villains emerged--sluggish museums, hidebound boards of trustees, the political right, the press and John Frohnmayer, head of the embattled National Endowment for the Arts.

But the group laid most problems at its own doorstep.

“The structures we have developed to support the arts are houses of cards,” said Ella King Torry, of the Pew Charitable Trusts, noting that dependence on earned income, box office or a few donors is “a shaky system” at best. “It’s like the homeless,” she said. “If two things go wrong, if you have a bad season and one of your funders falls out, you could go under.”

Boards of trustees’ system of governance also came under attack. “Our field is not given to institutionalization and it should not be institutionalized for the most part,” said Claire Peeps, program director of the Los Angeles Festival.

“As long as boards are made up of extremely rich Caucasian individuals those boards will be inherently conservative,” said Gary Garrels, director of the New York-based DIA Foundation, who joined a chorus of concern about multicultural representation in arts management.

“Responsibility is the central issue,” said Tom Reese, associate director of the Getty Center of the History of Art and the Humanities. “Money is what boards understand” and they want to measure what they are getting for their money. This leads to administrators developing “mission statements” that outline their objectives. Then, they concern themselves about “the creation of a product” that fits the statement rather than working as free agents, he said.

Isolation in various guises is also an endemic problem, according to the speakers. Institutions have isolated themselves from artists because they are preoccupied with their own survival. Trustees are isolated from multicultural and community concerns. And the art world at large has not been accountable to a large audience. In times of financial and political stress these facts make it difficult for arts groups to speak from a position of unity and power, participants said.

Problems seemed to be more apparent than solutions, however.

Cee Scott Brown, director of Creative Time in New York, said that he prefers to get along without National Endowment for the Arts money--considering its onus of censorship--and suggested establishing an alternate fund. But most other speakers weren’t ready to give up on the NEA or to accept the idea that the private sector could or should pick up the slack. Instead, they advocated restoring the endowment to an apolitical position or changing it so that it functions more effectively.

“The NEA belongs to the people . . . It’s the stamp of national approval that puts art on the agenda,” said Bella Lewitzky, director of the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company. Lewitzky turned down a $72,000 NEA grant rather than sign an anti-obscenity pledge and has filed suit against the agency. One of the endowment’s major assets is that it has been “more objective” and less subject to petty politics than state or local arts councils, she said.

Countering talk of gloom and doom, philanthropist Peter Norton said that loss of traditional support for the arts and an increase of censorship is a pendulum sweep that offers possibilities for positive change. “It’s very unfashionable to be a white male now. Old fogies are on the run. We can’t lose the custodians of money and power and not expect to have lost anything. Diversity has a price, but the decline of support from the old fogies is something we ought to celebrate. It is something we certainly ought to adjust to.”

A “lean time” may be “a better time” that will lead artists and institutions to “do more with less and do it better,” Norton said. How to do it better was the subject of much questioning, however. Among the tentative, vague and admittedly flawed suggestions: establishing barter systems and revenue-raising ventures such as restaurants and artist-designed products, looking at the ways art is supported in other countries, making more creative use of percent-for-art monies and encouraging foundations to fund learning projects rather than exhibitions.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington came under fire from Hopkins, who suggested that the gallery’s annual windfall of $40 million in government funds may not be the best use of that money. He questioned whether “the nation’s art” should be “locked up in one museum” in the East and asked why the gallery doesn’t charge admission to offset expenses as other museums must.

The only consensus that emerged from the two-day meeting was a call for collaboration, and even that seems fraught with peril. Several participants pointed out that collaborative projects take more time and rarely satisfy anyone. They also reminded one another that artists are creative loners.

But a hunkered-down mood--along with heightened multicultural sensitivities--led speakers to agree that a new, pervasive kind of cooperation is needed if the arts are to serve a larger public on a smaller budget.

“Collaboration is our future,” said arts advocate Joy Silverman. It was one of the few workshop pronouncements that went unchallenged.