Arts Need Public Funding

In a few days, the Los Angeles City Council is expected to act on a plan that promises to save, at least for a time, one of this city’s most valuable platforms for artistic and cultural expression--the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Under this plan, negotiated between the Community Redevelopment Agency and LATC with the support of the mayor, LATC will be relieved of a debt burden that few, if any, nonprofit institutions could sustain. In return, the city will gain a public arts facility in which any and all of the region’s diverse cultures can hope to find a voice.

With a vote to approve the plan, our politicians will reaffirm a decade-long commitment to the cultural and artistic growth of Los Angeles. What remains to be seen is how the private sector will respond.

Absent from this plan is the kind of ongoing public subsidy that would ensure LATC’s survival over the long term. And filling that void will require the strongest kind of financial commitment from individual and corporate supporters, driven by a recognition of what the arts really mean in the context of creating and sustaining a livable community. It is this context that I fear too many of us have forgotten.

As a society, we have increasingly settled for an idea of the arts as mere stimulation, as style. In the process, we have lost a deeper understanding of art as a means of informing our lives, of understanding who we are, what we are, what this life is for.

We have forgotten that the arts are a part of how we come to understand our national priorities, how we remember them, how we remember that other people live differently and may suffer as a consequence of our decisions. The arts are often the means through which we recognize and remedy civic and social injustices.

While most would agree that a robust economic order depends on the maintenance of an open marketplace in which goods and services can be freely exchanged, too few would remember that a healthy social order depends on maintaining avenues for the free exchange of ideas, aspirations and complaints. In a diverse and populous city such as Los Angeles, where so many live in mutually segregated and sometimes hostile camps called neighborhoods, that exchange gives us crucial perspective.

If we adults have forgotten what the arts are for, many of our children have not even begun to learn their value. In California, since passage of Proposition 13, the arts have been virtually driven from our public schools. As a result, we are in danger of educating an entire generation with little ability to enter imaginatively into other people’s lives or to think critically about their own. And if that happens, I wonder where we will find the psychic and human resources to live peacefully with one another, and to reach some kind of consensus as communities about what is important.

To know that public funding for the arts is in danger throughout the country, one need only recall the 18-month debate that raged around the National Endowment for the Arts. What began as a question about the application of NEA funds for controversial works--a serious debate with far-reaching implications of its own--ultimately escalated into strident allegations by some that government has no business funding the arts at all.

Although the assault on the NEA was turned back, that it happened at all is indicative of our lost perspective on the arts, a loss that is all the more critical in this era of deficit cutting and difficult social choices.

The debate over public funding for the arts will most certainly recur at all levels of government. Los Angeles is not likely to be an exception. A City Council decision to not abandon LATC may be a signal that our political leaders have not lost their resolve to keep city support for the arts on the public agenda. There is no question, however, that the private sector will be called upon to share an increasing amount of the financial responsibility.

One can only hope that the business community, which so actively and enthusiastically participated in the building of Los Angeles as a center of commerce, will be as willing to help finance our growth as a center of art and culture.

If a harbor or an airport lost money, the business community would rally to ensure that such essential facilities were preserved. No one would argue that only freight companies and shippers benefit from a harbor, or that only airlines and travelers benefit from an airport. We must realize that, in a similar way, our arts institutions produce benefits that extend far beyond those who buy tickets and attend productions. They provide one of the few means by which the diverse constituencies that make up our city can converse with one another, share experiences and imagine what our common future might be as we struggle with the economic and social issues that will so deeply impact us all.

Finding the wherewithal to ensure that LATC and other local arts institutions can endure the financial challenges that lie ahead to fulfill this important mission may be difficult. To fail, however, would be to strike a serious blow, not just to the arts, but to the future of Los Angeles as a city in which cultural diversity is truly woven into the fabric of community life.