New Grants Could Redeem City Program : Commentary: Tacking on a category for individual artists in the Cultural Affairs’ funding program is a smart way to make it possible to judge artists simply on the basis of merit.

Six years after launching a badly flawed program of grants for the visual and performing arts, the city’s Cultural Affairs Department has now fashioned a new grant category that, if all goes well, just might help the agency start to redeem its disappointing legacy.

Called the Individual Artist Grant, the pilot program is limited to visual art, including photography. It’s expected to operate for a minimum of two years, but if it works, the category could become a permanent fixture.

To understand the vital importance of the new grant category, it’s necessary to understand what was wrong with the old one. And to understand what was wrong with the old one, it’s necessary to recognize a difficult hurdle enshrined in L.A.’s city charter.

The charter disallows cash grants to individuals. The obvious reason for the prohibition is to discourage civic corruption, in the form of back-room payoffs to political allies.

To avoid the problem, the city requires expenditures to be made in a particular way. Agreements are made with independent contractors for specific services. When the service is delivered, the independent contractor gets paid.

For the Cultural Affairs Department, the prohibition’s damaging effect has been the elimination of any possibility of awarding merit fellowships to artists. Instead, an elaborate, even Byzantine program called the Artist-in-the-Community Grant was concocted.

It goes like this: Artists wanting to apply for funds must hook up with a school, hospital, prison or other nonprofit social service agency. Together, they become an independent contractor. Artist and agency collaborate in designing an arts program to benefit the agency’s students, patients or inmates.

Awards (up to $15,000) made under this program have ranged from ambitious efforts to engage audiences in the creation of significant art to--more often--dismal spectacles that engage them in glorified potholder-making. Either way, at least two inherently disabling flaws have undermined the scheme.

The practical problem is that panels of arts experts, who are brought in to select recipients from among the applicants, shouldn’t be assumed to have the expertise of social workers or administrative analysts. Peer-review panels might be well qualified to judge the artistic merit of an applicant. But program guidelines also require them to evaluate things far outside the arts field, such as the applicant’s administrative capability, current community need for the project and its social and educational merits.

The other flaw concerns the Cultural Affairs Department’s oft-stated commitment to cultural diversity. There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of that commitment. Inevitably, though, it’s thwarted by a grant program restricted only to artists who make socially oriented art. The diverse range of other artists--who in fact comprise the vast majority among painters, sculptors and photographers today--is summarily excluded from consideration.

The pilot Individual Artist Grant eliminates both structural imperfections.

In the new program, grants are geared toward direct support of the important (and usually unprofitable) work artists do. While arts grants in the past have been directed at funding social services, with artists cast as surrogate educators, health workers and therapists, artists will now be expected to be what they are: artists.

Applicants will be judged solely on artistic merit too, which is what a good peer-panel understands best. And the type of art an applicant makes won’t matter: The full range of artistic expression, socially oriented or not, is eligible for consideration.

One clear signal of the magnitude of the change is the application form. A 12-page tangle of bureaucratic doublespeak, demanding social mission statements and audience research studies, has been streamlined to a simple, four-page document with one main query: Discuss the nature of your art.

The $10,000-Individual Artist Grants won’t replace the Artist-in-the-Community program. Rather, both categories will for now compete for awards from the same pool of available funds. (For fiscal 1996-97, between $200,000 and $250,000 should be available.) A peer-review panel will determine the distribution.

So what has changed to suddenly allow the Cultural Affairs Department to begin this new endeavor? Certainly not the city charter. Service contracts are still required.

The department simply realized that, because it administers such exhibition spaces as the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park, it is itself a social-service provider. As an agency that exhibits art to the public, it can engage artists directly as independent contractors.

There’s just no need to require artists to search out schools or hospitals and make up projects. Instead, recipients of Individual Artist Grants will be required to make available to Cultural Affairs, for a four-month period, work created during the grant year. The department has the option of organizing group or solo shows of their work.

This simple but inspired program change was the brainchild of last year’s peer-review panel in the visual arts: artist Christy Armstrong; independent curator Noriko Fujinami; Gary Kornblau, publisher and editor of the magazine Art issues; Tom Rhoads, Santa Monica Museum of Art director, and Alma Ruiz, exhibitions coordinator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The panel had been taken aback, given the stature of Los Angeles as an important center for artistic production, by the generally miserable applications they were handed. Just five were good enough to fund.

Furthermore, they were shocked by the tiny number of applicants overall--a mere 21, even though L.A. claims thousands of artists, while this is a time of drastically limited arts funding.

The panelists deduced that the arbitrary social-service demands of the current grant program were actually preventing most talented artists from even applying. Their diligent inventiveness in conceiving a solution is a testament to the make-or-break significance of gifted peer panels to the entire grant-making process.

Will their solution work? That depends on two factors: the quality of the artists who now decide to apply (the deadline is Sept. 1) and the talent of the peer panel that evaluates their applications. Which, oddly enough, is exactly as it should be.

* Information and applications are available from the Cultural Affairs Department grants office: (213) 485-2433.