In Culture Wars, Arts Groups Go on Offense

The Culture Wars that consumed the arts world in the last decade have quieted, but a new kind of armament is taking place.

Once virtually defenseless against attacks from conservatives, arts leaders are aggressively aiming to reestablish the stature of arts and culture in American life.

Around the country, think tanks, foundations, academics and researchers are drawing up a wide range of empirical evidence designed to defend and define the civic role of culture in America. And by culture they don’t just mean art in a museum or music in an orchestra hall. Culture, they say, includes everything from fine art to movies and pop music, parks, historic monuments and architecture--the essential fabric of our lives. And, they say, government needs to pay fresh attention.

Witness the birth of the cultural policy movement.

“People have been talking about allegedly offensive art and public funding issues--it’s not that these aren’t important, but there’s a much bigger story here,” says Gigi Bradford, a poet and executive director of the 3-year-old Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arts and Culture, an independent think tank.

“We now live in an increasingly connected world where the knowledge economy has transformed our culture in the last decade. Creativity, innovation, imagination--the arts and cultural sector--are the raw materials of this transformation. And we believe that the next president and the next Congress--the first of the 21st century--will need to be looking at this in a much more holistic and integrated way.”

Following the model of environmentalists who began their movement by focusing on a narrow issue like saving the snail darter then evolved into proactive policy makers, funders and arts leaders are looking for ways to have a larger voice. They do not advocate creating a cultural ministry or appointing a culture czar, both of which, they say, would be antithetical to the diverse nature of culture in the U.S.

“Cultural policy,” Bradford says, “is a toolbox for all kinds of Americans--whether they be a member of a city council or a school board, a glass blower or a member of Congress--to make their own decision about our culture and the American experience.”

Although the focus of the national dialogue has been the National Endowment for the Arts, the agency gave away just $80 million last year, less than 1% of the year’s overall annual gift-giving to arts and culture. The larger national picture includes $1.2 billion from public funds--federal, state and local--and $10.5 billion from private donations. Even at its peak in 1992, the NEA’s contribution was $156 million, still only 1.5% of overall giving to arts and culture for the year.

“Symbolically, the NEA’s money is terribly important,” points out Stephen K. Urice of the National Culture Program at the Pew Charitable Trust in Philadelphia. “In a chronically undercapitalized system, the NEA’s money is significant both for the real dollars and for the matching funds it generates. But we must also begin to study and understand better the other 99% of this extremely complex resource system.”

Among the forces driving the movement are major foundations that have long supported the arts, such as Pew, the Getty Trust and the Irvine Foundation in Southern California and the Ford Foundation in New York. Both in collaborations and individually, they are sponsoring studies of small and large arts organizations’ audiences and funding bases while also looking at the effect on the arts of national trends in philanthropy, regulations on tax deductions for donations to arts institutions, zoning and urban planning, copyright laws for creative properties and even the proposed repeal of estate tax.

The NEA, primarily a funding agency, is increasing its collaborations with other federal agencies as Chairman Bill Ivey seeks ways to put culture into public policy. One of the largest initiatives is Challenge America, which not only seeks to find ways of increasing access to arts nationally, but, Ivey says, will provide services to young people, in school and after school. The agency also is working with the Department of Justice, as one example, to develop programs overlapping creativity and juvenile rehabilitation.

The Center for Arts and Culture, the first independent think tank devoted exclusively to arts and cultural issues, is preparing to release a series of position papers on a variety of cultural policy topics. Culled from 75 artists, cultural leaders and academics nationwide, these statements will be specifically intended as transition papers for the new administration and new Congress.

Probably the biggest catalyst for the current focus on cultural policy is a large infusion of cash from the Pew Trust. Among the nation’s largest grant makers in areas ranging from culture to public policy, health and the environment, the foundation will spend $50 million over five years on an initiative called Optimizing America’s Cultural Resources. Begun a year ago, a number of projects are underway, including an 18-month study by the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp. to be released in early 2001 examining the impact of the arts in the United States.

U.S. government involvement in the arts does not boil down just to grant giving, but how government actions affect cultural heritage, as well as artists and arts organizations. Indeed, while this concerted effort to examine and rethink public policy may be new, the field is not--the tax code that regulates nonprofits, created in the early part of this century, has always had a radical effect on culture nationally.

Change in the laws governing operating trusts or foundations could have a significant effect on arts funding nationally, points out Barry Munitz, president of the Getty Trust. Allowing them to give away a larger percentage of their asset base in any given year to keep their tax status could mean significant infusions of new philanthropy, Munitz says. To help him explore such issues, he has brought to the Getty historian James Allen Smith, founding chairman of the Center for Arts and Culture. Munitz says they will work with other major national foundations to identify “policy issues that may be amenable in any way to legislation or to law change.”

“Down the road,” he says, “these issues could be dramatically more important [than NEA funding], for two very fundamental reasons. One is there’s a lot more money at stake. And the other is, it’s a lot less flashily controversial.”

Decency in Arts Was the Focus in the ‘90s

The Culture Wars of the 1990s focused on narrow issues of decency in art, spurred first by NEA-funded exhibitions of the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work includes sadomasochistic imagery, and Andres Serrano, whose work was deemed sacrilegious by some Christians. In addition, the NEA’s rescinding of a handful of grants to performance artists whose work dealt openly with sexuality fueled the already heated debate and ultimately prompted the endowment to rework its guidelines and operating procedures.

In the face of these attacks, which also called for the dismantling of the agency, defenders argued that the government’s grants to artists should be seen as part a much broader effort. There will always be new critics, but many in the arts world feel that they have relied too long on anecdotes for evidence and not had enough hard facts.

Thus, the current push for new research.

To be sure, studies on cultural trends have been done in the past--the NEA, for example, has been surveying public participation in the arts on a periodic basis since 1982. But to date, no unified body of research exists cross-referencing all of the arts, says Rand senior social scientist Kevin F. McCarthy, who is overseeing the multipart arts assessment study sponsored by Pew.

“What you get,” he says, “is a canvas that has some parts filled in, and lots of missing parts, and no way to relate all the parts to the whole.”

Rand is filling in those gaps by examining academic literature as well as journalism, previous empirical cultural research and the ever-evolving world of the Web. Rand is also looking at trends in arts funding as well as the full range of arts producers--commercial, nonprofit and amateur sectors--through which McCarthy hopes to create a more exact picture of today’s cultural trends.

Among the academic institutions offering courses in cultural policy, at least two have developed independent programs. Policy and arts educators at Ohio State University are partnering with the nonprofit Americans for the Arts in Washington, D.C., to create national and local profiles of cultural support. Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, established in 1994, recently received a $287,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for its research on public attitudes toward the arts, both through studies of arts controversies and by looking at how they were represented in the media.

Since Munitz took the helm of the Getty Center in 1998, he has increasingly used the site as a neutral forum for interdisciplinary programs and discussions, he says, and has widened the trust’s focus on arts education and policy.

The Getty’s goals, Munitz says, “are a more thoughtful exchange among a wider range of participants, some lay, some professional, some new to the issue, some more experienced, leading, hopefully, to a stronger role for culture and the arts in national society and a greater awareness in other parts of society for what arts and culture do.”

Artists Aware of the Research

Administrators and social scientists are doing the research, but artists need to be part of the conversation, cautions Roberto Bedoya, a writer and executive director of the Washington-based National Assn. of Artists Organizations. Artists are aware of the research and are interested, he says, citing overflow attendance at his organization’s recent conference session on cultural policy.

“People understand that these issues are going to affect the distribution of culture wealth,” he says, and artists want to ensure that small, artist-run organizations are part of the picture. “We’ve got to talk about the makers--who their support systems are and how we can defend their right to assemble and to free speech.”

On a grass-roots level, Beth Fox, director of Arts Inc., a Los Angeles arts service organization, is one of those doing that ground-zero research. “We’ve seen [during the past decade] a shift from funding what would traditionally be called ‘pure arts activity’ to more arts with social purpose,” she says. “That’s a huge policy shift that was not seen in the past.”

As a result, she says, arts groups are becoming hybrid organizations. “We are seeing ourselves more in a citizenship role, community building. It is a sea change that is leaving many organizations and artists in sort of a seasick state. There is a lot of confusion, going back to one’s purpose--to make art--has been hard for many, to really hold true to that purpose while also recognizing that there are tremendous opportunities in seeing oneself differently.”

The focus on new opportunities is echoed in the changing role of the NEA. Ivey, the former head of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville who took over the embattled agency in 1998 from actress Jane Alexander, acknowledges that new ways of thinking about cultural policy are emerging, and the NEA is attempting to take a pragmatic role in the process.

“When we developed our new strategic plan in 1998, we realized that with limited resources, in order to provide citizens with good value for their dollar, we had to play a new leadership role that had to do with advocating art in public policies,” Ivey says.

“Almost every week there’s some new piece of evidence that indicates ways in which art helps community flourish, helps young people do better in school, helps communities revitalize downtown districts. As this value grows, it makes it easier and easier for us to place the arts in public policies.”