Should Arts Be Partially Self Sustaining?

[Metro Jacksonville]

Should Arts Be Partially Self Sustaining?



Metrojacksonville takes a look at the idea of "Self Sustaining", Not-For-Profits in The Arts.

In the current economic climate with budget cuts threatening to permanently shutter several local arts Organizations, is it time that the Arts Organizations started looking to this model of financing public culture?

If they don't, what is the alternative?

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2009-jul-should-arts-be-partially-self-sustaining

[brainstormer]

One must also consider that public money allows the average-joe to participate in symphony concerts and attend local museums.  If the symphony did not receive any money, I'm guessing ticket prices would be out of reach for many, including myself.  Why should only the rich enjoy good music?

[mtraininjax]

The graduations in the Arena would suffer, no, not that...we built the arena to cover graduations since the Florida Theatre could not handle them.....

[TPC]

Great article Stephen. You bring up some interesting points and pose some good questions.

[blizz01]

Sad headlines continue to mix with positive............

Alhambra Dinner Theatre closes

The Alhambra Dinner Theatre has suspended operations.

According to a phone message on the dinner theater’s main line, Alhambra management blames the economy for its closing.

“Every effort has been made to continue operations, but unfortunately, as has occurred with other similar businesses, the Alhambra has been a victim of these difficult economic times. Economic conditions over the past year have severely affected its attendance and its ability to adjust expenses.”

Established in 1967, the Alhambra is owned and operated by Tod Booth Productions Inc. According to the message the dinner theater on Beach Boulevard is the oldest of its kind in the nation.

The message states that management is continuing to explore other options, including negotiations with the dinner theater’s lenders and potential private investors, but for now it will remain closed.

http://jacksonville.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/stories/2009/08/31/daily7.html

[brainstormer]

I think part of Alhambra's problem was location.  The city has grown more and more away from that part of Beach Blvd.  Ask most people in Jacksonville where it was located and they wouldn't know.  But ask them where the Florida Theatre or Times Union is and they know.

[ProjectMaximus]

One must also consider that public money allows the average-joe to participate in symphony concerts and attend local museums.  If the symphony did not receive any money, I'm guessing ticket prices would be out of reach for many, including myself.  Why should only the rich enjoy good music?

Depends what you mean by private money. Symphonies like the JSO get very little subsidy from the govt. The greatest benefit they receive is the tax-exemption (which is significant, dont get me wrong). But it's people like you, who support the arts by making individual donations/contributions, that symphonies rely on to keep ticket prices relatively low for the general public.

Actually, they would have to be competitive.  They couldnt just have a half empty auditorium and still get paid.

not true in the case of the symphony. Probably the same for opera and ballet as well. I'm not privy to the JSO's financial books, but it's doubtful that revenue from ticket sales comprises more than 33% of the operating budget. Most money comes from corporate and individual contributions...actually, primarily individuals. Point is, if they sold every seat for every concert at their current prices, it wouldn't come close to matching costs, so lowering prices wouldn't help at all even if it sold more seats.

Your thoughts on alternative revenue sources are valid and one for the purists to debate. I'm somewhere in the middle, as I recognize that changing times require a change in philosophy.

[hillary supporter]

I think part of Alhambra's problem was location.  The city has grown more and more away from that part of Beach Blvd.  Ask most people in Jacksonville where it was located and they wouldn't know.  But ask them where the Florida Theatre or Times Union is and they know.

The Alhambras relocation downtown (in the Synder church) is just perfect! The church was the site of contemporary rock music two weekends ago that wasnt too sucessfull. These empty venues, manyactually controlled by the city, are a blessing for DT development and Jax met culture. Im going to Jim Draper  this am  and talk to him. Boomtowns theatre was great, but just couldnt handle the financial end (?) Can you come back on this Stephen?

[Bativac]

As a fairly young artist, I am not in favor of public money for art. My artistic and business partner and I applied for a couple public grants and were rejected -- in favor of the grants going to someone who needed to purchase a laser printer, or materials for their "public sculpture" project. (We were after money to have our children's books printed for distribution to local schools, Head Start programs, etc.)

So we went forward using our own money. I'm an illustrator and my partner is a poet. We've invested thousands of dollars into our projects and don't expect public money to fund any of it... nor, I think, do others of our generation (mid 20s - early 30s). We've spoken at schools, Head Start, local festivals, etc and have been moderately successful. Our mindset is that we must fend for ourselves or suffer failure.

Grants going to people who just want to "make art" may contribute something intangible to the culture, but it would make more financial sense for those monies to go towards artists who want to produce something that will generate income (and, thus, taxes). But it would make even more sense for that money to fund necessary social programs, i.e. local homeless shelter improvements, etc. It seems like too many artists who receive public grants are more interested in making some kind of personal statement than contributing something positive to the local community.

But I might be biased because I am an angry young man whose grant applications have all been rejected.

[ChriswUfGator]

As a fairly young artist, I am not in favor of public money for art. My artistic and business partner and I applied for a couple public grants and were rejected -- in favor of the grants going to someone who needed to purchase a laser printer, or materials for their "public sculpture" project. (We were after money to have our children's books printed for distribution to local schools, Head Start programs, etc.)

So we went forward using our own money. I'm an illustrator and my partner is a poet. We've invested thousands of dollars into our projects and don't expect public money to fund any of it... nor, I think, do others of our generation (mid 20s - early 30s). We've spoken at schools, Head Start, local festivals, etc and have been moderately successful. Our mindset is that we must fend for ourselves or suffer failure.

Grants going to people who just want to "make art" may contribute something intangible to the culture, but it would make more financial sense for those monies to go towards artists who want to produce something that will generate income (and, thus, taxes). But it would make even more sense for that money to fund necessary social programs, i.e. local homeless shelter improvements, etc. It seems like too many artists who receive public grants are more interested in making some kind of personal statement than contributing something positive to the local community.

But I might be biased because I am an angry young man whose grant applications have all been rejected.

Nah your observation is pretty valid.

Most of the public money winds up funding substandard product or poorly managed venues that couldn't compete in the general marketplace. Gone are the days when Diego Rivera is the artist hired to do murals in public buildings, nowadays and in Jacksonville at least it's all whoever's brother in law who's running the grant program that gets the money, or else it all goes to support crappy management decisions that take a venue that could really do something and make it into a cash drain.

Even the private money in this area is concerned with creating a testament to their own tastes rather than creating something actually intended to be enjoyed by the public. As nice as it undoubtedly was of the Haskells to make such a sacrifice by taking that giant tax deduction at the height of the art  and construction booms, the result is that now we have the official Rauschenberg museum here in Jacksonville. Except it was supposed to represent all modern art. Don't like Rauschenberg? Too bad! Guess you need to go make some dayum money and start your own museum.

Welcome to JAX! This was chriswufgator's intro to the Jacksonville art scene 101. That'll be $.50 pay on your way out.

P.S. I'm not against public funding for the arts, it's just so mismanaged here locally it causes more harm than good.

[simms3]

Good art should be able to attract investors and buyers.  No public money should be used.  I have to quote a famous Atlantan who is actually quite funny.  He is libertarian if you could not guess.

In the 1960s, shortly after the National Endowment of the Arts was formed, the sum of $750 was seized from some hapless wage earner and transferred to the account of a budding literary genius.  Now $750 (a few thousand in today's dollars) may not seem like much, but in the early 1960s this money could have solved a lot of problems --- or provided a lot of pleasure --- for the person who earned it.  But noooooooo.  The government needed it, because it had to underwrite some fool who wanted his magazine to publish this one word poem.

Are you ready?
Here's the poem:

Lighght

There, now, I've done everything I could to spruce up this work of art.  I centered it on the page for you.  I put it in a nifty little box with a nice border.  I even sprang a fancy typefface.  Do you feel enriched?  Enlightened?  More in touch with the inner you?

...

Believe it or not, "lighght" ---published in the Chicago Review in 1968---won Aram Saroyan the NEA poetry award and $750 in taxpayer money.  Saroyan later scammed another $1,500 from taxpayers when editor George Plimpton decoded to reprint it in the NEA-supported American Literary Anthology.

The money probably went to buy pot.  (Wait---that's no baseless charge.  A biography of Aram Saroyan at the University of Connecticut, where his papers are housed, notes that he smoked marijuana in the 1960s and never graduated from college).

Not everyone was pleased with this NEA grant.  When word got out about it, William Scherle, a Republican congressman from Iowa, demanded to know what "Lighght" meant.  Was it a typo?  A joke?  A con game?  "If my kid came home from school spelling like that, I would have stood him in the corner with a dunce cap," Scherle reportedly said.  When one of Scherle's assistants contacted the editor of Aermican Literary Anthology to ask what Saroyan's poem meant, however, he didn't get a straight answer.

"You are from the Midwest," Plimpton replied.  "You are culturally deprived, so you wouldn't understand it anyway."  Charming.  For what it's worth---and that's much less than $750 or $1,500---the question of the literary value of the one-word poem was eventually answered, in a way.  Saroyan himself tried to explain the seven letter word years later.  This alleged poet said by manipulating the spelling of "Light" to "Lighght," he found a way for his poem "to be, not mean."

Oh, yea.  Certainly clears it up for me.
He explained further:
"Part of the aim seems to have been to make this ineffable (light) into a thing, as it were---to change it from a verb (the agency of illumination) to a noun that yet radiates as light does.  The dougble ghgh seems to work in that way.

Aram, listen to me carefully and do exactly as I say.  Put the pipe down and back away slowly.

You know, now that I've been thinking about it, I'm an artist, too!  My art form is words!  I craft words into carefully constructed sentences and paragraphs designed to inform, amuse, outrage, infuriate, and obfuscate!  I'm only on about 200 hundred stations around the country.  That makes me feel like my art is being rejected.  I think I'll just go apply for an NEA grant for a few million to pay radio stations to take my show.  That's how Air America did it!  (Well...taking funds from Alzheimer's programs and Boys and Girls Clubs isn't exactly like applying for a federal grant, but they did have to pay radio stations to carry their programming).  Why sholdn't I give that a try?

...

Years ago, the Richard B. Russell Federal Office Building was built in Atlanta.  The taxpayers, of course, were forced to spend millions on ugly welfare art for the building.  One work of "art" consisted of a large torn piece of canvas with paint splattered all over it.  When contractors were doing the final cleanup, they came upon this work of art, mistook it for an old painter's drop cloth, and threw it in a Dumpster.  When the artist discovered his precious piece of work in the trash, he threw what only could be described as a "diva hissy fit."

To anyone who cared to listen, he complained that the people in charge of postconstruction cleanup---and most of the ordinary citizens out there---just weren't sophisticated enough to appreciate his artistic masertwork.

Me, I think the people of Atlanta are the smart ones: To this day, that piece of dog squeeze hanging on the wall of the Russell building is universally known as the "drop cloth."

Every time a politician votes to dump a load of taxpayer money into the artistic community, that politician is telling you and every other taxpayer that he believes it's more important for the government to subsidize an unmarketable artist than it is for you to spend your money on things you need---things like healthcare, home payments, debt reduction, and your children's education.  Unbridled arrogance.

And don't for a minute think the "Lighght" fiasco was an isolated incident.  Oh, no.  The NEA never fails to deliver.

Before we proceed, a warning: Some of the case studies that follow get pretty rough.  I'm trying to get you so steamed that you reach out to your elected officials and tell them that up with this you will not put.  These examples, grotesque as they may be, illustrate how little respect these welfare artists, and the politicians who pander to them, have for you and the hard work you put into earning a living---before they get a hold of it.

Here we go:

1)A grant of $30,000 to Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, sponsor of a traveling exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe.  Termed "homoerotic," the pictures included graphic sexual images such as a self portrait of Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip sticking out of his you-know-what; a little girl with her skirt lifted to expose her genitals, and oh yes, an especially lovely photograph of a man urinating into another man's mouth.

2) A $75,000 grant to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, for an exhibit by Andres Serrano that included a photograph titled "Piss Christ."  That's the now infamous photo of a plastic crucifix immersed in a jar of the artist's urine.

3) A grant to The Kitchen, a Manhattan theater, which sponsored a live performance by a porno star named Annie Sprinkle.  While masturbating on stage, the performer actually commented, "Usually I get paid a lot of money for this, but tonight it's government funded."

4) $70,000 for a show called "Degenerate with a Capital D."  This exhibit included the remains of "artist" Shawn Eichman's own aborted baby.

5) $127,000 in 1990 and $125,000 in 1989 to the Center on Puppetry Arts, which happened to feature a puppet show depicting oral sex between puppets.

6) $50,000 to Living Stage, which encouraged elementary schoolers to shout "Bullshit!" at the top of their lungs during a performance.

7) $20,000 to an arts festival that included a display of sex toys and Bibles, which subsequently were set ablaze.  The name of this one was "Bible Burn."  Nice.

$6,025 to Ann Wilchusky for "sculpting in place."  As a pilot, I was particularly interested in this one: To an artist, "sculpting in place" involved the refined art of throwing crepe paper out of an airplane.

9) Several grants to a theater in New York where one Johanna Went performed with giant tampons, satanic bunnies, three-foot feces, dildos, and a giant vagina headdress which she squeezed as white liquid gushed from her mouth.

10) $204,390 to the Franklin Furnace in New York, which put on a show featuring an 86 year old woman boasting of her sexual exploits, and one lesbian inserting her foot into another lesbian's vagina.

11) $40,000 to the Gay Sunshine Press to produce "alternative" publications, including illustrations of sex between men and animals.

...

I wonder if poor Aram Saroyan felt cheated?  After all, he only got $2,250 out of the NEA.

What's next?  What about a live production on the life of O.J. Simpson?  Now that the private sector isn't going to publish his book, perhaps he can apply for a government NEA grant.  I can picture the marquee now: If I Did It---The Musical!

...

There are some artists who've actually figured out a way to make you pay for their work without actually getting their hands on your tax money.  They force you to buy it with you own after-tax money!  That's the way it works in Naples, FL.  This artist money-grab was launched as the the "Percent for Art" plan, though the name was later changed to "Dollar for Art."  The plan here is to make real estate developers set aside one dollar for every square foot of new development to buy art.  This applies to any private project totaling at least $500,000, and to all city-construction projects.

The art has to be located on the site of the development, in full public view.  What's more, the artwork must go through a three step review process involving a Public Art Advisory Committee, a Design Review Board, and then the Naples City Council---two committees with no responsibility to the developer whatsoever, and then the local government.  And you know who ends up footing the bill, don't you?  Whoever buys the property.  What a deal!

Cows have three stomachs, which they use to turn grass into cow flops.  Now the City of Naples has a similar process---and I'm sure it will produce similar results.

The above long quote is a series of excerpts from the chapter "Shining a Light on Arts Funding" from Somebody's Gotta Say It, a book written in 2007 by Neal Boortz.  The quote can be found on pages 78-85.  His next chapter is titled: "The Louder the Commercial...The Dumber They Think You Are".  LoL  I recommend this book for anyone because it's actually quite funny and has a lot of info most people are sadly unaware of.

[doctorwho3]

I think that the arts are great.  As previously mentioned, without public support, things like JSO and museums would have ticket prices that are out of reach for many people, and sure, everyone should be able to enjoy them.  That being said, however, when we are in a major recession like this, it should not be encumbered upon tax payers who are having to cut back on their own expenses to support the arts.  If I decide I need to tighten my belt in order to meet day to day living expenses, the government should not force me to contribute to the arts through taxes.  Moreover, given the other shortfalls in the budget, I think there are other causes that take priority (such as education).  In economic times like these, we need to re-examine what we spend our money on.

[sheets]

The arts have always been partially self-sustaining because the amount of public funding provided for art in this country is so minuscule it has to be. But if we want art to take risks it has to be free from market pressures (or any pressure) to follow some formula for success. Art requires open-minded benefactors who provide freedom to the cultural producers.  This works better with an individual or small group of patrons.

Here is where public funding helps: it provides a level of cache to the artist/s or arts organization seeking funding from patrons. It is more attractive to an investor if an official granting agency has already approved of a project or artist.

Getting rid of public arts funding will do nothing to cut the budget. Its like improving ones sugar intake only by cutting out your daily tic-tac. And it most definitely would not lower our tax rates. But it has symbolic political weight to it among the libertarian set.

[simms3]

I think considering what projects the NEA has supported with taxpayer dollars, the controversy isn't over how much, but what.  Talented artists throughout history have always found backers/investors.  The federal government should not be called in to support controversial artists who can't find backers/investors on their own merit.

If an art collector wants to buy pieces like "Piss Christ" and "Bible Burn" and pay for pornos played like Broadways and dropping crepe paper from a plane and calling it art, and then later donate these "works" to a museum, then so be it.  I don't think your average taxpayer is comfortable allowing some of the money they earned to be taken to pay for controversial, "mind-expanding" art that somehow only the worthless artist finds valuable and significant.

Investors don't need to see the backing of a grant to see whether they want to invest in the art or not.  It has nothing to do with investors.  Public grants are often used for artists who can't find investors because their art is worthless and pointless.

[MusicMan]

I think public funding for the arts makes a lot of sense. What doesn't make sense is public funding for football stadiums. Or subsidizing
any "for profit" endeavor. The amount of taxpayer money devoted to the arts in this country is incredibly small. What you receive in return is quite large.

For instance, the NEA budget has never been more than 1 dollar per US citizen person annually, never. About 90 percent of that is paid to organizations who in turn pay modest salaries to artists who work in small organizations. Almost all of that money goes to pay rent/mortgages, car payments, college tuition, babysitters, groceries..... Incredibly efficient use of funds.

Now look at the typical stadium. Several hundred million taxpayer dollars, used about 15 times per year.  If NFL teams relied on stadium attendance /ticket sales to pay their players they would earn about the same as the symphony players, but with a much shorter season.  The stadium in Jax is a perfect example. It sits there from January til September, not creating jobs or increasing the tax base or anything.
In particular, this one has spurred absolutely zero new businesses in the immediate vacinity. And if the team ownership decides their best interest lies in moving the team to LA or some other place, well we can start having tractor pulls and rodeos in that stadium. YA HOO!!!!  Do you think
the ownership will offer a cash rebate if/when they leave?

Now back to the symphony folks. In every one of these organizations that I know of, and especially here in Jax, they give hundreds of free concerts all over town. At the Beach, Jazz Fest, ......  in schools, churches, synagogues, even the library. They even have open rehearsals a couple times a year where you can come in and quietly observe how the "art"
is put together.  An opportunity for every taxpayer in Duval to see and hear the orchestra for free.

Try that down at the stadium. Couple of free games sure would be nice.I mean, jeez, we bought them a $300 million dollar stadium?