Laurie Norton Moffatt, executive director, Norman Rockwell Museum
While nosing around the Association of Art Museum Directors’ website yesterday, I came upon this under-the-radar testimony by AAMD and the American Association of Museums to Congress in opposition to the ballyhooed Our Town initiative of Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
During a Congressional subcommittee appropriations hearing for NEA and the National Endowments for the Humanities, Laurie Norton Moffatt, executive director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA, testified on behalf of both AAMD and the American Association of Museums. Perhaps by relying on the Rockwell Museum for their spokesperson, the museum groups were attempting to put their best face forward in wooing Congressional
conservatives.
I have nothing against the Rockwell Museum, having
visited it and thoroughly enjoyed it. But I do think that the designation of that very small, specialized institution to represent the
entire museum community before Congress was telling. [UPDATE: Dewey Blanton, head of media relations for AAM
tells me that Moffatt was chosen because she is on the board of both AAM
and AAMD.]
Moffatt unsurprisingly asked Congress “to approve increases for both agencies.” President Obama‘s proposed
fiscal 2011 appropriation for NEA was only $161.315
million—the same amount he proposed for
fiscal 2010, but a decrease from the $167.5 million that Congress
ultimately allocated for fiscal 2010.
But then came the kicker:
Modest increases would allow both agencies to undertake new initiatives such as NEA’s proposed Our Town. Absent a rise in overall funds, we would not support funding of new initiatives [emphasis added].
The President’s proposed decrease from the fiscal 2010 budget meant that Rocco Landesman, NEA’s chairman, had to find something to cut, in order to fund Our Town (scroll down), his new program to provide “$5 million in up to 35 communities to support planning
and design projects, and arts engagement strategies.” As I previously reported, Landesman decided to eliminate the $10-million American
Masterpieces program and to reduce funding for The Big Read. (I agree with the latter cut; I’d prefer elimination or significant revision of the current classics-heavy list to focus instead on contemporary literature, as a way to support American writers.)
One new program that NEA recently did find money for is AAMD’s initiative, which began last August, “to document the impact of community service programs at art museums.” Janet Landay, AAMD’s executive director, reports that her organization was just awarded an NEA grant of $50,000 for what is basically a promotional campaign to tout the community-service importance of museums to the American public—an effort that is, in part, aimed at those arts-unfriendly legislators who might regard cultural funding as an expendable frill.
With NEA’s grant to AAMD, the government is funding a project conceived, in part, to influence government funders. I want federal arts money to fund arts projects, not public-relations campaigns. And I don’t see why AAMD needs $50,000 in government funds to gather easily obtainable information from its own members about their public programs.
Speaking of dubious spending on promotion, whatever happened to the $25,000 commission, announced more than three months ago, for a redesign of the logo for “Art Works”—another Landesman initiative? As far as I can see, that logo hasn’t changed. This could be a good thing: Perhaps they decided to do away with that bit of unnecessary spending. Or maybe that art needs more time to work.
