A few days ago blog neighbour Doug McLennan lamented that Congress seems to have no interest in arts-related legislation, with no bills coming to floor on which we could even guess at how elected officials actually weigh the arts as a matter of national importance. I responded that we should be careful what we wish for, that any legislation dealing with cultural sector would likely be a source of conflict, that would not necessarily result in a positive result for the arts (where by “the arts” I refer to those who are the audience and consumers, not just producers). I wrote:
But I am going to urge caution on the vision thing. Because aside from “art is good”, reasonable people can differ on what that vision ought to be. A much bigger role for the NEA? OK, but what would that do to support for state and local arts councils, or to philanthropic support? More funding for arts education? Maybe, but what do we mean by “arts education”, and what is it that would be sacrificed in otherwise highly pressed public schools to facilitate it? Copyright reform? Well, would that be to increase access to works, or to increase protections and compensation for copyright holders?
Doug replied in turn that he could not agree:
But here’s the problem. If the arts want to have a meaningful place in American culture, they have to lead. It’s no longer obvious to most people – yes, most – that the “arts are good.” We don’t need government for the arts to succeed, but on a range of public policy and arts-specific issues, the arts need advocacy or policy will be set in ways that do not favor the arts.
Copyright for example. The DMLA is a disaster for artists. You know that non-arts lobbyists are arguing for copyright reform and that what they’re arguing for will likely not be in the interests of the arts (if recent experience is any guide). How about communications policy – cable regulation, social media platform censorship, net neutrality? Artists have a stake in all these issues. How about community development? That’s an arts issue. Diversity? Again arts. Why are the arts good? Why should we invest in them?
Still I get nervous whenever Congress indicates that it wants to review copyright law. And I remain unsure as to what legislation people would like to see.
So, what do you think? The comments for this post are a suggestion box: what arts policy changes would you like to see? But, I’m going to make this a bit challenging: the suggestion cannot involve increasing taxes, or redirecting spending from non-arts related government programs, to give more to the arts. We have lots of advocacy along those lines already, and I’m not sure there’s much new to be said (which does not mean that advocacy is wrong, just that we already know this).
Reallocations are ok. If you want to suggest “more money for the NEA” or “subsidized artist housing” or “put an artist in every school” you have to say from what arts program you would take money. Likewise with suggestions for changes in regulation – they cannot be “rob Peter to pay the arts”. Can be federal, state, local, and those from outside the US are welcome to weigh in (only fair, since I am not yet eligible to vote in the US).
Have at it.
It is hard to find suggestions Michael 🙂
I’m not sure that the concerns about re-appropriating money for the arts are justified (i.e. taking money from some other government program to funding the arts.) As I noted earlier, the $140 million NEA appropriation is 0.0000368% of the Federal government’s $3.8 trillion budget. That’s 2.7 millionth of the budget. Arts funding could be give a tenfold increase without having any significant effect on the budget.
Anyway, here are a few ideas in answer to your question:
1. Legislation could be created that would allow Congress itself to develop a closer relationship to the arts. Before larger appropriations for the arts can be made, it will be necessary for our political leaders to become more aware and advocate for the arts themselves. Only then can they begin to formulate the most appropriate arts policies.
2. We could develop legislation and appropriations to give the arts a stronger position in our schools.
3. We could develop legislation to de-centralize the NEA so that it is administered from about 9 or 10 regional centers that work closely with states and municipalities in that region.
4. We could initiate a small number of state arts institutions like orchestras, state theaters, and museums that could serve as pilot programs and models from which we could experiment and learn.
5. We could closely study how Europeans run their state arts programs, since they have been doing this for decades, and see which of their practices might be suitable for the USA.
The map at the link below shows the 10 census regions of the USA. They broadly define cultural regions. Regional administration of the NEA could be divided along similar lines.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/maps.cfm
The idea of dividing the NEA into regionally administrated districts strikes me as counterproductive, to say the least. It would create another layer of bureaucracy and all the attendent struggles for power and money inherent to 10 committees under one federal program, nor would it help create a nationwide program for the arts. However, beefing up states’ arts organizations that already exist by guaranteeing an equitable basic funding level for them all, perhaps based on population, might be useful. And I’d like to see some portion of those funds earmarked for safety net programs artists can apply for, supporting housing and health care for those in need due to low incomes during the course of productive careers. Such support could be linked to community service/arts education programs so that elder artists were essentially employed to address school groups and/or local organizations on a regular schedule. If funding for this was diverted from showy NEA projects such as the expensive but limited-audience production of Jazz Masters Awards ceremonies, I would not be sad or feel deprived.
Dividing the NEA into 10 regional districts could increase or decrease bureaucracy, depending on how its done. If, for example, the funds were sent directly to the districts based on population, there would be little room for fighting over funds. And it would help end the dominance and mediocrity that the Northeastern cultural establishment has over our lives.
The ultimate goal would be to build state and municipal arts funding systems that generate and administer their own funds. A general target for the NEA would be for it to spend about 10% of the funds for national programs. Once this is accomplished the NEA regional districts could be phased out when genuine state and municipals systems are built.
This is actually the pattern found in the larger European countries. Only small countries like Norway and Finland use a central system like the NEA. Even a small countries like Austria (8 million people) and Switzerland have strongly decentralized arts funding systems.
The reasons for centralization are obvious. The NEA folks in Washington, for example, don’t know shit about culture in New Mexico — assuming they know its even a state….
Culture is by its very nature local. This concept is also harmed when culture is funded by a plutocracy located in a few financial centers around the country. The blue haired ladies and their foundations in NYC understand little about the true needs of the jazz scene in Kansas City or New Orleans, to say nothing of Sacramento or Salt Lake City.
Except for a few national projects, Federalism is antithetic to the nature of culture. Of course, the big media industries, like the pop-music-industrial-complex, that flatten our cultural lives with their generic mediocrity won’t want to hear this. And that is why the USA, and the USA alone among developed countries, has had so much trouble building a public funding system for the arts, much less one that is administered regionally.
Ironically, it exactly this generic corporate plutocracy and the dominating federalism necessary to support it that all but destroyed jazz in America, and why during the 60, 70, 80s Europe, with its public arts funding and state radio systems, played a significant role keeping a lot of American jazz from simply vanishing.
As is probably obvious, the fourth paragraph should read DE-centralization.
There’s also something about jazz that is specifically local and communal in nature. It’s difficult to explain why, but it’s an intimate art form that has to connect directly to people in their communities. That’s how jazz evolved and that is still its nature. There’s something about pretense and stardom and jazz that doesn’t mix.
Once the national media industry got its long greedy fingers around the neck of jazz it began a slow death. Sure, Miles, Chet, Getz & Co. were great, but for me, and I think for many others, a kind of emptiness evolved when they began to give jazz a de facto generic standard. What could be more antithetic to the art form? Under this sort of mass market debasement, we inevitably moved toward Al Hirt (in his later years,) Kenny G, Chris Botti, smooth jazz, and the like. But even our greats were debased by the market, including even Miles.
Anyway, jazz is a good example of why culture should be local. Jazz should talk directly to us as communities, and that means it needs to come from our communities.
Mr. Osborne puts up a lot to unpack. I agree that jazz, specifically, emerges from individual talents nurtured (or sometimes unsuccessfully suppressed) on a local level. However, most jazz musicians who grow up in remote locales are eager to leave home, not stay in it. They want to hit the road, compete or collaborate with musicians from elsewhere, see the larger world, Their local scenes cannot or will not support them. It’s been that way since Jelly Roll Morton left New Orleans, This doesn’t mean jazz isn’t local, but rather than “local” wants to go big time — like sandlot kids dream of playing major league baseball.
I do not believe that jazz ever suffered from the imposition by ANYBODY of a “de facto generic standard.” It didn’t happen during the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, when the record companies were going strong yet maverick creative music organizations mushroomed across the country, or even since Wynton Marsalis has succeeded in promoting and marketing his somewhat hegemonic vision of jazz, Today, zillions of players are doing their very distinct things every night all across the U.S. They just have a very hard time making a living from it, whether they go to major metropolitan centers or live in rural communities, given competition, changed tastes, costs of travel (and “away-gigs” always pay better than local gigs), and implosion of the record industry. In Chicago there is a great deal of creative music being performed — read about it on my artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz blog — but most of the creators have non-music-related day gigs. Though we have an entrepreneurial Jazz Institute of Chicago and a degree of City of Chicago backing, plus a great history of jazz that included in the past not only great artists but also high profile music publishers, night clubs, record labels, broadcast platforms, the major jazz periodical, etc., today the $ and worse the infrastructure is inadequate for the community. The culture is fine, the commerce sucks — and it’s worse elsewhere in Illinois than in this big city. Unless there is a college or university in town, small settlements don’t present “creative music” much in the way of ballet, modern dance, cutting edge visual art or independent film, either.
It’s hard for me to see how dividing the NEA into 10 regions could possible NOT involve more bureaucracy, and what Mr. Osborne describes is not that, but rather block grants to regions based on population. Then is the funding to be disseminated throughout the given region also on the basis of population? Will different localities in each region compete for those funds, through some sort of protocols? Who will be responsible for that, regional administrators? With the funds going to what, in those places where public arts are simply not locally produced? Of which there are, regrettably, many.
While the NEA may know little about New Mexico, funding for the NEA’s Jazz Masters formerly helped nationally respected artists tour via block-booking support, which organizations such as the Western Jazz Presenters Network (venues from Albuquerque to Seattle) were able to use to defray costs very different than those in the ’30s, when jazz bands could barnstorm the country playing for dancers. This funding would not have come from local sources, private or public, which is why Federal support was needed to help the greater American public hear some of our greatest if least commercialized musicians, live, There are vast areas of the US which do not have healthy arts environs or thriving scenes. There are states that do not seem to value the arts, and do not invest in them. In my opinion, Federal policy should be to nurture the arts — not impose specific art works, but make it possible for kids to be exposed and maybe inspired. I’ve corresponded with or had online discussions with some fantastic local arts administrators (check out Idaho Commission on the Arts exec director Michael Falson in this panel discussion I moderated: http://news.jazzjournalists.org/talking-jazz/talking-jazz-3-where-will-jazz-funding-come-from/) doing what they can with what they’ve got, but all of them look to the feds, rather than to their state governments (and in the U.S., that’s our “regional” breakdown), for support.
I think the key here is that only a small number of sandlot kids make the bigtime. If jazz is to be healthy, those who do make the bigtime need to continue creating local scenes. That is the essence of what jazz truly is.
It’s difficult to say jazz culture is fine when its economic basis isn’t. The history of jazz has shown that formula to be a disaster. I think we would need a lot of data to understand what is actually happening.
I notice, for example, that many of the videos that were made of jazz greats for about 30 years (from the 60s through the 90 and even later) were made in Europe. This does not speak well to the support of the culture in the USA, even in terms of the larger media for “Masters.”
The ten NEA districts would be a transitional system of decentralizing the NEA with the ultimate goal of establishing state and municipal systems that raise their own arts funds and administer them. If the Europeans can manage this, I don’t see why we can’t. The funds would be distributed to the regions more-or-less on population, but once the funding is more localized in the regions it would be based on a more intimate knowledge of the region’s culture – something very difficult for the NEA in its current form.
The alternative is to distribute the funding to all 50 states directly, but given the paltry NEA budget, I think it would become so dissipated that it would be meaningless. The money divided to ten larger reasons might have more impact,
The term NEA Jazz Masters describes exactly the problem. A few fat cats get all the funding and the rest of the country is neglected, its local artists left unrecognized and impoverished. It makes more sense to give Albuquerque or Seattle the funding and let them decide for themselves if they want remote “Masters” who will blow into town and quickly leave, or if they want to fund their local artists, or some combination of both. These decisions should be made locally, not by some clueless person in D.C. Wynton’s buttoned down, obedient, jazz is fine for New York plutocrats, but less suited to Boise, Miami, Kanas City, or Joplin.
It’s true that funding for Masters would not come from local levels, nor even much funding for the locals, and that is exactly why we need to begin the process of decentralizing our arts funding systems. The irony is that through recordings, university venues, telecasts, etc. people have at least some chance to hear the Masters, but at issue is building support for local artists, which barely exists.
I’ll check out the Idaho link, sounds interesting.
The local generation of jazz scenes called for by Mr. Osborn is already happening throughout the US, using scarce local funding. Non-profit grass roots jazz support organizations in Baltimore, Bloomington IN, Boston, Charlotte NC, Chicago, Columbia MO, Columbus, Detroit, DC, Fayetteville AK, Kansas City, Montclair NJ, New Orleans, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland OR, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tucson and Woodstock come immediately to mind, as I’ve worked with many of them — and they’ve done much to keep jazz alive, pressing their communities for finances in every way they can imagine, typically without help from major nationwide philanthropies or much in the way of state or municipally provided revenue.
The NEA seldom funds those organizations except for special projects, and same goes for the Chicago-based MacArthur, Baltimore-based Mid Atlantic Arts Association, LA-based Herb Alpert foundation and NYC-based Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (those foundations, by the way, are no longer run by “blue haired ladie.” if they ever were). Regrettably and somewhat surprisingly, cities including Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Memphis, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, Santa Fe and Los Angeles do not seem to be able to muster enough local interest to convene sustaining audiences or to fund at a substantial level dedicated jazz-supporting organizations, and one must wonder if regional directors or panels governing funds distribution in such districts would be likely to support the initiation of regional jazz supporting activities or indeed similar activities for any art form other than the most conventional. Of course that would be their regionally=influenced prerogative, but it would not well serve creative individuals who need exposure to non-local, unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable works to grow.
Few jazz scenes in the US are currently self-sustaining without significant support from philanthropic entities, gov’t agencies or wealthy donors. (The relative handful of for-profit venues surviving in major cities are hard-pressed to book nationally traveling acts due to overhead costs, but are also often unable to draw returning audiences with local artists who are taken for granted and/or eclipsed by more commercially mainstreamed entertainment options). Those philanthropic funds are always in danger of drying up, and seldom cover operating expenses, preferring to underwrite splashy new initiatives which require the scene-makers (non-profit administrators/curators typically, usually embedded in their communities and knowledgable) have to continuously come up with new angles satisfying the donors’ concepts and preferences. The NEA does not dictate programming for any venues — they scrupulously refrain from promoting artists other than the Masters, and them mostly through the big once-a-year investiture ceremony akin to the Kennedy Center honors. It was programmers at non-profits in Albuquerque, Tucson, Seattle, etc. who determined if they wanted to book Jazz Masters — the NEA supported Masters’ tours to make such bookings more affordable. Good as the internet is for showing videos and streaming musicians’ performances, there’s nothing like live. Anyway, this is moot, as the NEA has suspended its tour support for Jazz Masters. Now five musicians are named Jazz Masters and they get a modest honorarium, a few meals, some national attention and honor — nothing that drains resources that could be available to the field as a whole.
(And nice though it was that the Europeans and Japanese were able to fill in for a handful of emigre jazz stars in the late ’60s and ’70s, and book Americans into festivals, through state-supported television and radio stations documenting performances that we have today (little of which was done here, though PBS/NPR stations such as WTTW and WGBH did some; commercial shows such as David Sanborn’s Nightmusic or jazz on MTV were limited and shorlived) that income stream has dried up some, too, in part because Americans seeded Europe’s own jazz scenes. However, that has nothing to do with de-centralizing the NEA or suggested further national arts policy proposals. Nor does the model of smaller, more easily travelled European states that were historically organized by region and federated in most cases after the US.
Lack of funds, imagination, commitment to the art form, and the Congressional ban on funding project-based grants (as the NEA did very successfully for jazz musicians nationwide in the ’80s) prohibit the NEA from having much affect on the current jazz scene — the Jazz Masters program is their one attempt to do that raises the profile of jazz. It’s more than is done by any other gov’t agency state, municipal or county-wide. Pitiful though it may be, I see no reason to believe 10 mini-NEAs would do any better but might compete for funds with the standing local organizations that have painstakingly pieced together budgets to keep the music heard. And I bet the circumstances are similar for other art forms.
We know, of course, that there are small, impoverished jazz scenes around the country, but we lack enough concrete information about them. To return to the original question, legislation could be passed that would allow the collection of more information about what is happening where. This would greatly facilitate funding plans.
Decentralization of the NEA would help shift the focus to these regional scenes. The idea that something as big, remote, and unwieldy as the Federal Government should fund individual artists was always a monumentally bad idea headed for disaster. The NEA became a sitting duck for reactionaries. The NEA will only be able to do its job when it decentralizes and the large majority of its work dissolves into state and municipal organizations.
A couple examples form classical music illustrates the problems with the growing centralization of the arts. Miami, a city with a metro population of 5.5 million, eliminated its orchestra, specifically with the goal of initiating a series of several guest performances each year by the Cleveland Symphony. There is no other developed country in the world where a city of 5.5 million doesn’t have its own professional symphony orchestra.
Germany has 83 full time opera houses owned and operated by the state governments. The USA only has about 6 genuinely functional houses for four times the population, and they all have only partial seasons – the longest is seven months at the Met. The Met’s HD broadcasts are meant to fill this gap, but as you say, nothing replaces live performances. Another example of centralization and working on the cheap that destroys our cultural communities.
Full time big bands ceased to exist in the USA several decades ago – for the most part, about half a century ago. Germany has about ten full time big bands all run by State Radios (Stuttgart, Cologne, Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Hamburg, etc..) No federal funding, all funded at the state level. Why should the Germans be doing so much to keep the most American of art forms alive and well?
The European state television and radio networks continue to present American jazz artists, but as you note, they now have competition for many different places. And due to their impoverishment and neglect, American jazz artists have trouble competing – though this, of course, will be heatedly denied.
Below is an absolutely wonderful recent Bavarian State Radio Television broadcast of the incomparable Lynne Arriale. Why can’t America create stunning productions like this? Why does it squander so much talent? And why are Americans so resistant to the idea of publically funding the arts, creating state theaters and orchestras, and state radio and television networks? Even the most culture and informed people seem brainwashed into resistance. Anyway, listen to Arriale here, courtesy of Germany. This is only one of countless fabulous jazz productions create by European state television networks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz1ZNZwcSG4
And of course, these European state broadcasters have lots of positions for jazz journalists and programmers. It’s all so much more civilized, but you can’t tell Americans that.
My first suggestion in my own response to the post was that the NEA create a database of information about jazz non-profits in the USA. That would be a small step towards a database of jazz resources nationwide, which is something the NEA isn’t interested in/capable of because it would include for-profit resources. Such surveying is the sort of thing that can only be done by a national organization.
Why wouldn’t regional/state mini-NEA’s also attract opposition of reactionaries as the federal one has? Would reactionary, budget-constricting states or regions deign to appropriate anything for the arts?
Europe’s history of royal patronage for the arts has done good and ill and left a legacy. One aspect is that the arts are respected as part of a nation’s (or a region’s) historic inheritance and perhaps ongoing responsibility. For better or worse, we don’t have that ingrained connection here, never have. Our artists from William Billings on have always been outsiders rather than attached to the powers that be.
Establishing 10 top-down arts administrations will not solve funding problems or disparities in arts education and accessibility. Improvement in American arts, imho, must deal with audience demand (or lack thereof). There are more jazz big bands in the US today than people who want to listen to them. Audience development too must start at the local level. There’s nothing stopping states and even regions that are allied to institute arts policies now. Do they need federal license/prodding to do so? Or local motivation? That’s what seems to me to be most lacking.
I think regional centers (and ultimately the states) would be very effective increating their own data bases, especially if it were contingent upon obtaining funding. The principle is that the closer administrators are to the scene, the more they know about it.
Regional NEAs would attract some resistance — after all, this is America – but it would be less likely and not as strong, because regional administration responds to regional perspectives. Officials in San Francisco, for example, might schedule an exhibit of Mapplethorpe using their own funding, and if the fine folks in North Carolina objected, San Francisco could just tell them to mind their own damned business because they would be functioning autonomously and in response to local social and cultural mores. And if the folks in Lubbock wanted to have a choral festival for local fundamentalist churches, they could do that without interference from liberals in Minnesota or Massachusetts.
One of the things that happens in Europe is that the countries, and the states within countries become very competitive with their arts organizations. If Bavaria has a big shot orchestra, Hessen will soon want to have an orchestra just as good. France and Germany keep a small war going with attempts to one up each other with their cultural offerings – a type of competition that makes them truly appreciate each other.
I think this same sensibility would evolve in the USA. The Old South or the Rocky Mountain States wouldn’t just sit by when they began to notice that the Upper Midwest was gaining all sorts of prestige and financial benefits from being a center of creativity in the arts. St. Louis wouldn’t want to be second gun to Denver. When an effective cultural funding infrastructure is in place, regionalism creates a sense of friendly competition that is inherently American.
It’s difficult to extrapolate our lack of a feudalistic history into a lack of appreciation for the arts. Americans have a love for the arts as deep and pervasive as anywhere else – at least when given a chance. And in fact, we have a history of very large public arts funding programs.
During its years of operation, the government-funded Federal Art Project of the WPA hired about 10,000 artists who collectively created more than 100,000 paintings and murals and over 18,000 sculptures during the program’s 8 years of existence (1935-1943.) A consistent goal of the WPA was to support and celebrate cultural diversity across the country, including in smaller cities and towns.
The Federal Theater Project existed for four years, from 1935 to 1939. Within a year it employed 15,000 people who created about 1200 productions (not including radio.) It played to an estimated 30 million people in more than 200 theaters nationwide, as well as in parks, schools, churches, clubs, factories, hospitals and closed-off streets.
The Federal Theatre of the Air began weekly radio broadcasts March 15, 1936. It presented an average of 3,000 programs annually on commercial stations and the NBC, Mutual and CBS networks. Radio divisions were also created in 11 states.
Alas, the programs were eventually shut down mostly because the disruptions of WWII allowed reactionary Senators to slander the programs as too “socialist” – an accusation now universally regarded as ridiculous by historians.
Nevertheless, this sensibility continued for a while after the war. One example was the NBC Opera Theater which existed from 1949 to 1964. The company performed a total of 43 operas for NBC, the majority of which were broadcast on the program NBC Television Opera Theatre. The organization’s work recieved 3 Primetime Emmy Award nominations. All of the performances were broadcast live from a NBC studio. The program commissioned about ten new operas by composers ranging from Mennotti to Lukas Foss to Norman Dello Joio.
Europe continues this sort of publicly funded arts activity to this day. Americans do not realize the extent to which their country and cultural lives were strongly damaged by postwar political and economic philosophies that destroyed our systems of public arts funding – a situation that can only be described as a form of oppression.
So is it just a natural phenomenon that Americans seem uninterested in the arts? Or is this lack of interest a consciously engineered social construct? I’m inclined toward the latter view, and think that organizing public funding systems regionally would give Americans a closer and deeper sense of connection to the arts in their lives. With intelligent organization and a long-term vision, we can rebuild our cultural lives. When people take a local sense of pride in their cultural institutions they support them. It builds motivation and creates audiences. To do this, we need well organized, regional public arts funding systems like every other developed country in the world has long had.