Austerity Blues

From the Executive Director

By Ben Cameron

It’s wheat-from-the-chaff time.

With each new day come additional signals that resources for the arts will be less and less for the foreseeable future. As of early April, legislators in New Jersey, Arizona, Florida and Missouri have considered elimination of arts agencies in their entireties. Are there more to come? Foundation letters apologizing for “no new grantees” or advising groups to budget for smaller grants fill our in-baskets, and corporations continue to demand more visibility for ever fewer dollars. And while we all aspire to courage in our work, it is a time when the connection between funding and fear—one issue among the many powerfully articulated by Zelda Fichandler’s “Whither (or Wither) Art?”—has never seemed clearer.

In short, our supporters are making hard, hard decisions, often to our disadvantage, and we are deluding ourselves if we believe these decisions are short-term ones. The talk in many circles is shifting from “temporary downsizing” to “rightsizing”—a suggestion that this is more than a temporary shadow, perhaps the beginning of an entirely new, fiscally austere chapter for the arts.

And so for us, too, this is a time of hard, hard decisions. As one arts leader said recently, “In a business where there is precious little ‘fat’ to cut (if any), we’re moving beyond cutting to the bone to lopping off limbs. Basically, our options boil down to cutting the art and cutting people.” 

In a variety of forums, I have heard people making loud defenses of their own programs: “Producing international work is the moral choice in these times;” or “Supporting new work is the obligation of every theatre;” or “Arts education is the foremost responsibility every group must meet.” I grow uneasy about these kind of absolutes: Are we suggesting that a group who chooses not to play in the international sphere is immoral, that groups who do solely classical work are reprehensible, that groups who opt out of arts education are irresponsible? Clearly we as a field must support all of these activities (and more). This does not seem, however, commensurate with expecting that each individual theatre serve these various masters. Indeed, in a time of severely diminished resources, it may be impossible to serve multiple masters meaningfully. International work is a moral choice, new work an obligation, arts education a responsibility that an individual theatre may and perhaps should elect—but only in the large context of mission and values.

Indeed, the hard choices ahead require that every group be clear about which core priorities it will protect at all costs—a set of choices that will by necessity require some theatres to eliminate activities that fall outside this core. It is a time when what we protect will make clear our true priorities, will distinguish organic commitment from intellectual oratory, and will reveal which programs are indeed core, as opposed to those that have been ancillary, not only within individual theatres but within sub-communities of philosophical commitment.

I have, for example, followed with interest the hue and cry surrounding the decision of a large museum to eliminate its film and video program. While I understand the protests that have accompanied this decision, what I hear in the museum’s action is a clear declaration of its core priorities, its desire to return to a fundamental mission of serving traditional visual artworks of painting and sculpture. I assume that the museum administrators understand its fiscal realities and needs far better from the inside than I ever could from the outside. I assume that they have examined every alternative and proceeded not precipitously but thoughtfully. And I am not naïve enough to believe that saving the film program would have eliminated pain: It simply would have placed that pain on other shoulders in other departments.

When cuts are made in our field, I think it serves us badly to focus our energies in protest and anger at one another. Can we presume that the actions of others come from similarly painful deliberations? Can we channel our anger into protesting the conditions that have made these hard choices a necessity, into leveraging important new resources for us all, into supporting those organizations that engage in thoughtful, respectful discussion about our collective needs? Can we continue to ascribe integrity to others, even if we disagree?

During the NEA crises of the early ’90s, there was significant infighting among arts groups. While we bemoaned the lack of support that some other fields gave to our “NEA Four,” many failed to extend themselves to support the museums under attack for Mapplethorpe and Serrano and (if we are totally honest) were more than a little critical of them behind closed and not-so-closed doors. We spent far too much time finding fault with one another, much to the delight of our enemies, who were content to watch us undermine our own case rather than undermining theirs. We allowed ourselves to be fractured along the lines of aesthetics, organization size, discipline and community. And we paid the price.

Now we are standing at the brink of another such time. If we spend our energies criticizing each other’s decisions, it will be to the delight—and gain—of other groups with other agendas. This is a time that will test not only our individual resolve and our individual organizations but our collective will, our sense of community. And it is this sense of community that will determine our ability to move forward. The old “united we stand” dictum has never rung truer—for almost certainly, if divided, we will fall.

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