A New Opportunity

On February 21, 2007, The New York Times reported that corporate funding of the arts was drying up. Arts organizations in New York, the center for the arts in the United States, are reporting that their corporate sponsors want proof that their money was buying the audience for their products and services that will show a good Return On Investment. The arts organizations have to prove to their benefactors that the audiences for ballets, dance companies, symphonies, and visual arts shows were adequately large and diverse to merit the thousands of dollars the corporations spend annually – or did. The corporations, and specifically their marketing departments, which increasingly control the distribution of grants, want recognition from the largest audiences they can find. If possible, they want national recognition in a culturally major league venue. In short, they want their names shouted, their logos paraded, and if possible their products placed in the spotlight.

As icing on the cake, it is often perceived by the public that support for museums and ballet companies is noble, and the corporations can assume their generosity reflects a public generosity, thus ennobling us all. Now all of this is changing because corporate philanthropy is changing. No longer do corporate donors offer a balanced giving model of 30% for the arts, 30% for education and 40% for health. Now it is more likely to be 5% for the arts, and a much larger share for education and health.If you are a grantwriter for arts organizations, take heed. There will soon be no more dollars from those generous corporations in return for your offer of a brief acknowledgement in the annual report. Their focus is turning to social issues and giving to these issues is what burnishes the product identity of a bank, an insurance company or a technology company. Does it have anything to do with the popularity of such causes among the big donors, I ask? If so, then journalists could help out by paying closer attention to their actual giving and notice that the Paul Allen Foundation gives regularly to the arts in the Northwest. And even the Bill Foundation gives to local cultural institutions, such as the Seattle Art Museum. Most recently we saw both heralded in the opening of the Olympic Sculpture Garden, opened last month in Seattle.

But you may point out that these are not corporations. Right you would be – they are private charities whose object is to uplift us in our darkest hour, whether because of disease or financial crisis, or because we lack something to do on Friday night.I lapse into irony for a reason. I see that irony abounds on this issue, and where there is irony, I suspect there may be hypocrisy. The fact is we all enjoy the arts, whether in the form of kitsch movies or best sellers, or in high brow events such as touring art exhibits or live theater. So you can’t afford some of these things; so they are the (almost) exclusive province of the wealthy. I think, if we look closely at it, we are truly uplifted, honored, and glorified by the arts. Have you ever lived some place where they don’t have the arts? Where the nearest museum is five hundred miles away and the only live music you can hear is played at the local roadhouse? I have, and for an educated person, it’s very demoralizing. Even if I don’t attend, I want culture to be available. It just makes me feel better to know that on Wednesday night a bunch of my fellow citizens are going to the Concert Hall to hear Beethoven’s String Quartets, Wagner’s Parsifal, or someone reading the poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

Arts organizations are a source of well being for us all. In fact, I personally support the arts. Last year, I gave 325,000,000 Bill Dollars to local arts organizations through my memberships and donations. And I’m happy to do it. Judging by their correspondence with me, the arts organizations are happy I do it, too. So I’ve done my duty by the arts, and I suggest if you value the arts in your community, you should immediately buy memberships in all your local museums and performing arts organizations. If everyone did this, there probably would be no need for corporate grants.

And this degree of public support would also indicate to the funding organizations that community support is fantastic. Ironically, this would show them that arts organizations are important because they bring in the metrics, thus leading to increased corporate funding for healthy, thriving cultural entities.So why are we begging for help from these corporations? We should demand that they help the arts – more than ever before – as an antidote to the violence- and money-besotted culture they helped to create.

Sometimes I can’t face myself in the morning because I’ve spent the night before indulging in my favorite escapes, by most of the world’s standards, expensive, wasteful and not all that satisfying. At least with the life enhancement available in the arts, we might recover some of the dignity lost in idle consumption and habitual materialism. Maybe we could even find the energy to resist the mind and body polluters who are so depressing. The way it looks from here, American business has a genius for increasing profits in very creative ways, and they have equally impressive genius for selling the general population the notion that it’s all good. But the net result is billions and billion on their side of the ledger and less on my side. Everyday, the financial pages are full of reports of mergers and acquisitions worth billions. You are hard-pressed to find a buy-out that is worth less than 10 figures.

So why not support the arts, at the very least because it sooths us, so the bitter pill of exploitation goes down with a little bit of cultural sugar.The arts are undervalued in the USA. Big discovery. Yes, the arts are undervalued. But the fact is they are invaluable because they are life-affirming for the community starved for moral, cultural and intellectual sustenance. Feeding that natural, inherent hunger is why they exist, aside from the useful titillation of the idle rich. When the corporations realize that their associations with the arts show that they support life, they will value and support the arts.

But so long as they equate their social responsibility exclusively with curing disease, or a clean water supply in Nigeria, or the battle against AIDS, they will never see the arts as more than luxury. I’m not ashamed of the fact that the arts are a luxury for a society rife with disease, degradation, and poverty. And if I lived in Uganda, I would be outraged if some philanthropy built a $100 million modern art museum in Kampala. But we are a wealthy society, and we must grow to encompass our cultural dreams and achievements, if nothing else than to prove to ourselves that we have it in us.

Billions can be a worrisome thing

When in January a Los Angeles Times reporter began researching the investment history of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the first places she consulted was the 990s filed in the databases of Guidestar.com, a website that provides access to these tax returns of the non-profits free of charge. The Gates Foundation’s 2004 990 (the most recent one available, all 94 Mb of it) runs to 2565 pages, so reading it must have been a chore and a half for the reporter. Once you’ve found the pages where the Foundation’s investments are listed (in detail, with monetary investment amounts provided with the name of each investment), there are nearly 100 pages of them (over 4000 investments), as might be expected of an organization with $32 billion to invest. But a good reporter is not afraid of research.

And what did the LA Times dig up? Some very tantalizing facts, worthy of publication and syndication, which is where the Seattle Times picked it up for its January 18, 2007 apologia, under the headline "Gates Foundation faces multibillion-dollar dilemma." I was naturally drawn to the article and read it avidly, thus quickly. Now, several weeks later, I have the leisure to think about what the world’s richest philanthropy is doing with all that dough, and I discover that some of it is invested in some of the very companies whose exploitative and destructive operations are exacerbating the very problems the Gates Foundation is trying to eradicate, namely malaria, polio and AIDS. Shocking indeed, and juicy. Nothing like showing the giant’s feet of clay to get us proles salivating.

I am one to believe that the wealthiest, and supposedly most privileged among us must be held to a higher standard. After all, people like Bill Gates (if there are any others) are examples for youth, who because of him, aspire to great wealth through entrepreneurial struggle. There are chinks in the armor, of course – there always are. Here we have the drop-out rich kid propped up by his wealthy, powerful family until the crazy software-for-profit scheme gets legs. All of us should be so disadvantaged. But he has come a long way, and now he is an example for us all, except for this thing about the hundreds of millions he has invested in trashy companies. Of course his home town newspaper will not trash nor tarnish, so they make up the ususal excuse for bad behavior: everybody does it, so it’s okay. And more subtlely, who’s it hurting, anyway?

BP (British Peteroleum) is one among many oil companies that rape the earth and reap enormous profits for stock holders. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is only one among their thousands of stockholders, among them Greenpeace. Of course, Greenpeace does not buy BP stock by the armload, but by the pinch with nose closed, in order to get in the door of the stockholders meetings where the really mean stuff happens. One would register surprise if the Gates people showed enough interest in this confab to ask Expedia about the cost of a roundtrip.
Be calm, everyone “ so far the foundation has managed its investments separately from its grant programs. It invests in a diversified portfolio for a steady return, and then uses the profits toward greater social goals,” simpers Seattle Times reporter Kristi Heim. Of course the grant programs are managed separately! Of course they aren’t commingled with the investments. They’re separate offices on separate floors. These people hardly speak!

How dare you!!!

The long and short of Heims’ piece is that the Gates Foundation is doing what almost everybody does: they’re investing their wealth where it does the most good – for them. Forget the environment or third world health, where are the profits, dammit?! If they were going to inspect their investments with an eye toward eliminating the most egregious offenders of Gates Foundation’s Goals and Objectives, which they’re are not, then they would have to work really, really hard to get the job done. And there is simply not time nor money nor staff enough to do it. So, in short, the answer to the Los Angeles Times is a huffy: “You don’t get it, do you? We’re the GATES Foundation. Dammit.”

But the hometown apologia newspaper says that COO Cheryl Scott promised to review the foundations investments, although they were not planning to meet the challenges head on by actually doing anything. They, no doubt, will rely on the sacrosanct factor and the how-dare-you reaction to kick in and make this silly business go away.

Not so fast. On closer inspection anyone familiar with foundations will find a familiar pattern. Any of them worth over 10 million is heavily diversified, meaning they don’t know where their money is invested because it is handled by a money manager whose job it is to maximize the return on the investment. I’m sure the Gates Foundation has a battalion of such people to manage its billions and to assure that the bank account grows. So that is what is at the root of this ostensibly evil regime: a legitimate need to see the money safe and growing for the benefit of the world, with an unfortunately blurred if not blind eye toward how exactly it’s done.

Now that the world’s attention has been called to the issue, the Gates Foundation vows to revamp its investment strategy to eliminate any awful disease-carrying, planet-raping enterprises among its stock buys. Good luck to them. With so many profitable grass-roots organizations around, how will they ever decide? What price political correctness?