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.