Cultural commitments: rethinking arts funding policy

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Ann Lee Morgan

Two other essays analyze specific aspects of the NEA's operation. David B. Pankratz, an arts consultant and author, and Carla Hanzal, an artist and arts manager, offer a valuable look at "Leadership and the NEA: The Roles of the Chairperson and the National Council on the Arts." They investigate the statutory and historical functions of these two entities and inspect the relationship between each of the Endowment's five successive chairpersons and the 26-member advisory board that supervises the agency. They conclude with a discussion of dilemmas inherent in this partnership and endorse the importance of decisive but sensitive leadership from the chairperson. In another dose look at Endowment procedures, Mulcahy gives a detailed history of the Congressional reauthorization procedures that have repeatedly forced the NEA to defend itself with respect to several difficult issues, but have had the value of serving as "a forum for debating the nature of public arts policy." Without explaining why, Mulcahy covers the reauthorization history only through 1985. It is instructive to see how contentious the hearings have been historically, but the last 10 years have so altered the situation that it is frustrating to be deprived of the benefit of Mulcahy's research and experience concerning more recent events.

Mulcahy also contributes the final essay, "The Public Interest and Arts Policy," in which he concentrates on the public nature of the NEA as an aspect of a national cultural policy. In the end, what we are aiming for, he claims, is "a public culture that is not an official culture," suggesting that the NEA might "undertake as its cultural mission the task of persuading the public that there is a societal obligation" to safeguard the artistic patrimony and to "provide opportunities for artistic participation by as large a number of people and in as many different ways as feasible." He concludes with the hope that a result might be to "mitigate the political parochialism that has failed to appreciate the central role that the National Endowment for the Arts has played, and should continue to play, in fostering the country's cultural condition."(9)

A more diverse collection of essays, The Arts in the World Economy: Public Policy and Private Philanthropy for a Global Cultural Community, edited by Olin Robison, Robert Freeman and Charles A. Riley II, also provides thought-provoking perspectives on government arts funding. This anthology is an aftereffect of the December 1993 Salzburg Seminar. Riley, a freelance arts journalist who teaches English at Baruch College of the City University of New York, actually edited the volume, according to a preface by Robison, a former president of Middlebury College, who is now president of the Salzburg Seminar. Freeman, director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, was co-chair, along with Robison, of the particular session that spawned the book.

In his preface, Robison explains that the Salzburg Seminar is devoted to "public issues with a particular emphasis on areas where work of the academic and public policy communities intersect." In order to obtain a wide range of views for the arts seminar, the organizers "enhanced the mix by involving artists, arts educators, civil servants, politicians, and arts administrators" from 33 countries. The topic was chosen in response to "a persistent sense that the arts are in crisis in most parts of the world," as well as a growing recognition that "many arts organizations now transcend national boundaries and are global in their artistic concerns and in their audiences."(10) The essays included in the book are evidently based on papers given at the seminar, with some later editing and rewriting. The book includes a fine bibliography of sources on arts policy and funding, as well as a helpful list of international arts organizations, but, unfortunately, no index.