Tim Silbaugh
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TOUGH LOVE FOR THE ARTS
• It's going to hurt, but we've got to break the vicious arts-funding cycle.
By Roger Downey MORE
• Seven more ideas from our arts writers.
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• And another thing: Tear down that Lenin statue in Fremont!
By Robert Meyers MORE
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The new year 's a traditional time for journalists to look back over the notable events of the past 12 months. Arts journalists are particularly prone to this habit, probably because there's so little happening on their beats around this time. This year, though, among the 10-best columns and my-favorite-memory features, another note was struck, paying generic tribute to the incalculable benefits, economic and spiritual, that the arts bestow on our region.
Far from being mere seasonal feel-good features, these articles set off alarms among cynical old-time observers of the arts scene. Never mind the maunderings about how the arts hoist our quality of life into the stratosphere, how the benefits of arts spending keep the engine of our regional commerce chugging; these articles signal one thing and one thing only: In the very near future, someone, usually the body politic, is going to be asked to fork over a whole lot of money.
This time the prospective beneficiaries are Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet, the principal tenants of Seattle Center's McCaw Hall, which was built more or less to those organizations' specs. Before ground was broken, responsibility for raising funds to cover its prospective cost was divvied up between the opera and PNB, the Seattle Center, and local and regional government. But costs proved higher than expected, and when the city of Seattle proposed that McCaw's tenants pay a share of the cost, it was accused of draining their very lifeblood of existence.
For those with only moderately long memories, this campaign is eerily similar to the one waged in the late '90s by private backers of the Paramount Theatre to dragoon the city into paying $5 million more than it had pledged to the restoration of the landmark theater. That campaign failed; it remains to be seen whether the heavy community hitters who sit on the boards of the opera and the ballet are able to bend cash-strapped city politicians to their will.
Clashing with the same season of comfort and joy, backers of the Empty Space Theatre were struggling to keep the 35-year-old institution afloat. Again. This is not the theater's first near-death experience; it barely survived its dive into bankruptcy after a 1980s move from spartan Capitol Hill quarters to a posh piece of Pioneer Square real estate. The prognosis this time round is bleak; unless it comes up with a major infusion of cash, the empty Space is likely to follow the Group into the lamented limbo of once-lauded theaters whose artistic accomplishments were out of all proportion to their size.
Should we save the Empty Space once more? Should the public pick up the difference between what it costs to build and operate McCaw Hall and what its prime tenants are willing to pay? These aren't one-time questions. Squabbles about who ought to pay for buildings or renovations are endemic; just about every arts organization in the Puget Sound region, large or small, has experienced one or more life-threatening financial crises since I've been paying attention to the scene. Some—though none of the largest—ultimately expired, to universal condolence. No one, so far as I know, shrugged and said, "Too bad; well, that's show business."
But that may be exactly the reason we don't seem to be able to break out of the vicious complacency-or- crisis circle. We've forgotten, or been taught to forget, that whatever its social or spiritual value, art is a business like any other. When a fine restaurant closes its doors, we may regret its passing, but we don't try to set up an endowment to keep it open; when a plumber goes out of business, we assume the plumber must have ignored the bottom line and hit the Yellow Pages to look for another.
Even individual artists are expected to live by the economic rules that govern all the rest of us: Friends might throw a rent party for someone who's in danger of losing the lease on a studio, but not an annual campaign with mailings and phone banks. Not year after year. Somehow only arts organizations are allowed to claim immunity from the laws of financial gravity; for them, there's no connection between supply and demand, balanced budgets are for profiteers and sissies, and water runs uphill when we tell it to.
This attitude has been a long time growing; it was implicit in the legislation that created the National Endowment for the Arts back in 1969. The idea is expressed in the NEA's current slogan "A Great Nation Deserves Great Art"; access to the arts is an entitlement of American citizenship. Congress never gave the NEA enough money to begin to achieve that goal, but it did set the ideological tone for states, localities, and municipalities across the nation. And thanks to the overflowing coffers of the Ford and Rockefeller and other foundations, it seemed for a while that the United States was moving toward a system of state-supported arts delivery like that long taken for granted all over Europe.
It didn't turn out that way, of course. Foundation money gradually ran out, and the NEA's modest allotment of cash was sliced ever thinner for the benefit of an ever-wider pool of artistically dubious but politically correct or populist ventures. But the main reason it didn't turn out that way is that there was never a consensus among Americans that the government had any business funding the arts.
