Paris, a visitor cannot navigate the boulevards and winding alleyways without stumbling onto art at every corner.
Stand on the Ile de la Cite before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and you can glimpse the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. A five-minute walk brings you to the Musee d’Orsay, a train station turned glorious art museum.
By night, symphonies, ballet troupes and opera companies perform year-round, and even the streets and cafes are alive with a magical hospitality to art and creativity.
Across the channel, in nearby London, a stroll along Shaftesbury Avenue is aglow from the light of marquee bulbs beaming on a theater strip unparalleled in the world. Shakespeare’s works and other classics play in rotating repertory.
Culture is a matter of civic pride. This year, Great Britain, with only a fifth the population of the United States, is spending 50 percent more to fund the arts than federal, state and local agencies here–some $1.5 billion. The French–at $3 billion–spend three times as much as the U.S.
Despite the increasingly intimate global village, when it comes to the arts, the U.S. and Europe are still worlds apart.
“In Europe, high culture and the fine arts are inextricably linked to each country’s sense of national identity,” says Daniel Ritter, executive director of the Center for Arts and Culture, a Washington think tank. “There’s history of the government taking responsibility for culture as a means of keeping national identity in place. In the U.S., we never made that link.
“One analogy would be to the U.S. environmental movement of the 1970s,” Ritter says. “That took root because Americans feel a natural tie to the land, to a shared sense of endless space and resources. In Europe, there’s a similar notion of high culture. Culture there relates to the national soul.”
In the U.S., there is, at best, an ambivalence about government support for artistic enterprises and, at worst, outright hostility. The fine arts–classical music, theater, dance and the visual arts–are largely a collection of European forms and practices. And there long has been something of an awkward fit between these art forms and American culture.
Fury over a handful of controversial works in the 1980s raised old questions about the role the arts play in American society. A decade later, fine arts organizations struggle to find new and creative ways to survive in an environment of diminished public funding. At the same time, they’re competing in a diverse and rapidly changing cultural milieu–one exploding with competing forms of mass media with every passing year.
Eyeing huge social, economic, cultural and demographic shifts ahead, some arts organizations have adjusted to market realities with surprising success. But the challenges they face remain enormous.
The 10-year-old struggle over funding continues. Federal appropriations to the National Endowment for the Arts are down 40 percent since 1995. Current U.S. House of Representatives proposals call for a 1997 freeze at $99.5 million, and it seems unlikely funding will increase anytime soon. The GOP platform, in fact, calls for the elimination of the NEA.
To replace lost government dollars, many arts groups have formed partnerships with corporations eager to sell products by association with performances or grand exhibitions. But many in the cultural community fear this will favor mainstream artistic endeavors at the expense of experimental ones.
Competing in the marketplace means that the traditional arts must swim against a tide of pop culture that permeates every corner of American life. Why go to the trouble and expense of buying tickets and traveling to a live event when you can sit home and surf through 100 cable channels?
On the horizon, demographic clouds are gathering that portend a shift in the traditional support base for the arts as well as the emergence of brand new audiences that may have little connection to them. The primary support base for symphonic music and theater is largely older, affluent Americans, and Baby Boomers are not supporting those arts at the same level. Huge ethnic changes mean arts organizations must find ways to reach new groups who may have no cultural tradition involving these European-based art forms.
Arts in America
All of this is made more difficult by the uncertain place the arts always have held in this country. Early settlers arrived with some skepticism about the culture they left behind. While the Puritans brought an appreciation of language and literature–especially manifest in their sermons–theirs was the regime that had shut down the theaters in England for a time.
Because of our huge territory, the arts that developed remained largely based back East. Though literature flourished in the 19th Century, American theater and serious music from the 1800s are barely remembered. Huck Finn, the century’s most famous American literary character, embodies the pioneer suspicion of “highfalutin” Europe in his wrestlings with the King and the Duke, a pair of traveling Shakespearean rascals.
Theater meant ratty, vaudevillian troupes or more ambitious epics now largely forgotten. As late as the mid-19th Century, there were no American symphony orchestras. And always Americans approached the European arts with something of an inferiority complex. At the turn of the century, American-born novelist Henry James settled permanently in Europe and wrote extensively of the struggle of the American trying to acquire some semblance of culture there.
Even in the 1920s, T.S. Eliot forsook his St. Louis roots and relocated to London, just as a coterie of novelists and painters emigrated to Paris, inspiring a new term: the expatriates. Back home, the socially penetrating Sinclair Lewis provided a scathing look at small-town values and resistance to cultural improvement in “Main Street,” in which heroine Carol Milford is frustrated in her attempts to improve her provincial home, Gopher Prairie, Minn.
Many of the European arts did not come of age in America until the 20th Century: painting in the 1950s with Abstract Expressionism, the first U.S. movement to gain broad attention in its own time; drama with Eugene O’Neill; ballet with the creation of American Ballet Theatre in 1940 and the New York City Ballet in 1948; and opera with such entities as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, which didn’t begin until 1954.
Government support for the arts is also a latter-day trend. In 1789, George Washington urged Congress to patronize the arts–and Congress declined. A formal bill to establish an arts council went down in flames in 1877. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt did establish a Bureau of Fine Arts to advise on public buildings
But it wasn’t until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration that any noteworthy subsidy of the performing arts arrived. In 1935, FDR expanded his Works Progress Administration to include projects on art, music, theater and writing. Some 16,000 musicians and 14,000 actors performed for an estimated 25 million people, all to a $160 million price tag, until 1943, when FDR canceled all WPA programs.
Twenty years later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, leaving unsigned on his desk an executive order to create an advisory arts council. In 1965, after Lyndon Johnson and a new liberal Congress won in a landslide, the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act passed, establishing what would become the NEA.
Comparison to Europe
In contrast, there is a long history in Europe of royal patronage. For centuries, kings, princes and popes commissioned architects to build palaces, painters to provide portraits, sculptors to line the streets with sculpture and composers to write scores. Since the Renaissance, when the Medici and Pope Julius II supported Michelangelo, heads of European city-states and nations underwrote the arts. Everything from Shakespearean dramas to the vast portion of what we call classical music was sponsored by the church or the court.
Today, differences in subsidy underscore the differences in the two traditions. In 1987, when NEA support continued unchallenged, a comparison by the Policy Studies Institute revealed that the U.S. spent less per person on the arts than each of five European countries.
The contrast was staggering: The Federal Republic of Germany spent $39 per person; France spent $35; the Netherlands $33; Sweden $45 and Great Britain $16.
The U.S. spent $3.30 per person.
More recent figures suggest there hasn’t been much change. Compare the current NEA allocation of $99.5 million to the $1.5 billion allocated for 1995-96 in the United Kingdom and some $3.1 billion for 1996 in France. However, those totals are a bit misleading. There are 56 state agencies and 3,800 local ones that provide money to the arts in the U.S., too. The state organizations gave $263 million in 1996 and the local ones allocated $650 million.
That brings total government dollars to a little more than $1 billion–but that’s still only a third of the amount allocated in France, a country with a population one-fifth as large.
But Europe and the U.S. differ not only in governmental subsidies and tradition; there’s also a complex difference in the structure of taxation and funding for the arts between the continents.
European countries generally don’t provide tax deductions for private donation, and as a result there is very little of it. The American arts have always been buoyed by such donations, from the traveling Chautauqua programs dating from 1874 to the largess of the industrialist barons and, beginning with the income tax in 1913, individual donation.
“Does that equalize subsidy between the U.S. and Europe? I honestly don’t know,” says the Center for Arts and Culture’s Ritter. “We’re only starting to study that right now.”
Another important difference: Each European nation is responsible for a very small geographic region. Most European countries are comparable in size to individual U.S. states. Part of the challenge of culture here is that very lack of centralization; the U.S. faces a much bigger challenge in bringing opera to Wyoming than, say, France does to Nice or Bordeaux.
“On the other hand, Europeans have proven much more devoted to economic access to the arts than Americans,” Ritter says. “Much of the European subsidy goes to keeping ticket prices affordable. As a result, prices are lower in Paris than New York. Only in recent years, under Jane Alexander, has the NEA focused on democratic access, on arts education and promoting the arts in rural areas.”
Europe has own problems
Does that mean a tradition in Europe of bluebloods and blue-collar workers sitting happily side by side at the opera? Well, not exactly.
“I don’t think you have the British equivalent of Joe Six Pack going to the theater in England anymore than you have here,” says Caroline Cracraft, vice consul for public affairs at the British consulate in Chicago. “Whenever U.S. tourists stay away from London, for whatever reason, the theaters worry about a lack of business.
“And the ordinary citizen can express outrage at subsidies in England, too,” Cracraft adds. “There has been plenty of controversy over public funding for Damien Hurst,” for example, whose art works involve dead sheep suspended in formaldehyde.
But Ritter cautions there’s still a fundamental difference between the U.S. and Europe on that score. “It’s true you have funding controversies in Europe,” he says. “But those attacks never lead to an indictment of the whole system of funding. They merely question the expense of money for that particular work of art. They don’t say, `Let’s not fund the arts at all.’ “
Coincidentally, Ritter says, a big debate in Europe right now is over the invasion of American mass media. “The immense popularity of movies, TV shows and rock music from America in Europe has produced a concern that national and regional identities may be washed away,” he says.
“In the states, what high culture we’ve developed, such as ballet and jazz, has never been associated with our national identity. Thus, the arrival of mass media doesn’t seem a threat to high culture to most Americans. In some ways the new mass media is American culture.”
Mass media is unquestionably, however, a threat in the pursuit of audiences in this country. Some of the dangers are subtle. “Thirty or forty years ago, when the not-for-profit theater began, there were distinct realms of culture and business and education and religion,” says Theatre Communications Group executive director John Sullivan. “Now we’re in one great soup of information.
“When I was a young director, the theme of alienation pretty much belonged to the theater. Now you see it in ads on TV for jeans. The business community has usurped alienation, just as the movies usurped narrative. That makes it harder to maintain a distinctive identity.”
And yet Sullivan is optimistic: “There’s a huge opening for the theater in that in a world of exploding information sources, the theater is still a real place where real people can get together and share information. In the long run, our task is to provide perspective on this age of information and do something a computer probably can’t: celebrate public life and community.”
Is there a future for the NEA?
The notion of high culture battling it out in the competitive world of American capitalism is viewed as positive by some. They believe that this market approach is preferable to taking government handouts, which easily can be taken away. And, some say, the NEA is such a mess that we’re better off without it.
“The arts (in the U.S.) have survived far longer without government intervention than with subsidies,” writes scholar Alice Goldfarb Marquis in her controversial history of the National Endowment for the Arts, “Art Lessons.” “Artists work their magic because they must, and they work best in the wild.”
Calling the National Endowment for the Arts a culture zoo, she says “it is time to turn the animals loose.”
She suggests that the notion of the arts as an entitlement is a new one, anyway. “The 19th Century was a free-for-all, especially in the area of music,” she says. “Fine art was commercial.”
But many scholars and artists disagree. “Artists have always been subsidized, going back to the founding of Western civilization,” says W.J.T. Mitchell, author and professor of English at the University of Chicago. “Without subsidy, we wouldn’t have the Acropolis. We wouldn’t have Sophocles, Euripides or Aeschylus.”
“If the model is that of wild animals in a jungle, and the notion is that some arts would survive in a deregulated capitalist world, it’s true, some would,” Mitchell says. “But the question is, is that what you really want? The kind that survive? Those that satisfy the popular taste?”
Robert Brustein, author of “Dumbocracy in America” and artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, doubts that a society that doesn’t support art for art’s sake can long survive.
“If the future is nothing but `Twister’ and `Mission: Impossible,’ both of which I loved, we’re finished as a country,” he says. “The debate should be about giving people the opportunity to embrace great work, not getting rid of great work because everybody didn’t like it.”
Adjusting, but at a cost
There are also signs, as the century nears its end, that the American arts are attempting to reverse their troubles.
The Theatre Communications Group, the not-for-profit theater movement’s service organization, said gloomily in its 1994 report, “Non-profit theaters across the country continued to struggle for economic health and survival.” “Still unable to recover from . . . the recession of the early 1990s, theaters once again failed to balance their budgets and experienced audience attrition.”
That was then. The organization’s most recent 1995 wrapup shows signs of hope: “In the 1994-95 season, non-profit professional theaters . . . experienced institutional growth for the first time in five years.” The group’s report “shows overall earnings grew at a faster pace than expenses among 66 tracked theaters.” According to that report, theaters have countered losses in public and private funding at the national level by focusing on local support, box-office earnings and the further development of endowment funds. They have tightened their belts and concentrated on local support.
The picture is checkered but hopeful for America’s symphony orchestras, too. An important 1992 study, the Wolf Report, warned that symphony orchestras faced dire problems in terms of funding declines and an aging audience.
“But it woke the industry up,” says Melinda Whiting, editor of Symphony Magazine, the bi-monthly publication of the American Symphony League. Orchestras have worked aggressively to find new sources of funding and to avoid long-term debt. “You find the number of orchestras reporting a deficit much higher 10 years ago than it is now,” she says.
Meanwhile, orchestras work to attract younger audiences. In Philadelphia, the orchestra regularly offers concerts with video screens relaying close-up images of the conductor and the players, in the manner of a stadium rock concert. Philadelphia also offers regular theme nights to lure younger audiences, complete with a session afterwards at a local bar. At Halloween, the orchestra members perform in costumes and audiences are encouraged to come in masquerade, too.
Of course, there is a downside. This struggle to survive has raised questions about lowering standards. Theaters are surviving but, many argue, at the cost of less new work and fewer aesthetic risks.
“In one study, we learned that staged readings of new works declined by 16 percent between 1991 and 1995,” says Alisha Tonsic, management and government programs associate at Theatre Communications Group. Even as the theaters seem to be recovering, “new play development is definitely down,” she adds.
Some might bristle at the notion of symphony players dressed like witches, nuns and Martians. But engaging new, inexperienced customers for music, art and theater may be essential to the arts’ future vitality. Contemporizing these art forms may be one way of accomplishing this.
And Americans need a more fundamental re-evaluation of the artist. “Americans need to abandon the paradigm of artists as romantic and peripheral and realize they lead normal lives,” says Carol Becker, dean of the faculty and interim president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “Being an artist is a profession. The notion of the 19th Century that artists live on the fringe is still with us and that disempowers them.”
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SUNDAY: The precarious position of the arts in America. Arts & Entertainment.
MONDAY: Why the arts can’t pay their own way. Tempo.
TUESDAY: The uneasy partnership between the arts and corporations. Tempo.
WEDNESDAY: How the arts are recasting themselves for the future.Tempo.
