When music lovers swarmed into the Ravinia Festival for the season opener in June, it wasn’t the redesigned stage or the reupholstered seating or even the great musical artists that they laid eyes on first.
Rather, it was a gleaming Infiniti sedan–strategically positioned near the entrance to the festival–that initially captured attention. Before the maestro signaled the first downbeat, concertgoers stared at the incongruity: a shiny, new luxury car, sans driver, plunked into the midst of a leafy arts festival. (The Infiniti will be back for the season’s closing weekend, ending Sept. 2.)
Call it the face of the fine arts in the ’90s. For better and for worse, commerce and culture have begun to embrace each other as never before.
With the National Endowment for the Arts having faced political attack and steady downsizing for the past several years, and with arts councils across the country similarly enduring perpetually flat or shrinking funds, perhaps it’s not surprising that America’s struggling arts organizations have come to the conclusion that they can’t depend on governmental largess as they once did.
The NEA and the state and local arts councils may not be totally out of the picture yet–there even are subtle indications that the cutbacks may have bottomed out–but the arts organizations, out of necessity, have found seductive new sources of income in corporate coffers.
This development, though just a few years old, already has changed the look and texture of the arts in Chicago and nationwide. Consider just a few examples:
– This season’s Ravinia Festival calendar came adorned with more corporate logos than photographs of performing artists. For the first time in Ravinia’s 61-year history, virtually every concert has a corporate sponsor, its signage displayed on the festival grounds and embossed on tickets.
– The opening season of the new home of the Museum of Contemporary Art achieved remarkable results in corporate fundraising, with 30 companies coughing up $63.5 million to be a part of the city’s newest and most glittering cultural shrine. Take a stroll through the new building or a glance at museum brochures, and you’ll see corporate imprimaturs from American Express, Alberto-Culver, Refco Group and others.
– The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Goodman Theatre, Art Institute of Chicago and other local cultural behemoths all enjoy corporate support throughout their seasons.
“The world of funding the arts has changed a great deal over the past six years,” says Margaret Bergen Davis, development director of the Ravinia Festival, acknowledging a shift from public to corporate dollars, “and we’ve been adjusting to that.”
It’s called the “devolution” of traditional arts funding, says Sarah Solotaroff of the Chicago Community Trust, a philanthropic foundation that supports social and arts causes. “There has been slippage in foundation support, public funds clearly have declined, and corporate funds (that is, corporate philanthropy, rather than corporate sponsorships) have dropped,” adds Solotaroff, “and arts groups have reacted accordingly.”
Indeed, various surveys bear out what arts presenters began to learn firsthand as the go-go ’80s turned into the downsized ’90s.
In the 1980s, “the total dollar amount flowing into the arts (from foundations) increased dramatically,” reports Loren Renz in “Arts Funding Revision: An Update on Foundation Trends in the 1990s.”
The new decade, however, told a different story, with support from foundations losing steam in the ’90s, according to the Renz report.
At the same time, funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and from state arts agencies dropped significantly. Clearly, the pressure to find new sources of money was on.
But in the midst of these lean times, an unexpected development occurred: Suddenly, arts groups were receiving windfall cash from a previously untapped source–corporate sponsorships.
From 1985 to 1996, corporate sponsorship in North America skyrocketed, from $850 million in 1985 to $2.5 billion in 1990 to a projected $5.4 billion in 1996, according to IEG Inc., an events-sponsorship company based in Chicago that specializes in sports, arts, event, entertainment and cause marketing. Among arts groups, corporate sponsorship jumped from $245 million in 1993 to $255 million in ’94 to $277 million in ’95 to a projected $323 million in ’96.
Obviously, arts groups had hit on a new way of raising cash.
“When I came to Ravinia (in 1990), I decided this was an area that was relatively untapped,” says Zarin Mehta, executive director of the Ravinia Festival, which has been an aggressive pursuer of corporate cash.
“Though we really didn’t get much from the NEA, except for some special commissioning grants, I did feel that we probably would be losing grants from the Illinois Arts Council. And I felt that foundations and corporations would start diverting their money into social causes, which is just what happened.”
Altruism, however, is not the primary motivation here. Rather, corporations began to realize that sponsoring arts events yields dividends that traditional advertising dollars cannot match.
“By sponsoring an arts event, the corporations get access to mailing lists, signage at the event, logo display in advertisements for the arts group, and those aren’t even the most important attractions,” says Lisa Ukman, founding director of IEG.
“In order to market a product in 1996,” says Ukman, “you need to tether your product to something bigger than itself. In other words, you can’t sell on the attributes of the product alone because there’s so much clutter out there.”
If the courtship of marketing and the muse has given cash-strapped arts groups a sorely needed fiscal infusion, there has been a price to pay. The influx of new corporate dollars has brought a distinctly commercial look to the non-profit arts in America.
The corporations have taken pains to determine “how they can use the image or the product of a particular arts institution in order to advance their own, corporate cause,” says Alene Valkanas, executive director of the Illinois Arts Alliance.
“And it’s those market-driven forces that are directing their contributions. But what happens to the small scholarly exhibitions, the small theater productions, which are vital in terms of nurturing our culture and preserving our heritage?”
As Valkanas implies, the corporations tend to mete out their sponsorships to giant arts organizations that reach large numbers of constituents.
The smaller companies, which often present adventurous and experimental work by newer, younger artists, rarely benefit from the corporate windfall.
“We have made attempts to contact various airlines for corporate sponsorships, but they tend to shy away from us,” says Ken Thompson, of the Randolph Street Gallery, an institution that champions new ideas in music, art, drama and letters.
“We do avant-garde work, and corporations tend to be conservative: They don’t want to be associated with an institution like ours. We do unusual, experimental work, where you’re not sure what’s going to happen next, and that’s unsettling to corporations.
“Furthermore,” adds Thompson, “an institution like Ravinia is going to send out a million brochures for their season, so the corporations want to be on there. That’s not going to happen by sponsoring something at Randolph Street Gallery. It’s just not worth it to a corporation.”
The Victory Gardens Theater, a widely respected but comparatively small Chicago institution, encountered similar results. Last year, the theater announced it would stage Steve Carter’s “Root Causes,” a $120,000 show that was roughly twice the cost of the theater’s typical production.
“We went into this production knowing that it’s a large-scale one that was going to require extra funds,” says the theater’s managing director, John Walker.
But after visiting a variety of sources, Walker and friends came up dry and had to postpone the production indefinitely.
“It’s hard for companies of our size to get those corporate sponsorships, because we can’t return the numbers of people that the larger theaters can,” says Walker.
And even the occasional small institution that has scored a corporate sponsorship finds it difficult to make lightning strike twice.
Latino Chicago Theater, for instance, won a $30,000 sponsorship from AT&T, which paid for the entire cost of its production of “Lolita de Lares.” The historical play, about a Puerto Rican freedom fighter, gave AT&T “a way to connect with the Puerto Rican community, which is frankly hard to do,” says Juan Ramirez, the theater company’s artistic director.
But when Ramirez and friends went looking for a corporate sponsor for the theater’s production of Migdalia Cruz’s “Cigarettes and Moby Dick,” they struck out.
“It has a lesbian affair,” says Ramirez, “and maybe that’s why the corporations didn’t want to come onboard.”
As Randolph Street Gallery development director Gustavo Paredes puts it, “Corporations like safe, non-controversial art. If you’re dealing with issues of race or gender or class, there is some level of discomfort on the corporate side.”
The further danger in the corporatization of arts funding, say critics, is that it encourages large institutions to cling to safe, mainstream themes, while it deprives smaller, more experimental institutions of funds sorely needed to develop new work and to find and nurture new talent.
Says Valkanas of the Illinois Arts Alliance, “It’s a food-chain issue.
“If the actors are not being trained in the small storefront theaters, they’re not going to be ready for the Goodman. Take out one step in the food chain, and the whole process is in doubt.”
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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
