In tough economic times, going to the ballet or the opera is not the first thing that pops into most people’s minds. That thrift instinct also moves philanthropies and government agencies to rechannel reduced grants to bread-and-butter causes.
During the past two years, the stock market meltdown has put a few dents even on the megaportfolio of the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, shrinking it from $4.2 billion at the start of 2002 to just under $4 billion today.
The sour investment and economic climate is one more reason to applaud the foundation’s announcement Monday that it will give away $42 million in unsolicited grants, including $21.5 million to Chicago-area arts organizations. The foundation has also committed about $28 million over the next five years to these groups, some of which have been hurt by the post-Sept. 11 economic downturn.
National Public Radio will receive $14 million from MacArthur, part of it for its endowment, the rest for general operations. That is the largest grant in NPR’s history.
An additional $4 million will go to organizations involved in international work, including the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.
The MacArthur grants, awarded in conjunction with the foundation’s 25th anniversary, are good news on two counts. They help cultural organizations thrive and also break loose from the vagaries of government funding.
Some of MacArthur’s largesse will go to the usual big-leaguers–the major museums, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera. However, a host of worthy but lesser-known venues, such as the Redmoon Theater and the Muntu Dance Theater, also stand to benefit. Recipients can use the grants with a minimum of restrictions. The money should put to rest perceptions that the foundation had lost interest in the arts in favor of social programs.
There is another, subtle benefit to this. During the 1990s, social conservatives, led by then-Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, made a crusade against federal funding of art in general, and works they believed to be obscene. So recipients were asked to certify the projects underwritten with federal funds met “decency standards.”
The dispute didn’t make Helms an aesthete, but it highlighted the pact-with-the-devil nature of government funding for the arts. If not out-and-out censorship, as in the case of Helms, public funding tends to breed a common-denominator blahness that’s hardly the trademark of great artistic endeavors.
So give the MacArthur Foundation a double standing ovation–one for supporting art and culture, another for doing its part to free art and culture from the inevitable strings attached to public funding.
