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2 years ago
Revised NEA/Fed Arts Policy panel answers (1-3)
1. Many of the participants in this forum have commented on whether or not the NEA should attempt to reinstate direct grants to artists. Some feel the agency is vulnerable to partisan political attacks and that funding artists directly might open up a Pandora’s Box of problems. Others believe that funding for individual artists should be at the very core of the Endowment’s mission. What do you think the NEA should do on this issue?
The “conservative Christian anarchist” Right started its long and destructive campaign to dominate American affairs with the attack on NEA in the 1980s. [The quote is from Peter Drucker (a self-analysis), but I would add “corparatist.”] The Right’s (and, lesser by degree, the Left’s) intimidation of public discourse may have started on the subject of art, but it now permeates American society. We can all look around us to gauge the effects.
The Delays, Armeys, Limbaughs etc., have laid waste to the country. They also managed to alienate the great majority of Americans along the way. In the intervening 25 years (which span my generation’s cultural emergence) since the NEA – and the American people – capitulated to the bullying of the Right on the issue of direct artist grants, the Endowment has never had a better opportunity than it has now to reclaim its vital cultural leadership role.
Let the restoration of civility and respect for free speech in America’s public forum, especially for dissenting or divergent voices and visions, come full circle. And let NEA lead the way. In short, yes, the NEA must once again administer the awarding of individual artist grants. The compelling reasons are several.• America has lost its post-War competitive edge in the contemporary arts arena; a glance at programming at the major exhibiting institutions should suffice to verify this statement. MoMA will not be producing a major solo show for an American artist (I don’t count filmmaker Tim Burton) through 2011, which is a travesty. The artists of Western Europe and elsewhere have enjoyed significant government patronage, and their work demonstrates the value of such direct support.
• The near-total privatization of art in America has not produced great, or even reasonably good outcomes for the field, by nearly any measure, unless one considers enriching a very few people to be the goal of an art ecosystem.
• By not establishing a standard for American artistic excellence and achievement through an individual artist award grant, NEA legitimizes pervasive anti-artist prejudices and industry practices. The undermining effects on the public discourse with respect to individual expressive freedom, and the collateral damage to artist lives and livings, cannot be overestimated. NEA should define itself as “first responder” when free speech is threatened in America, not as battered victim of oppression. With its former enemies weakened or otherwise disgraced/diminished, the Endowment must not miss this great opportunity to reassert itself in the broader cultural arena.
Then, the question is “How” to implement an NEA direct artist award. I would suggest the Endowment combine several models that have proven sustainable in the private and quasi-governmental sectors. In essence, NEA must create a “public option,” a strong counterpoint to corporate entertainment industry-produced competitions that, to an unfortunate extent, currently define America’s artistic identity (e.g., “America’s Top Model,” “American Idol,” “Project Runway” or “America’s Got Talent”). We as a nation can and should do better than this.
Briefly, the NEA could sponsor a program to determine grant recipients that would include three (or more) voting components:• An academy award – this panel (spanning all arts fields) would serve as a fine sample academy – basing grants awards to individual artists on merit, arising from a transparent standards set; a relevant model to consider is the Turner Prize (1-2 year cycles)
• A competition – in the vein of “America’s Got Talent,” driven by an open/popular voting system (2-4 year cycles)*
• A Chairman’s Award – for outstanding achievement for a single American artist from a list of broad categories (the other components could have more specific categories) during a selection cycle of one or two years
*This component is especially important by virtue of its capacity to emphasize the democratization of the awards system – and for its capacity to generate substantial support (and trust) from the American people.
2. A growing number of artists work outside of the public and foundation grant systems. By doing so, they have detached themselves from the gatekeeper financing systems of the past and are engaging in new ways of supporting themselves through their art. How can the National Endowment for the Arts and other public art funders support rather than interfere with this approach to making a career in the arts?
Before measures are taken to address the needs of artists, a clear acknowledgment from the arts field must verify that the need for reform exists, so that appropriate action can commence. We must decide to take care of our own, or it simply will not happen.
At present there is no American social, political or economic mechanism for nurturing artists and supporting our work throughout our lives. It should be noted this is true for nearly all Americans, except those of inherited wealth. I would specifically reference a section in The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, [“Artists’ Careers and Their Labor Markets” (Alper and Wassall)], entitled “US artists’ careers: 1979-1998,” as a supporting document. That analysis serves as a good preface for the attached letter.
A friend – herself an artist, a former collaborator and a patron of my work – sent the following note to me a few weeks ago. She was unaware of this panel at the time, and gave me permission to share it within the context of the forum. I think this letter, and the American artist experience it communicates, a tragic one, clearly demonstrates that the impetus for change is real.
The problem is bigger than art. I would suggest that the social Darwinism that inflicts wanton, wasteful damage - on the dreams of American artists like my friend and many others like her - is prevalent in every sector of our society. Artists may not be special in this regard, but we do possess special skills for advocating for societal improvement. I believe we must endeavor to apply artistic skills tactically and strategically for the welfare of the communities we inhabit, small to large, and not just in our own interests. Good examples of Americans who are doing so are Michael Moore and the Yes Men.
The disdain of the artist for a structurally neglectful or hurtful society is well represented in my friend’s letter. The converse – the pervasive social prejudice against the artist – while more complex and dimensional, is in part due to our collective failure as artists to align with the commonwealth, instead of the wealthy and their interests; conflated by the destructive ambition for stardom and its fleeting promise.
»>I double-checked all my figures, and three were inaccurate by 7 or 57 or 62 dollars - the figures come from the yearly Social Security Statement, so these figures determine how much I’ll get in my retirement… assuming we still have Social Security then!
Here’s my annual income, 1974 - 1993
1974 - $2462 working in the office of WT Grants in highschool
1975 - $2157 working in the office of WT Grants in highschool
1976 - $1251 singing in bars. Yes this is ANNUAL.
1977 - $2496 singing in bars
1978 - $0, must have bought equipment and so got to write income off
1979 - $4119 as a waitress at pizza hut and singing some, this is my biggest year yet
1980 - $2219 musician singing in bars
1981 - $2336 musician singing in bars
1982 - $0 musician, must have bought some gear
1983 - $3651 musician in band that was getting popular regionally
1984 - $6165 musician, our band was really popular
1985 - $470 the band broke up
1986 - $1039 playing covers in a terrible band and about to get divorced
1987 - $8290 receptionist by day at a printing company while sneaking into a recording studio at night - this was my biggest income, and I’m 30 this year.
1988 - $8871 lookout, I’m working at an advertising agency, another big year
1989 - $640 this is the year I got a record deal with BigMajorLabel, look how that sneaking into the recording studio paid off
1990 - $0 - this is the year I and my band made a record for BigMajorLabel (our manager gave us money to live on, and when it fell apart, the manager filed for bankruptcy and lost his house)
1991 - $9,612 - my share of the $130,000+ publishing advance, after the lawyer presented a $100,000+ bill… lost the record deal this year
1992 - $669 - now I am a former major label artist
1993 - $17,023 - I got a job as an assistant in the music business and never looked back… I was 36 and just sick of starving and hurting…
I’m thinking of turning those numbers into some kind of artwork or song or maybe both. When I look at those numbers, it breaks my heart. When I look back on my life’s path, I sometimes weep for the young woman I was. Oh man, I was born so fabulously talented, nobody ever knew what to do with me, I didn’t know what to do with myself for years and years, and all of that confusion and pain fueled the alcoholism…and did nothing to advance or develop my talents….
These days I drive past mall parking lots and think, look at all the cattle. They’re inside grazing, fattening themselves up for the kill, literally. And that on which they “feed” has no meaning, no value, it goes through their system and comes out the other end as the shit it was to begin with, gets flushed away into the sewers with everything else that stinks and that we put far, far away from us or it will make us sick… …. they waste the money they have on shit: just diversions, illusions…and judge others on what meaningless diversions and illusions they do or do not display…. they divide themselves into smaller herds defined by an agreement to see and share a common illusion … “do you see what I see” is the secret password
In 1999, when I was without a piano for the first time since I had started composing on it…. I was living in MInnesota where I had gone to get my master’s degree, I would drive down the streets in expensive neighborhoods in St. Paul, and just KNOW that there were gorgeous baby grands and full grands inside them, that were being used for nothing more than table tops for family photos, and it would literally make me cry. My body ached. They had pianos in their houses, and didn’t know what to do with them, I knew what to do with them, and couldn’t get next to one….anytime I ran across a piano in a church or building somewhere, it was a magnet, I had to touch it even if I wasn’t permitted to play it… the St. Paul Quakers were gracious enough to give me a key to their more-or-less unheated church, and I would go in there one day a week, wearing my winter coat and hat and gloves with the fingertips cut-off so I could feel the keys, and play the piano…..I was desperate, I still am desperate. I wouldn’t mind a little less desperation. Before, the desperation came from “Where will I get my food? How will I pay my electric? Do I have to stay with a man who doesn’t love me just to have food and shelter?” and now it is “How will I find time and energy to make the art and the music?” because a fulltime job is exhausting and takes up alot of a person’s day… but after 12 years in this field I finally have a 4-day a week job, so there is about to be time to make art and music, more and more of it now that I’m settling in and actually have a piano again… so I have started performing out again (2 times in the last two weeks, and the response has been excellent, I have gotten very good by singing at home alone) - next week I am beginning a course in discipline, and that is, I will be getting up at 5 AM to play music BEFORE I go to work, one must put one’s priorities at the top of the day when energy is the issue…
By the way… the year I got the record deal with BigMajorLabel, I lived in a two-room “converted” garage, slept in a coat and hat under an electric blanket, and if I forgot and left any water in a glass or dish, it was frozen solid the next morning - I had a kerosene heater (the one I gave you for your artspace in Nashville, remember?) but of course I couldn’t run it at night… the local convenience store was papered in bad checks, a dozen or so of them were mine…. I was lucky to have $20 to my name, and people who are not artists think I’m joking when I say I lived on the 3Ps : pasta, potatoes and peanut butter.
It is a painful path, that of the artist, no matter where the survival money comes from. We feel more deeply…. I have done alot of reading of the research on gifted and talented persons, and when I share it with people who are gifted and talented, they sometimes cry… anyway, I made a vow never to be dependent on anyone for money ever again (including record companies and publishing companies), so that I could make my own art and my own music as I saw fit, not have to put up with ugliness or tantrums from husbands (I’ve had two, and am done with that manner of living)… this meant, and I knew it when I started down this path, that I would have to give up my art and music for a long time, and it’s been more than a dozen years, really. I stopped thinking about it because it only made me angry, and I had made my choice.
Now it is changing. I’ve been through menopause, have been sleepless and nauseous and covered up in sweats day and night for about 6 years…. but have started sleeping again in the last 5 months so I feel art and music energy welling up, and I actually now have a place for them to come out and play. And now that I have my space and a job that doesn’t kill me (as the others in this field have nearly done), I am letting the Beast back out of its cage. It has been resting well and long, taking in without comment, and has been doing pushups in its little cell.
Long live the BEAST!!!
Love
JetGirl
3. Arguably, this country has more artists than patrons and audiences to support them. Why should the public sector support and extend this oversupply?
I have reviewed the relevant data that superficially sustains this argument, an argument that arises from a corporatist/Rightist/free market anarchist-schema. I would suggest, by way of reframing the question’s perspective, that America should be proud of the numbers of citizens who have committed their futures to collective cultural and artistic improvement and excellence.
The premise for any utilitarian application of the referred-to talent pool for the benefit of the commonwealth requires a pervasive re-envisioning of American social identity, and the concurrent application of the nation’s political will to promote general quality of life over the wealth of a few individuals. This is the case in many facets – if not all – of the country’s current problem set.
In the comments section earlier in the forum panel I included a plan for a New Art in Action (NAIA) program for the country. I submit that a neo-New Deal approach could be tremendously beneficial to the US and the arts field. It should be remembered that the several public art programs instituted during the last great Depression had the direct result of catapulting America’s artists to the forefront of the art world in a remarkably short period of time. Arguably, these programs collectively constitute the greatest public arts movement in history, yielding hundreds of thousands of artworks, many of which remain among the United States’ undisputed cultural treasures.
Today’s NEA-administered NAIA program would have a very different focus, even if the impact would be the same: to visibly inspire, provide hope, for a nation rocked on its heals by economic devastation at the hands of the usual suspects. This time, the labor of artists could be focused on improving virtual/digital infrastructure, as well as actual architecture/infrastructure, throughout the nation. A generation of young artists, working with established masters, could devote themselves to a range of necessary public works projects, from upgrading municipal websites to installing public art in blighted neighborhoods. The NEA and arts orgs can contribute leadership and management towards implementation of a New Art in Action initiative.
The potential benefits are practically incalculable, not least among them the restoring of civic pride to many towns and cities struggling to survive the decimation that has enriched some of Wall St. and impoverished almost all of Main St. The program would also provide logistical experience, not to mention usefulness and fair wages, to legions of artists who will never, under the current system, experience their real value to the community otherwise.
Artists must not be the organ grinder’s monkeys for the rich any longer. We must re-integrate in the lives of our fellow Americans and align with them for a commonwealth, rather than continue our participation and therefore support of a destructive arts economy shaped like a hybrid of the NBA and a Las Vegas casino. Currently, except for a few stars, the “house,” the Super Class, always wins. This must change, and a New Art in Action program can change it.
The alternatives are: an even more extreme consolidation of cultural wealth over the next several decades to the detriment of the nation and democracy; a slow march for the US towards artistic and cultural irrelevance; and the wasting of tens of thousands artists’ dreams and visions. This last is probably the worst loss to a free society.
America will – absent real change at depth - continue its trend towards a cultural diet consisting of the artistic equivalent of “fast food.” I refer to the consumer portable “art” industry, in which multinational corporations distribute cultural “McNuggets” for $1-20, for the majority poor. The rich, absent reformation, will continue to feast on weird luxury art that is best at mocking the lack of others. The few of aristocratic means will continue to horde the best of the best art for their own indulgences, only shared with the rest of us as noblesse oblige. This is not the America our Founders envisioned, nor the one Americans have fought to defend for centuries. Notes
