Starting Fresh: A Modest Proposal
Arlene Goldbard continues to drill down on the issues around Equity in Arts funding:
Let’s have a national El Sistema in all art forms, a new WPA, a teaching artists corps, an infusion of artists’ work in every social and educational system! What are your ideas?
But before the makeovers start flying, its really important to look at first principles. The current system is astoundingly inequitable in sharing resources with rich and poor, rural and urban, genders, races, practices, ethnicities, and so on: however you slice it. But that’s not all that’s wrong. The system fails because it is built on faulty wiring, with significant tangles where there should be flow. Below, I single out three big ones: the private-public toggle, the means-and-ends muddle, and the public-interest pickle.
The existing arts funding apparatus in the U.S. was set up to fill in gaps in private funding. In the mid-60s, private foundations commissioned major studies of what one (The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects, issued by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) called “the income gap”—the gap between what major institutions could achieve through box office and contributions and the budgets to which they aspired. These laid out the blueprint for the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965.