Utterly Clueless: Cultural Policy San Francisco Style

The city creates a special initiative to respond to residents’ deep desire for cultural equity, one small step toward equalizing access to resources. It is housed at the Arts Commission, along with many other programs and initiatives. This initiative supports artists and groups—mostly grounded in communities of color or other marginalized categories—who have not been able to obtain meaningful resources from mainstream sources. As the story unfolds, the host organism falls into disarray, rotting from the head. Supposedly objective (i.e., astoundingly under-informed and therefore unprepared) auditors are summoned to diagnose and recommend, but they are given a brief that covers only a few questions. Their recommendations are mostlly administrative and general, but they single out the special initiative for significant cuts.

I’m guessing the embedded racism of this story is invisible to the auditors, the tone of whose report suggests a touchingly naive belief in the objective, uninflected, universal applicability of its management philosophy and regulatory approach. No one has offered a better critique of the presumed neutrality of regulators than Anatole France:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

But the SFAC’s weak cultural competency is not invisible to countless artists in the San Francisco community, who are mobilizing to call attention to the audit and overturn its most damaging recommendations. Community meetings are scheduled, actions are being planned, and—if the circumstances that triggered it weren’t so deeply disappointing—I’d be happy to say a long-deferred public dialogue on essential questions of cultural policy is beginning to take shape.