At an Allied Arts Beer and Culture Night last week, Michael Killoren faced the unenviable task of justifying changes to the 30-year-old Seattle Arts Commission (SAC) to a room filled mostly with artists who have benefited from it as it was.
Killoren, the SAC's recently appointed executive director, is by all accounts intelligent and experienced, and cuts a sharp figure in his glamour-geek glasses and long sideburns, but acquitted himself dismally, unable or unwilling to answer point-blank questions about how the SAC would and wouldn't change under the mayor's new proposed structure. At times he seemed muddled, at times dazed. Again and again he fell back on abstractions--"It's in the process," he said, or "There are opportunities there"--which made him seem slippery and evasive. The room was stifling, with an air of unpleasantly heightened emotion.
Many of the bureaucratic changes outlined in the mayor's proposed budget for 2003-2004 (and currently under debate at the city council) don't seem unduly controversial; in fact they seem mostly organizational, born of the necessity of creating efficiencies in a time of $60 million budget shortfalls. The arts commission would become the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, and move into the executive department. It would include, in addition to the 15-person commission and current programs (public art, civic partnerships, and community arts development and outreach), the city's Film and Video Office (currently housed in the Office of Economic Development) and the new Music and Youth Commission.
But there's a purely rhetorical ring to all this. When pressed for reasons why the commission should move into the executive department, Killoren answered, "To give it a high profile," which, when you think about it, doesn't really mean anything (which may have been why it seemed more sinister than it was). Presumably the mayor could raise a department's profile simply by calling attention to it, and lavishing it with attention and money.
There's more to it than bureaucracy, however. There's a 25 percent cut in the budget, including the suspension of admissions tax proceeds for the biennium (this percentage varies depending on who you ask; city council member Nick Licata estimates it at 25 percent, and is currently trying to reinstate about $83,000 per year). There are jobs being abrogated and reinvented and reclassified, so that people holding those jobs have to reapply for them. There are rumblings that power is being taken from the commission and given to the staff (not unlike the kinds of tensions that arise in most nonprofit organizations).
Killoren didn't get very far before people in the audience began shouting out objections. Why mix art and commerce, as with the addition of the film office? What about the esteemed, well-respected people (such as Barbara Goldstein, the program manager for public art) who stood to lose their jobs? How did the new entity propose to insulate itself from politics? What would happen to the trust between the artists and the commission?
The mayor's proposal uncovers a nest of conflicting interests. The film office doesn't want to dilute its efficacy by adding promotion to its other duties; the mayor's office doesn't see any reason why the resources and talents of that department shouldn't be put to better use. Artists don't want to see business and economic development sideline the support of public art; Killoren thinks that cultural tourism could be the key to creating more money for art (what he likes to call "growing the pie"). The traditional-music community worries that popular music will overtake everything; the popular-music community would just like any representation at all. Even the bureaucratic reorganization is seen--and this I found out in subsequent conversations, from people who did not wish to speak on the record--as attempts by the mayor to put underqualified (presumably loyal) lackeys into important staff positions. And to all this there was the undertow of betrayal: The arts community had not been consulted about these changes, there had been no dialogue, the trust relationship had not been maintained.
To one observing and trying to make sense of it all, the furor seemed somehow to miss the point, although the point remained unclear. The level-headed Jim Kelly, from the King County Office of Cultural Resources, seemed to be getting closer when he suggested to the overheated room that perhaps all this reorganization was distracting us (and perhaps deliberately) from the fact that the department, in whatever form, was taking among the largest budget cuts of any in the city (according to Licata's office, most departments' cuts are between four and 14%). Writer John Boylan urged the crowd to remember that to take money for art from the government was to make a deal with the devil. And Dave Meinert, a local music promoter who sat on the board of JAMPAC, wondered why this arts community didn't organize itself better, and make itself into a political force that swayed elections and determined policy.
And Meinert was right. Although Killoren was made very uncomfortable for a couple of hours, he was embarrassed in front of a group of people with almost no remaining political clout--many of those who got the SAC instituted in the first place. The unspoken example, of course, that came to mind when Meinert mentioned political power was the Vera Project, which successfully lobbied the mayor, city council, and arts commission, and got itself $75,000 last year to build an all-ages dance club. (And in being so reminded, caused me to wonder where everyone under 40 was; those interested in preserving the SAC as it was seemed to be of a single generation.) And while artists managed, through lobbying for an increase in the percent-for-art, to add the admissions tax to the SAC's revenue, they have been unable to do much more, since then, than retain infinitesimal public funding for mostly uninteresting art.
After all, this was government we were dealing with--why is trust an issue? And perhaps this is at the root of things, that the SAC is seen as changing from an independent voice to one that is a faint echo of the mayor's, with the result that the department becomes a field for what one participant called "political football." But government-sponsored art is not the same thing as art; it rarely comes without strings attached. It hasn't been "insulated from politics," at least since the culture wars of the '90s, if not before. This is not the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s, which funded unrestricted creativity and possible failure; art is a product, and the government wants an acceptable deliverable.
It seems to me that what was going unsaid was that artists feared film and music would marginalize the less-popular arts in a department that constitutes their sole foothold in the government. Which is a fine and valid concern. So why doesn't the arts community depend less on trust relationships and more on political organization? Supporters of the film office have made themselves heard, and it will likely stay where it is in the Office of Economic Development. Meinert--increasingly the only person in town talking about arts funding who makes any sense these days--speculated that artists fritter away their focus on organizational details, instead of concentrating on the big issues: housing, funding, and health insurance. Until such time as they demand straight talk and answers, Seattle artists will continue to receive, at the hands of government, obfuscation, rationalization, and leftovers.
