I’m a little scared to write this entry. You’ll see why in a minute. Hopefully by the end you’ll also see why I decided to do it anyway.

Welcome to the Recession, I’ll be your Impending Sense of Doom for the evening.

In a year of deep financial crisis the theater community—never far from financial crisis even in healthy years—has understandably begun to fret. They nervously remember the banker’s gift that funded half their season last year, they stare unhappily at their empty seats, they witness the food-stamp existence of their workers, and they’re scared¹. Then they look at Congress passing a bill to pump 790,000,000,000 ever-loving dollars² into the American economy, of which a measly 50 million went to the NEA after the Democrats managed to hold off the art-hating Republicans (causing the art world to hold their collective breath until the “win” could be confirmed), and they think to themselves (and I paraphrase here): Holy shit. We’re screwed.

When the going gets tough, the tough write public policy proposals.

It’s ever the duty of a citizen to participate in their republic, but it sure as hell doesn’t hurt to have 790 billion dollars on the table to encourage you.

For the theater community, that means we start talking very seriously about how much the arts are underfunded. And in a new age of The Change We Need, we get fired up to make it happen. Witness, for example: The New New Deal, Part 2 – A New WPA for Artists: How and Why, wherein Arlene Goldbard makes her case for funding culture on the tax-payer’s dime. And Arlene isn’t alone. Calls for government investment in the arts are popping up all over. Some with celebrity endorsements.

Here’s the problem: They all suck.

Artists Dig Themselves

Why do these proposals suck? Let’s look briefly at Goldbard’s proposal, “A New WPA for Artists: How and Why”. Almost everything you need to know about why that proposal sucks is in the title: A) it’s a proposal for the artists, and B) why comes after how.

Skim through the first half of this proposal and you’ll see things like:

“Including artists in the stimulus bill.”

“One percent for artists. [...] a petition calling on Congress to dedicate one percent of the stimulus package to support artists [...]

“Ballparking this at $50,000 per artist per year for stipend and associated costs, $125 million would support 2,500 artists.”

If you’re looking to sound tone-deaf and self-centered, hey, you win. If you’re looking to make a case for cultural investment in American society, please present this proposal to an American who may or may not know any actual artists, and may or may not have enough money to heat her home this winter, and let’s just see how that goes over.

The second half tries to answer “why” and claims to give “strong public policy arguments” for why the government should spend big bucks on art. The first one starts like this:

1. Things are changing in a way that elevates culture’s role. We are on the cusp between two cultural eras. The old system treats everything like so much material that can be weighed, measured, assigned a number and dismissed. The new system is grounded in…

At which point I stop reading because I want to shoot myself. She gives nine multi-paragraph public policy arguments, and they’re all about that good.

I’m Aiming for A Constructive Point Here, but Not Quite Yet

The fact that these proposals are self-centered and ineffective isn’t news. The theatrical community itself has started to point it out. Tony Adams said it nicely and Scott Walters puts it even better. They observe: don’t make this about the artists, make it about the people the arts will serve. The people who are, incidentally, funding the damn thing.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But I want to push even farther than that. I want us to seriously consider: should the arts get public funding at all?

A Digression: “No Wait, I Actually Love Theater I Promise”

I am a stakeholder in the arts. My livelihood is built upon them. I don’t eat without a healthy theater scene. And it’s more than that: Theater is the closest thing this atheist has to a church. (A truth which cannot be quickly summarized so I’ll leave it for another day.)

So Why Such a Hata?

I care about this because I want our culture to value depth and breadth in our arts. I want more people going to theater. And I think that appealing for public arts funding may not only be morally questionable, but may also be counterproductive.

Back to the Arguments At Hand

At the core of these appeals to fund art with taxes is, almost invariably, the simple belief that the arts deserve public funding. Nearly every conversation between two artists accepts this premise. Sometimes it is explicitly asserted, but often it’s just the accepted wisdom. It is a conviction of the deepest kind.

Why would artists commonly share this conviction? Because artists are, almost by definition, those who have directly experienced the power of art. Therefore they jump to the more expansive premise: “the arts are essential to a healthy human community, and therefore deserve public funding”.

The idea that the arts are essential can take different forms. The most common form I’ve seen is where arts are equated with education:

[...] if it’s public funding for the performance of the arts, or their exhibition, or education about them—if it’s public funding for the arts audience, who can disapprove? Except in the deepest reaches of the glibertarian right, we’re beyond debating whether education should be publicly funded, and making arts displays and performances available to the widest possible audience is simply public education on a grand scale.

— The Nonprofiteer: Second (and third) thoughts about public funding for the arts

I happen to agree about publicly funding education³, but the leap from “everyone loves funding education!” to “everyone will love funding Alvin Ailey tours!” is an awkward lunge from point A to point B. Theater and dance are not education. Theater and dance can bring important and unique elements to educational programs, and to be clear I consider truly educational arts programs to be a separate category in this whole discussion. But I simply do not buy that “art” is just another name for “education”. It’s not, and it does both these important human endeavors a disservice to smoosh them together into a muddy goo in the name of public funding.

After we discard the education argument, laying claim to “essential” gets difficult. The utilitarian arguments ring hollow⁴, and the spiritual ones are closer to the point but give us very loose ground on which to build public policy.

Perspective

Go find a nurse and ask her about her day. Or go read “Mountains Beyond Mountains“. Or go have a chat with a social worker advising single mothers, or a middle school teacher trying to teach students who can’t read. Then come tell me our new president should spend a million dollars on dance tours instead of any of those other things. That’s not just a tough argument to make, it’s a ridiculous argument. But we in the arts community not only make that argument, we feel we’re being ignobly and ignorantly snubbed when a teacher or a police officer or a nurse tells us to stuff it.

I spend my days wondering how people I know and work with in the theatre are surprised that the rest of America doesn’t care about them.

— A close friend who is completing an MFA/MBA in theater management at the Yale School of Drama and Yale School of Management

Theater is not central to our culture. I wish it was, but it’s not. The relationship theater forges with society must be aware of that fact. With the exception of a few rebellious voices, the conversation in the theater community today is dangerously out of touch. Our schools peddle MFA degrees without acknowledging their true worth. Our artists lose touch with the rest of the world and instead of re-investing in a relationship with a community they want to serve, they spoil for fights they can’t win on the merits of poor arguments. And in the process, they leave the rest of the world with a bitter taste of their own self-importance.

It’s Worth Doing This The Right Way

I’m not stupid. I know I’m taking a risk in saying these things. We’re at a vulnerable moment. Not all of our institutions will make it through the fire. We’ve watched multiple theaters reach the brink of insolvency in the last few weeks. For me to argue against the funds that could save them is, to put it mildly, not in my self interest. But I’m doing it out of the fervent belief that theater and the arts are important and are worth fighting for, and I’m more scared that if we do it like boneheads we’ll be worse off than we were before.

So what’s the right way?

Jeez, I make no claims about being that smart. But I’ll take a stab, since I promised to be constructive.

The first step is to spend some time getting away from the bubble. To hear how our own voices sound to the rest of the world, and to make an honest assessment of our current role in the cultural conversation. You’ll flop if you don’t understand your audience, right?

The next step is to be adults, and engage in the broader conversation about the breadth of our society, not just our myopic piece of it. When we do that, we start to notice interesting things:

If [Obama's] health-care plan gets enacted in anything like its current form, it’ll be the government’s greatest gift to culture in a generation.

— Newsweek: Obama and the Arts

“If Obama could create a program for universal health care—the effect on artists of that single change in their lives would release more creativity than any increase in NEA funding could ever do.”

— Scott Walters @ Theatre Ideas

Huh. There’s an idea already. Instead of fighting about NEA funding, why aren’t we all fighting even harder about health care? Yes, it’s a big problem, but it’s a big problem that matters to all of us. Imagine: artists might suddenly find themselves on the same team as the people they were previously battling. And the results of winning the new fight could be—probably would be—more important than the old fight.

What else can we find if we’re willing to deconstruct our assumptions? I don’t know. That’s what we need to figure out as a community. That’s what we desperately need to not avoid talking about. Will some of us get burned in this process? Yes. It’s already happening, and we can’t stop it. It sucks. We all know it sucks. But our system is feeble. It relies on trucking in New York talent, scoffs at any real connection with local communities, and churns out a bunch of moderately entertaining shows about which audiences need not feel much investment. We’ve set it up this way and we can’t prop it up indefinitely with old ideas. Take a cue from our new president: a moment like this is a time to think big, not small. A moment like this is a time for a huge investment for our long-term health. It’s time to build a new vision, and to beat a new path.

[1] I’ve met nationally known, award-winning, full-time playwrights who live their life without health insurance. And that was long before the current recession.

[2] That’s B7EFAB5C00 dollars in hexadecimal, in case you were wondering. Maybe the government should start reporting deficits in hex; it looks smaller that way.

[3] I also happen to have friends I respect who are deeply opposed to publicly funded education and can make an articulate argument against it. I strongly disagree with them, but I don’t dismiss them out of hand.

[4] As the great Clive James said: “The utilitarian view doesn’t work.”