Last night attended a meeting concerning the hiring of a new director for the central funding agency for arts in our community. They’re out to find some person with superior leadership ability who is also a strategic-planning, fund-raising guru full of passion for the arts. That’s not the hard part.
What’s the mission -- we don’t know. Do we want a teacup tipper capable of casting coils of flattery and guilt around the local business community and other well-heeled ‘givers’ thereby raking in the cash, or should it be someone who knows and cares about art and artists? Could the same person do both? Actually could they please be able to do everything because we don’t know what we want.
Here’s the bureaucratic dilemma -- do we use public money to midwife self-sustaining art commerce for the economic and spiritual benefit of the community, or do we perpetuate our charity-based institutions, most of all, us? Whining for the city, the state, the federal largesse to look our way seems insensitive, just does, what with conditions on the street. Soliciting businessmen and their accountants for a little chunk of write-off in exchange for their name on a plaque isn’t going to earn their respect. This approach will however give us the power to direct which favorites put on performances, what artists succeed -- an off-the-shelf small town byzantine court of cronyism. This really isn’t an option anymore.
The world changes and the charity model is rapidly becoming obsolete. Time to contribute to the future or grind on in futility and dwindling support -- don’t we complain? Broaden the audience or get out of the way. Actively facilitate community awareness and appreciation of art instead of engineering artistic dependency by dribbling out funds -- not enough to live on, just enough to keep hope alive. This new director should be working to make his or her job less important, the institution’s influence less, and instead improve the climate for ticket sales and direct purchases for visual artists by becoming a bridge between an increasingly interested community and its creative class.
1 comment:
Another spot on entry. What you said about "art for common folk" ties very closely to this. It used to be up to the end of World War II that the connection between art and "common people" was very close and that the common people had a visual fluency that they could go to a gallery or any place art was being shown and connect with the art and understand it. After World War II, periodicals like Art News got very interested in driving a cultural wedge between art, artists and the people who had been interested in them up to that point and succeeded all too well. The poison that resulted from this is still very much intact in places like Lexington. A director who understands this and finds a way to bring an antidote that as you say "improves the climate for ticket sales and direct purchases for visual artists" will achieve something pretty amazing. Lexington's track record for hiring such directors does not give me much hope. The question that the city should be asking itself is what is Paducah doing right that Lexington is doing wrong? I'm guessing that one of those things is that it doesn't create a cutthroat culture in its arts community in the way it doles out increasingly tiny portions of money to those seeking it.
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