Arts Funding

With their City Hall in the throes of fiscal crisis, Pittsburgh arts and culture patrons nonetheless enjoyed a rare treat over the first 10 days in October: free admission to many museums, musical and dance performances, and family activities. Here in Philadelphia, the Kimmel Center and other arts venues and museums may have been hopping - but it was mostly pay-as-you-go. Was Pittsburgh spending its last few bucks on feel-good freebies? Hardly. The city - actually, Allegheny County as a whole - was celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Allegheny Regional Asset District.

If Noel Coward lived today, as bohemians simultaneously face HIV and cuts in arts funding, he wouldn't write Design for Living. He would write Alive and Kicking, a defiantly witty and wisecracking romantic comedy about a heartstoppingly gorgeous dancer, who is HIV-positive, and his unexpected affair with a paunchy social worker. Although the film's subtitle could be My Insecurity is Bigger Than Yours, it's awfully, wonderfully funny. Tonio (Jason Flemyng) is the premier danseur with London's fictional Ballet Luna, a position he has achieved by default as the troupe's Nureyev is dying of AIDS.

Sixty-three arts organizations across the area are in the running for some cold hard cash from the Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia, courtesy of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The arts challenge will eventually dole out $9 million over three years. These arts organizations - which range from behemoths such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to individuals with big ideas, like sculptor Darla Jackson - were chosen from a field of 1,752 applicants. Applicants had to submit their ideas in 150 words or less.

At an eagerly awaited ceremony here on July 28, about 200 New Jersey theater companies, dance troupes and museums will learn whether they get a grant from the state Council on the Arts - say, $50,000 for stage lights, or maybe $75,000 to hire administrative staff. But 16 groups already have state funds without the council's rigorous application and peer review process - courtesy of their state legislators. The extra money, almost none of which was distributed in South Jersey, has sparked some resentment in creative fields in which cash is hard to come by. It has some members of the arts community muttering darkly that, of all people, politicians should not be evaluating which art programs are worthwhile causes.

After three years of decline and stagnation, funding for state arts agencies across the country increased this year. In its 1994 financial survey, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, a Washington-based service organization, reported that states appropriated $247.6 million for the arts in fiscal 1994, an increase of 16 percent from $213.4 million the previous year. In Pennsylvania, the state Council on the Arts received $9.7 million in 1994, a 6.2 percent increase over 1993.

A state Senate committee decided yesterday that the New Jersey State Council on the Arts has not provided a quarter of its funding to South Jersey arts groups as the legislature intended. The nonbinding resolution, which the Senate Legislative Oversight Committee passed with a 4-0 vote, urged the council to reevaluate all grant applications submitted for fiscal 2002, which starts July 1. "We want the budget and the arts council to be reflective of a 25 percent funding support for the eight southern New Jersey counties regarding the arts," said Sen. John Matheussen (R., Gloucester)

Already stumping for hundreds of millions of dollars to raise new buildings, bolster endowments and rejuvenate the visitor experience, cultural leaders are stunned by the revelation that the Philadelphia Museum of Art intends to raise $500 million for the largest arts project in the city's history. "Wow," said Peter B. Lane, president of the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, of the sheer size of the Art Museum's goal. "I haven't heard a number any larger in this town. " "Yikes," said Janice C. Price, president of the Kimmel Center, which is trying to raise $90 million for endowment, debt reduction, or a combination of both.

Countering the governor's proposal to remove all state funding for the arts, a coalition of groups is asking New Jersey to combine tourism, arts and history under a single agency and create a permanent tax to fund them. The "tourism tax" would add to the 6 percent sales tax a 3 percent levy on hotel and motel rooms and a 2 percent levy on restaurant meals, entertainment and amusements. The groups expect the new tax would raise $250 million in the first year, of which $60 million would be returned to municipalities.

Taking a leaf from the book of grassroots conservative organizations and talk-show celebrities, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance has announced a voter registration drive to boost the number of arts supporters at the polls. "The best place to begin advocating for the arts is in the voting booth," Cathryn Coate, alliance director, told a small crowd in front of the Academy of Music yesterday morning. "It's timely for the spring primary for local elections and the next November's general election.

Whether the fresh faces in Congress know much about art is anybody's guess, but they've demonstrated clearly what they don't like: federal funding for the arts. Five dozen of the House's newer, more conservative members led a brief mutiny last week and forced GOP leaders to agree to wipe out arts funding in just two years. That's a year earlier than House leaders planned, and five years ahead of the schedule in the Senate, where arts funding has yet to be approved. It won't be a picnic in the meantime, either.

Margie Salvante is executive director of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia The headwinds of a bad economy blow hard and no more so than when it comes to the arts, which even in the best of times maintain a tenuous grip on reliable funding. Thankfully, Gov. Corbett has called for arts funding to stay level in his proposed budget for next year. Regrettably, however, the Republican-controlled legislature seeks to cut funding for the arts 70 percent. There is no better example than the vibrant theater scene in the Philadelphia area to illustrate why this funding is so crucially important to our region as both an economic driver and as a quality-of-life enhancement.

ALTHOUGH IT is great to see the Daily News endorse the work of a living Philadelphia artist, the photographer Zoe Strauss, the most interesting part of this article is that the Daily News shares the concerns regarding the Mural Arts Program put forth a decade ago by the Heretical Society, which was an independent artists' organization that provided a critique of the culture industry in Philadelphia, and which disbanded in 2001. The final statement of the Daily News editorial is very similar to the last line of the Heretical Society tract, the essay "No More Ugly Murals.

The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, whose 2012 program budget was cut 70 percent by the State House of Representatives, seems to have dodged a bullet: The Senate restored almost all the funding in its amended budget. As the House prepared to vote on the amended budget Wednesday, Jenny L. Hershour, managing director of the advocacy group Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania, said: "A lot of arts advocates made a lot of telephone calls and sent a lot of e-mails on behalf of arts funding.

Suzanne Cloud is executive director of Jazz Bridge When the Pennsylvania state House passed the penny-wise, pound-foolish House Bill 1485, I wasn't too surprised, but it didn't keep me from being existentially floored by the stupidity of the effort. Now the budget bill goes to the Senate, and all of us have to wince as they decide if 70 percent of arts funding goes into the big wood chipper of political expediency this month. But I think a small snapshot of what the loss of this funding would mean might tell a compelling story that the legislators would do well to hear.

If the crepes, mimes, and erection of a presumably expensive and possibly ephemeral 81-foot homage to the Eiffel Tower made you doubt that a serious artistic thread could be discerned in the Kimmel Center's Francophilia festival, reassurance could be found Saturday morning at the Perelman - in a children's concert. For the last performance of its season, Astral Artists took on the French theme - and some Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts funding - to produce three works.

Sixty-three arts organizations across the area are in the running for some cold hard cash from the Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia, courtesy of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The arts challenge will eventually dole out $9 million over three years. These arts organizations - which range from behemoths such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to individuals with big ideas, like sculptor Darla Jackson - were chosen from a field of 1,752 applicants. Applicants had to submit their ideas in 150 words or less.

Barbara Allen will receive $50,000 as one of 10 winners of the Purpose Prize, given to Americans over 60 who have reinvented themselves, tackling social problems in this latter stage of life. As founder of Fresh Artists, Allen, 62, of Lafayette Hill, in just two years has put more than 400 pieces of bold, lush, gorgeous "refrigerator art" from Philadelphia schoolchildren into corporate boardrooms and surprising spaces around the region and nation. She's used donations from those corporations to purchase $100,000 in art supplies for children in the city's neediest public schools.

When Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, breezed through town early this month ("to learn," as an endowment press official put it), he heard a great deal about "siloing. " The arts can't "be siloed," said Jane Golden, head of the city's Mural Arts Program. It's important "to eliminate all the silos" that constrain thinking about arts funding, said Jeremy Nowak, head of the Reinvestment Fund, the nonprofit development organization that was one of Landesman's hosts.

LEAVE IT to the geniuses of Pennsylvania Legislature to find yet a new way to rob Peter to pay Paul and pretend it's responsible lawmaking. In this case, "Peter" is education and "Paul" is . . . education. And, the robbery is accompanied by an assault on the nonprofit model for supporting arts and culture. To raise $100 million for the budget - and also to create a fund for the arts - the Legislature plans to impose a 6 percent sales tax on tickets to arts and cultural events (8 percent in the city.

Individual contributions had already dropped because of the nation's economic crisis. And once-hefty grants from foundations and corporations had fallen off as well. Adding to the storm of financial problems, New Jersey's arts, history, and tourism industries now face a state funding reduction of up to 25 percent in the budget proposed by Gov. Corzine this month. Arts officials say the decrease - about $9 million, if approved by lawmakers - might close some organizations and cut operations at others.