Art isn’t easy

As this year’s Arts Week celebrations hit their stride here in Bloomington, the national state of the arts is not worth celebrating.

New York City’s Alliance for the Arts released a report last month on the effect of the economic downturn on the city’s arts establishments. The verdict: NYC’s artists are hurting – and badly.

The Alliance sent questionnaires to 700 arts organizations, and the resulting data comprises the information from the 100 groups that responded. The findings show that as a result of the recession, 80 percent of New York City’s arts groups are reducing their budgets.

In addition, 78 percent of the groups that responded said that they have already reduced their budgets or plan to do so. Fifty percent plan to lay off employees, and 45 percent plan to cancel or postpone programs within the next year.

The alliance reported that in 2005, New York’s cultural organizations produced 40,000 jobs and generated $2.2 billion in wages. The expected cuts will undoubtedly have a negative effect on New York’s economy.

The new stimulus bill promises some relief, but it didn’t come without a fight. The package’s $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts was strongly opposed by Congressional Republicans – especially Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia.

Kingston suggested that arts aid should be passed over for programs that create more jobs.

Yet Labor Department Statistics show that the unemployment rate in some sectors of the arts is staggeringly higher than the national 6 percent average. Forty-six percent of actors and 19 percent of dancers are unemployed. The stimulus would most certainly help to get these people back to work.

But there is a larger question here: What exactly is the role of arts in our society? Are the arts some leisure to be enjoyed in good times and cut out with the waste when times are bad?

The arts are more than some kind of frivolous expense; they are the bread and butter of our national heritage. To jettison our support of the arts at the first signs of economic woes would be to fail to invest in our cultural future.

In 1935 Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed that the newly created Works Progress Administration include four arts projects. Within six months 40,000 people total were employed in the music, theater, writing and arts project. Throughout the project’s duration, 122 orchestras gave performances to 150 million people, and approximately 1 million works of art were distributed to public buildings across the country. Among the young employees were Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock.

Today’s great artists have grown out of the tradition of the artists from the WPA.

American support of the Arts has encouraged artists like Sunday’s Arts Week speaker Maya Angelou, a  2000 winner of the NEA’s National Medal of the arts. If we want to be able to celebrate arts for years to come, we must continue to support the arts through organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts – not only because it will create jobs, but because it is an investment in our national heritage.