Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.

If you google Dubois’ name and the first three words, you’ll find more than three million hits. The quotation has been the epigram for books and reports, the Urtext for conferences and dialogues, and an all-around handy reference for almost any rumination on the importance of art. It is always attributed to Dubois, but without citing any specific reference.

The thing is, as near as I can tell, the words do not belong to Dubois. (If I’m wrong, write me, please, and I’ll print a retraction.) My first doubts had to do with the lack of a cited source. My second doubts turned on the voice: Dubois’ was an elegant and formal cadence, and this quotation sounds so casual and contemporary.

All hail the internet, because it didn’t take more a few key strokes to confirm my doubts. The oldest in the vast list of links was a New York Times piece from 1996 on the effect of Henry Louis Gates’ leadership on the evolution of Black Studies. Scroll down about halfway, and you’ll find scholar-activist Cornel West paraphrasing Dubois to make a point:

‘But [Oprah]‘s got relatives and friends broke as the 10 Commandments,’ he said. ‘Just focusing on Oprah won’t show us how the race problem can be solved. It’s more complex than that. Du Bois said begin with art, because art tries to take us outside of ourselves. It’s a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and a context so conversation can flow back and forth, and we can be influenced by each other.’

Someone, somewhere, decided that was a direct quote, and so it has become, as least as far as the World Wide Web has any say in the matter. It’s not a hard thing to understand.

First, we love to cite authorities in support of our own beliefs, borrowing credibility from those whose credentials confer a permanent benefit of the doubt. We especially love it when our own beliefs are insurgent or our own credibility is under attack, which fits advocates of art’s public purpose to a T. When I first began writing about these subjects, my essays were compendia of quotations, a way of mounting the troops in defense of my own ideas. When I finally realized that the universe of knowledge is vast enough to contain not only every possible agreement but every possible dismissal, I recognized that saying Albert Einstein or W.E.B. Dubois or Mickey Mantle agrees with me isn’t much of an argument. I still love a felicitous phrase, and collect quotations in aid of elegance (rather than proof). But other people’s wisdom has become a condiment for my writing, rather than the main course.

Second, in this case, the “quotation” expresses a truth experienced firsthand by those who have cited it, a profound understanding that in the crucible of art, our self-understanding and connection to others are forged, that in the presence of beauty and meaning, we can open to ourselves and others. My own certainty of this truth is unshakeable, grounded in a cellular knowledge of art’s role in my own life and in so many others I have observed.

It’s true whether W.E.B. Dubois said it or not.

My friend’s query got me curious, though. I am by no means familiar with every word that Dubois wrote, but I am guessing that this, from his extremely interesting 1926 talk “Criteria of Negro Art” (which opens with the great scholar’s justification for talking about art at all at an NAACP annual conference), is the grain of sand that Cornel West used to create the pearl of wisdom that now festoons the internet under Dubois’ name:

Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of Beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods that men have used before. And what have been the tools of the artist in times gone by? First of all, he has used the Truth — not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have used Goodness — goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor and right — not for sake of an ethical sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.

The apostle of Beauty thus becomes the apostle of Truth and Right not by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the Truth or recognize an ideal of Justice.

Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.

What else to listen to today? The late, great, Etta James, who transmuted suffering to sweetness with the utmost grace. In honor of the day, this version of “A Sunday Kind of Love” from 1961.

But for me, a birthday is always an occasion. Every year has a distinct character and completeness that begs to be understood: I want to hang it on the wall, gaze for a while, put a frame around it. So when each birthday arrives, I ask myself what I have learned from the year just past. Today, two life-lessons stand out. Both are simultaneously personal and political.

I am deeply impressed by the lengths some people will go to avoid disappointment and vulnerability. This past year, I’ve noticed the way that has become a prime directive for quite a few people. I do not know whether it is has always been so: perhaps, at a certain age, it is usual to subside into guardedness—bitten too many times to be less than perpetually shy? But I don’t think so. I think it is one of the tendencies these times bring out.

All year long, I have been drawn repeatedly into a particular conversation, often in the process of getting acquainted with a new person. Some are with people have heard me speak or read a piece of my writing; some with men I’ve met in online dating world. Either way, the other person says, “You’re an optimist, aren’t you? How is that even possible when the human race is so determined to destroy itself?”

I explain that actually, I’m not an optimist. It’s true that often, I can see possibility, and almost always, the potential for good, for healing, for beauty, for meaning. But I can also see the many callous, corrupt, exploitive, and cruel actions that stain this world. I make no predictions as to which side will prevail. I simply notice that at this moment, life goes on. The thick pink-gold light at sunset turns San Francisco Bay’s cold water to wine. Birds careen overhead, drunk on light. People walk by: a father reaches low for the hand of his small son, who waddles along on legs just learning; next comes the couple who can’t keep their hands off each other, promenading, entwined, through the delirious sweetness of the hour.

“I’m just keeping my eyes open,” I say.

“No,” says the other person, “you’re a cockeyed optimist for sure. Our fate is obvious, because we’re so stupid. We knowingly poison our own air and water. It’s too late now. There’s no fixing it. We can only stand and watch as it all goes to hell.”

“You may be right,” I say, “but we can’t know for certain unless or until it happens.” I say that not knowing is the only intellectually defensible position. I explain that I feel much better when I admit it, that unknowing creates space for me to imagine and move toward alternative futures.

I ask this: “In the end, you may turn out to be right, but which life do you want to live till then? Watching the curtain fall? Or writing a new play?”

All year long, I’ve emerged from these conversations not fully understanding why it’s so important to these individuals to be right in predicting doom, as opposed to, say, warning and exhorting people toward the actions that could avert or forestall it. Why do they want so much to talk me out of pitching my tent on the ground of unknowing? Why can’t they tolerate unknowing as a stance? Why must it be resolved into some certainty, whether starry-eyed optimism or its opposite?

I’ve begun to see that it’s a heart question, one that pertains equally to the individual human heart and the heart of the world. These people are willing to endure enormous preemptive suffering to avoid feeling the vulnerability and disappointment of opening one’s heart to possibility that never materializes. On the personal plane, it keeps their hearts closed both to the depth of love and to the pain of its loss; on the political plane, it keeps them stuck as bystanders, rather than risking the fray. And we all lose by it. As Dr. King said, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

It’s not that I don’t understand. Of course I do. I’m just as afraid of getting hurt as anyone else. At times, I’ve shaped my life to avoid pain. It may have taken me a long time to recognize that being defended against vulnerability can dull the pain, but it also dulls the pleasure. But not for a while, and not any more.

Happy birthday lesson number one, then: whatever this year brings, however risky it feels to say so, I’m open to it.

The second lesson has impressed me deeply too: it’s been a big year for noticing the degree to which so many people’s self-worth feels contingent. Online dating has been an amazing education in this respect, especially because the ambient gender politics throw it into high relief. When I meet someone online who wishes to get acquainted (and that possibility appeals to me too), my first step is to suggest a few moments clicking around my website, to learn a little more about who I am—watching some of a video, or dipping into an essay or blog yields a much fuller picture than a dating profile. That can also disclose glaring incompatibilities, sparing us both a needless trip to the coffee shop, so it’s a good filtering device.

That starts some interesting conversations (and sometimes, a sharing of work in return). But in some men, it triggers a powerful need to measure themselves and find themselves lacking. Those men sometimes write back to say they are impressed, and even to open a conversation about political or other ideas (see previous life-lesson), but also to declare that they could never keep up with someone like me. Usually, they say that I would get bored. (That’s the gender politics part, I think: wouldn’t women usually be more drawn to a man if he seemed dynamic or accomplished?)

No doubt they’re right. Boredom is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: the person who feels less than will be dogged by it. He will freeze if he feels challenged to show up, and that will make it worse. The way out is either to dive in headlong, confronting the inner voice that makes you seem small to yourself, and possibly releasing its grip; or to keep your distance, avoiding people and situations that awaken self-doubt, and spiraling into a smaller orbit, even into isolation.

My inherited reactivity can be triggered by this. As an energetic little girl, full of desire, imagination, and opinions, I was often told I was too much: slow down, say less, keep your place. Learning to live has taught me to show up fully, as big as I am. If someone compares me to himself and decides I’m too much, let that be his truth, not mine.

It’s not always easy. The old voices whisper sometimes, as when a birthday opens a crack in time, when I wonder whether the years to come will show me the fulfillment of desire. In the meantime, I try to practice what a wise friend counseled, to have compassion for the one who is driven to compare himself to others, unable to take pleasure in what is. The personal is political, my generation learned, and this seems as true for the many as for the one. As Dr. King said, “As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.”

Happy birthday lesson number two, then: the desire and commitment to show up as big as I am, to help those around me to do the same, and to see those who reject this choice with compassion, rather than giving them the power to shrink my own spirit.

Big birthday blessings, friends, for a year of willing to risk being who we are, hearts wide open. And happy birthday, Dr. King, the author of these and so many other beautiful words:

This is where we are. Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values.

Address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 16 August 1967

Every year, I unearth the questions that are arising for me, the ones that will shape my take on life. Some change, some endure. This year, a new question swam to the surface of my awareness: Where do I belong? For someone who has lived such a peripatetic life, to be asking this seems momentous, although in truth, I don’t know if the answer will be a person, a place, a tribe. But somehow I am glad to be asking the question, and very ready to say yes if life hands me an answer. Will I be met? I am so grateful for the people in my life who allow me to answer yes, and still, I want more. Will I be understood?—that one is eternal for me, and the way Nina Simone asked it—big as life and proud of it—always knocks me off my feet. “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

I have plenty of wishes for myself, chiefly true love and enough money to buy a few months of my own time to finish my new book, which is demanding to be born, and which I know can have real impact.

But like so many people, my wish for our nation Occupies a lot of mental disk space.

I am so grateful to have witnessed the uprising of conscience and refusal to submit to illegitimate demands (whether from public- or private-sector tyrants) that has swept the planet since the Arab Spring commenced, nearly a year ago. And so challenged to find a way that such formidable energies can now be directed into constructing a new reality of justice tempered by love. Even if all that Occupy were to accomplish was to open a space of public discourse about things that had so often been deemed taboo before—the polarization of wealth, the abuse of corporate power, the imprisonment of democracy in a cage of gold—that would be enough.

But still, I want more.

This week, I spoke at length with a friend in publishing, who is contemplating a series of practical books on topics like consensus decision-making, thinking they may be of use to the emergent movement. This is one of the topics I know quite a bit about. My 2004 essay, “Don’t Do It: Organizational Suicide Prevention for Progressives” focuses on key issues that are still relevant, I think. For example:

[O]ften, progressives are so suspicious of structures of constituted authority that they have been willing to forego continuity and growth to inoculate themselves against the charge of power-mongering. These attitudes are not altogether unfamiliar to a 60s-era activist like myself, but I find their persistence dismaying. To be fair, I suppose it could be said that the escalation of such suspicion in the last four decades has been proportionate to growth in the abuse of power and authority in both government and commerce. But bending over backwards to avoid the sins of power, progressives tumble to the ground. Those without a positive image of power wielded in the service of freedom and justice are certain never to have any real-world power with which to be tempted.

How can we embody positive power? What can we rally around? As I wrote in the previous essay of this series, Annals of the Culture of Politics:

I’m convinced that one policy change can be the uniquely powerful lever to unleash the cascade of needed changes: getting private money completely out of the public electoral process, depriving entrenched interests of their primary instrument of public-sector control, the ability to dominate elections and legislative processes with money.

But I am told by a friend who works with progressive political donors and campaigns that this idea is deemed too abstract—too much about process rather than outcomes—to gain traction with a movement grounded in direct action.

I would really like that to be wrong, and so would Michael Moore, whose entire ten-point program for Occupy is well worth consdering. (It was rejected by the group charged with a “vision statement,” evidently on the grounds noted, above, a kneejerk refusal to be influenced, for fear of co-optation).

Moore is not my guru, but he’s hit it on the head lately, and I join him wholeheartedly in the conviction that getting private money out of the electoral process is the linchpin for any meaningful reform of our political system or economy.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ted Deutch have created companion amendments to the U.S. Constitution with key steps to help bring this about. (I’d like to see total public financing, which would be even more of a change, but this would help a great deal.)

No matter how corrupt the system, we the people still have constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, and access to a full array of tools to bring about democratic change. My New Year’s wish is for this change—divorcing money from politics—which can make possible a resurgent American democracy that brings the spirt of the streets into the statehouse. I don’t know with certainty that people will succeed in resurrecting true democracy if corporate wealth’s enormous thumb is removed from the scale; but without that change, I am deeply skeptical.

Happy New Year, everyone! May we all have reason to rejoice in the coming year. And just to be sure we start out as we mean to go on, eye candy!

Look in the mirror on this last day of the year. Gaze into your own eyes:

and all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes

Peter Gabriel’s great song, “In Your Eyes,” a delicious duet with Youssou N’Dour.

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For instance, I just added another paragraph to the list of qualities I am seeking in a man:

A disinclination toward doom. On the future of humanity, I’m an agnostic. I’m aware of the depth of our environmental and social challenges; in fact, a lot of my work concerns them. But I don’t have much tolerance for the certainty that our collective story will end badly. Many men I’ve met are continually collecting evidence of humanity’s folly: if that’s what you look for, you’ll find it everywhere, of course. But there’s also abundant evidence of our kindness and capacity to heal the damage we’ve done. I’m not a Pollyanna (or even an optimist). I just want to stay open to possibility, and find it difficult to sustain a close relationship with someone who doesn’t. Can’t we agree that none of us knows how the future will unfold? To me, that’s the only sustainable position.

What prompted this addition was a series of encounters with interesting, attractive men, each following an uncannily similar script. A man and a woman of a certain age are walking along the Pacific coast a little before sunset on a cool, sunny day:

And so on.

This can continue as long as HE and SHE enjoy playing ping-pong (i.e., when I’m the SHE, not very long).

I haven’t the slightest interest in talking anyone into a stance of optimism, which seems just as unfounded as the opposite. What I see is the vast potential of the human project, the moral grandeur of which we are capable, our capacity to make beauty and meaning. That’s not news; I’ve been aware of that feature of my own philosophical landscape for a long time. But just lately, I’ve realized I could never make a life with someone for whom the verdict is foreordained. Just facing that every day would burden my spirit and eventually, tip me away from the equanimity—and the dynamism, the perseverance, the creativity—that comes from knowing that the future is beyond our ability to foretell.

A blessing for us all as the new year approaches, then: May the power of not-knowing suffuse our lives, granting us a brilliant vision of possibility, an open-eyed ability to see the present with clarity, and the desire and energy to do our part in bringing the two together. And may we find true companions on the path.

Mighty Mo Rodgers’ “Dispatches from The Moon” puts us on the bleeding edge of the planetary tipping point, with an option to learn. Rodgers is a most didactic composer, which doesn’t interfere with his ability to groove on serious pleasures. I couldn’t find a video of his “Blues for A Blue Planet,” which I love; and if you’re interested in a unique take on blues ecumenicism, check out “Blues Is My Wailin’ Wall.”

I doubt I have anything truly, deeply new to say on the subject of Christmas for aliens (read last year’s post and judge for yourself; it’s linked to a funny video clip). Instead, I want to pose a question to readers who swim downstream at Christmas, paddling happily along a familiar and beloved current of holiday cheer. Unless you’ve aligned yourself with another religion and determined to learn its songs and customs, is there anything like this is your life? Have you ever absorbed the lore of another religion by osmosis, learning its songs and stories by heart, without even trying?

Almost always, unless one lives in an ethnic enclave embedded in—yet shielded from—the larger community, this mode of learning runs only one way: the immigrant, refugee, or captive learns the ruling culture, while his or her own heritage remains a dark blur to those who shape the dominant society.

Yet I want to say something about Christmas, this Atlantic Ocean of a holiday, which cannot be ignored. All of us must work out some relationship with it: frolicking in the shallows without giving much thought to its deeper meanings; diving headlong into the deeps of frenzied consumption; immersing oneself in the holy water of Christianity’s annual birth-ritual. Or standing on the shore, singing “Hava Nagila,” which is pretty much my stance.

It is precisely Christmas’s 800-pound-gorilla footprint, its central stature in our national life, that can make it so alienating for those who don’t partake. If your own heritage is Christian, try to imagine yourself a month of each year hearing “Happy Spring Festival!” or “Did you have a good Eid ul-Fitr?” or “Joyous Diwali to you!” in every shop or office you enter. Imagine the music of those holidays piped into every building. Imagine walking along almost any street in your town as an opportunity to immerse yourself in the signs, symbols, and decorations associated with someone else’s holiday. That is the sense of dislocation I experience with this annual national festival, in large part because it comes wrapped in a red-and-green presumption that elides our differences and obscures whatever doesn’t fit.

I imagine that Christmas’s ubiquity creates a deliciously oceanic feeling of belonging for those whose heritage rhymes with the holiday. It must be a little like everyone, everywhere, celebrating one’s birthday.

But to the rest of us, it can be a reminder of otherness: you just don’t belong, our common culture announces. You are constantly faced with the choice of whether to acknowledge it or not. When someone at the grocery says, “Merry Christmas,” or “How was your Christmas?” do I smile and say “Fine,” or do I strike a little blow for multiculturalism by saying “Well, actually, I don’t celebrate Christmas.” If I make the first choice, I swallow my otherness for the umpteenth time. If I make the latter choice, I have a different opportunity to feel otherness in facing the look of surprise or incomprehension my words provoke.

I’ve seen family Christmases from the inside (I was twice married to men whose families celebrated the holiday with full-on displays of lights and tinsel and a groaning-board of exotic—to me—foods: eggnog, ribbon candy, casseroles with marshmallows on top.) So I know firsthand that the yearning for family happiness embodied in glimpsing a fireside Christmas eve though a passing window may conceal an altogether different reality. Every therapist I know says the Christmas season marks an upturn in demand.

I also know that the slight depression—the touch of loneliness that sometimes persists through company, the chill despite a room’s warmth—that tends to settle on my shoulders this time of year can be cured by simply ceasing to care, by just letting the season twinkle past. I’ve long since ceased my most masochistic Christmas behavior, indulging a powerful attraction to deeply sentimental seasonal movies: Holiday Inn, It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street. The painful pleasure I used to derive from these was something like sticking the tip of my tongue into a sore place where a tooth used to be. I’m glad I lost my taste for it.

But I’d still like things to be different, not by squelching others’ exuberance, but by promoting equal-opportunity exuberance. I’d be entirely willing to shrug off the fact that I absorbed and memorized a mass of Christmas lore (not just the tunes) while attending a purportedly secular public grade school, if only my fellow Americans would (for instance) learn the names of major Jewish holidays and stop scheduling homecoming games on Yom Kippur. I don’t want to take anything from those who derive pleasure from Christmas, to make them feel that it’s not okay to be who they are. The remedy for an imbalance in public speech is not to restrict some people’s right to expression; it’s to nurture and encourage everyone else in taking advantage of the same right.

Imagine how things could be if we all were to accept the multicultural character of U.S. society, with a universal duty to know each other, however imperfectly or haltingly we begin. I’ve made it a small personal commitment to learn a little about the holidays of other traditions, in the spirit of do unto others. Here’s a calendar of religious holidays that should help. Even learning a major holiday or two each year could start to turn the tide.

The merest sign that my willingness to learn Christmas songs, stories, and customs were reciprocated would make me approach December feeling a bit of Ho! Ho! Ho! instead of Ho-Ho? Oh, No!

Along with countless other Jewish kids, I cared enough to learn all about the star, the manger, the wise men, the songs, and so many other things. If those were your stories and customs, how much do you care to make me feel welcome?

How about meeting me halfway? We’ll have a holiday potluck where all the holidays are equal, and all questions are okay to ask. You make the latkes, since they are traditional for Hanukkah, using the recipe below. I’ll make—let’s see—a Bûche de Noël, or a nice big Pannetone, or a pumpkin cheesecake…. What would you like?

Potato Latkes

6 medium baking potatoes, scrubbed
1 medium onion, peeled and chunked
2 eggs
2 Tablespoons matzo meal or flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Cooking oil (grapeseed, corn, etc., but not olive)

Grate the potatoes. Some people like distinct shreds; I like them finely grated, and usually do it by pulsing chunks of potato in the food processor until they look like small grains of rice. However you do it, mix them immediately with the baking powder, to help prevent oxidation, and put them in a strainer over a bowl or the sink to drain while you continue with preparation.

Heat oil in a skillet to a depth of half an inch, while you put the onion, eggs, matzo meal or flour, and salt into the food processor, and puree. Press down on the potatoes in the strainer, releasing as much liquid as possible, and combine the onion-egg mixture and potatoes in a bowl, mixing till uniform.

Drop a teaspoonful of this batter into the hot oil. It should bubble up enthusiastically, and the edges should begin to brown quickly. When it is brown on one side, turn this mini-pancake over and brown the other side. Remove from oil and drain on paper. Taste this, and adjust the salt as needed. Once that’s done, you’re ready to roll.

Some people like latkes thick and soft in the middle. I like them thin and crunchy. The difference is a matter of how much batter you use and how long you cook it. If you’re unsure, try it both ways. For a thick latke, gently drop a ladleful of batter into the hot oil and leave it alone until the bottom browns to your satisfaction. Then turn and brown the other side. For a thin one, immediately use a spatula to flatten the latke. Try to only turn them once, so they don’t absorb too much oil.

While they are cooking, watch the temperature, lowering the heat if they start to burn and raising it if the oil isn’t bubbling actively. Use a slotted spoon to remove burnt bits as they accumulate. Replenish the oil between batches, allowing it to heat before adding a new batch of latkes.

Unless people are eating them as soon as they come out of the pan, keep the first latkes warm while the rest cook. Arrange them on a baking sheet covered with absorbent paper (brown grocery bags cut open work well), and slide the baking sheet into a 275 degree oven.

Serve the latkes hot with applesauce and sour cream on the side.

A single recipe should feed six people as part of a meal, fewer if latkes are all that you are eating. If you are making mass quantities for a party, just double or triple the recipe and use two or three skillets simultaneously. Leftovers can be heated the next day in a 300 degree oven. They may be a little bit soggy, but still delicious.

While you cook, listen to this beautiful song by Consuelo Luz, “Los Biblicos,” (“The Nightingales”), sung in Ladino, Sephardic Judeo-Spanish.

Los bilbilicos cantan
Con sospiros de amor
Mi neshama mi ventura
Estan en tu poder

The nightingales sing
With sighs of love
My soul and my fate
Are in your power

Surely, the report was already well underway when Occupy emerged this fall. But the timing was fortuitous. The movement has stimulated artists, leaders, and commentators to a new readiness to engage in serious debate, enlivening a field that had hardened into a predictable shape. Justifiable anger and resentment flowed from those most affected by years of funding cuts and attacks from the right. Many of the rest displayed a demoralized resignation in which the most they dared hope was to be hurt a little less than feared. At least temporarily, that is changing. If the green shoots of deliberation and debate are watered, they could grow into a full-scale national conversation about the public interest in culture.

Need I say that I’m ready and waiting?

(If you want to sample recent discourse, in addition to the blogs GIA has posted, here are a few commentaries by Diane Ragsdale, Barry Hessinius, Clayton Lord, and Scott Walters‘ four-part series, “Occupy Lincoln Center.” Some of the discussion is rippling beyond, as in this post on “Philanthropy, Venture Funding and F***ing S**t Up” by green thought leader Alex Steffens, who points out the same dynamics in other sectors.)

The consensus seems to be that, evaluated in terms of equity, the current funding system is broken. (I’d like to pause to bookmark this moment, because while the system been broken for a very long time, many more people are now willing to say so. I hope that signals a change in the weather.)

So now what? In her contribution to the GIA forum, Holly Sidford poses a set of challenges that turn on precisely that question: “What if we could start fresh and design a new system of support for arts and culture in this country, with equity as one of its fundamental tenets?”

(In case you think I was exaggerating about readiness: I’ve been asking and answering that question for decades, beginning with an ancient artifact commissioned by the California Arts Council in 1978, and continuing up through my book New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development and more recent proposals for a new WPA, such as “The New New Deal 2009: Public Service Jobs for Artists?” and “The New New Deal, Part 2–A New WPA for Artists: How and Why.” The question has also been asked and answered by scholars, activists, and policymakers in other parts of the world, with results that are often hugely relevant, and so far, just as often ignored. But as Shakespeare wrote, “ripeness is all.” Is the time ripe for this discussion? Fingers crossed.)

I’m happy as a clam when I’m tinkering with system design, suggesting ways to configure programs that are closer to the ground or otherwise more efficient and effective.

(Indeed, I’d be thrilled to consult with anyone who wants to go at this worthy project seriously: a foundation or public agency that wants a truly fresh and promising approach; an academic institution or service organization that wants to engage the question for the benefit of the field; or a think-tank that wants to approach this supremely worthy challenge with new eyes and new energy. If any of those describe you, please contact me to take advantage of my decades of study, experimentation, social imagination, and practical knowledge on the subject.)

Whee! Brainstorm! Let’s have a national El Sistema in all art forms, a new WPA, a teaching artists corps, an infusion of artists’ work in every social and educational system! What are your ideas?

But before the makeovers start flying, its really important to look at first principles. The current system is astoundingly inequitable in sharing resources with rich and poor, rural and urban, genders, races, practices, ethnicities, and so on: however you slice it. But that’s not all that’s wrong. The system fails because it is built on faulty wiring, with significant tangles where there should be flow. Below, I single out three big ones: the private-public toggle, the means-and-ends muddle, and the public-interest pickle.

THE PRIVATE-PUBLIC TOGGLE

The existing arts funding apparatus in the U.S. was set up to fill in gaps in private funding. In the mid-60s, private foundations commissioned major studies of what one (The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects, issued by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) called “the income gap”—the gap between what major institutions could achieve through box office and contributions and the budgets to which they aspired. These laid out the blueprint for the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. They were infused with fear of letting the public into the private world of prestige arts, as this central statement from the Rockefeller report illustrates:

We must never allow the central focus on quality to weaken or shift. Popularization in any realm often leads to the reduction of standards. In our effort to broaden the audience base, we must not be led to accept imitation as a substitute for creation, mediocrity as a stand-in for excellence. Democratization carries with it a peril for art, even as it does for education. There are no guarantees against the dilution of standards that often accompanies an expanding public, but a constant critical awareness of the danger can do much to prevent its consequences.

Following private donors’ lead was the main public goal, which is exactly backwards. (The same backwards logic has had oil companies dictating energy policy, banks and brokerages dictating economic policy, and so on—and we know how well that has worked, don’t we, 99%?) The public interest has to come first. All the imbalances, prejudices, and short-sightedness that has followed stems directly from the error of putting it last.

Of course, individual patrons and donors are free to play in art markets however they wish. But when it comes to organized private philanthropy and public subvention, there isn’t a hard-and-fast line. Indeed, foundations are granted exemption from taxes in exchange for their public benefit. If that doesn’t lead, they don’t deserve a break from taxpayers. The dialogue that articulates the public interest in culture needs to encompass everyone.

THE MEANS-AND-ENDS MUDDLE

With private patronage as the model, both public and private funding has naturally centered on selecting worthy end-products. Most grants programs focus on choosing between project proposals, commonly selecting from a pool of proposals many times larger than will be funded. Which idea sounds best? Which artists and organizations have the best reputations? Who knows whom? Foundations and public agencies spend lots of time developing guidelines, operating panels, and evaluating programs. But very often, the same artists, groups, and projects are funded regardless of guidelines, because the underlying activity is a kind of shopping, and brandnames sell.

Within this framework, relatively few are anointed, the grantmaking process is expensive and time-consuming, and money doesn’t go very far. The alternative—to support means instead of ends—doesn’t get much attention in this country, even though it embodies a far more democratic impulse. Subsidizing rehearsal and performance space, teaching and learning, jobs for artists working in community: all such forms of investment maximize the benefit of each dollar, freeing artists and organizations to work in and with their communities, rather than always focusing on raising short-term funds for approved end-products.

THE PUBLIC-INTEREST PICKLE

By definition, all public policy should be grounded in an articulation of the public interest. So far, the main force driving U.S. cultural policy has been an assertion of the needs of nonprofit arts organizations, easily dismissed by ideologues who deny there is any public interest in culture. The debate turns on grants, ignoring other forms of intervention (such as training, technical assistance, regulation, taxation, promotion and distribution, job development, and so on). Instead of a war of counter-assertions, we need understand cultural development as analogous to economic development.

Consider the nation through an economic development lens, and it’s easy to see that we want to create more sustainability and prosperity, which means more jobs, capital, and infrastructure allowing these social goods to flow to all regions and communities. Through a cultural development lens, comparable national goals emerge: we want to know each other better, reveling in our diversity, supporting the infrastructure to enable that; we want much broader cultural and social inclusion; we want a lively, vibrant, diverse cultural landscape; and we want to recognize and protect culture as the crucible in which we work out identity, shared meaning, and a positive modus vivendi.

To give a sense of what the public interest in culture might be, a few (but by no means all) of the cultural policy goals I’d like to see as part of our national yardstick for cultural development:

• Full cultural citizenship, where all have equal encouragment and support to feel at home in our own communities, to have a say in cultural life, to see and be seen, understand and be understood by our neighbors;
• Active cultural participation, to balance a surfeit of passive private-sector entertainments, with ample opportunities to learn, create, and experience the cultural commons, bringing us out into connection with our fellow citizens;
• Full social integration of arts methods and approaches, so that education, healing, and every other public good has the benefit of artists’ gifts and methods to enliven and engage community members;
• Awareness of and intervention throughout the entire cultural landscape, seeing commercial culture, nonprofit work, and informal participation as an ecology, and providing stimulus toward national goals throughout the ecosystem;
• Equity in the distribution of resources and access to systems, so that everyone has equal access to the means and fruits of cultural creativity, with restorative funding to redress past imbalances;
• Awareness of the cultural impact of public policies and actions (such as urban redevelopment), giving community cultural life a standing in decisions that are now seen as merely economic; and
• Many opportunities to learn and practice imagination and empathy through arts work, consciously investing in our collective capacity to develop compassion and connection through many forms of sharing stories.

Focusing on systems without laying down this foundation of goals and values complicates things without improving them. So far in the history of U.S. cultural policy, changes have been made piecemeal and defensively, nipping and tucking in response to criticism without even aspiring to an overarching clarity. That’s why the current system seems so jury-rigged and kludgy, like the federal tax code.

Before we start drawing up blueprints, we need to engage a national converation, grounded in the three foundational public policy questions: Who are we as a people? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered?

When we rise to the task of answering those, the worthy challenge Sidford has posed in designing a cultural support apparatus can be met. To do that, we have to get serious about cultural policy. Making up for private shortfalls or balancing existing inequities in nonprofit grants are only part of the task. It also has to include addressing the imbalances and distortions created by the consumer cultural industries, or else it’s just redecoration, not deep renewal.

To my fellow congregants in the church of art: may we have the courage to seize this moment, giving it all it deserves. Here’s Leonard Cohen for inspiration: “Land of Plenty.”

Don’t really have the courage
To stand where I must stand
Don’t really have the temperament
To Lend a helping hand

Don’t really know who sent me
To raise my voice and say:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.

In brief, the study says that the way the arts and cultural grants pie is sliced:

…is demonstrably out of balance with our evolving cultural landscape and with the changing demographics of our communities. Current arts grantmaking disregards large segments of cultural practice, and by doing so, it disregards large segments of our society.

A growing number of artists and cultural groups are working in artistic traditions from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific Rim, as well as in new technology-based and hybrid forms. They are using the arts in increasingly diverse ways to engage and build communities and address the root causes of persistent societal problems, including issues of economic, educational and environmental injustice as well as inequities in civil and human rights.

Much of this work is being done at the grassroots and community levels by artists and relatively small cultural organizations. Yet, the majority of arts funding supports large organizations with budgets greater than $5 million. Such organizations, which comprise less than 2 percent of the universe of arts and cultural nonprofits, receive more than half of the sector’s total revenue. These institutions focus primarily on Western European art forms, and their programs serve audiences that are predominantly white and upper income. Only 10 percent of grant dollars made with a primary or secondary purpose of supporting the arts explicitly benefit underserved communities, including lower-income populations, communities of color and other disadvantaged groups. And less than 4 percent focus on advancing social justice goals. These facts suggest that most arts philanthropy is not engaged in addressing inequities that trouble our communities, and is not meeting the needs of our most marginalized populations.

Mostly, GIA’s bloggers welcome findings that confirm their own impressions, expressing the wish that effective documentation from an authoritative source will have more impact than—for instance—their own prior entreaties. I’m also glad to see the situation documented, and hope it has an impact. Sidford makes important points, such as the need to attend to changing demographics and changes in arts practice; why and how to view the cultural landscape as an ecology, in which each sector affects the others; and how to act on the opportunity to advance social healing through cultural funding. Implicitly, the report invites funders into a change of heart, hoping they will be moved to engage with a series of recommended questions, that their answers will help to transform their practice.

Most of the GIA bloggers make modest suggestions as to how funders can channel more resources to the artists and organizations whose social and cultural contributions are now so disproportionately underfunded. Several point to their own organizations’ or allies’ work as models. Understandably, most position themselves as ahead of the curve, already taking steps to increase equity.

So far, at least, there are few comments (the online forum ends on 16 December, so there’s still time). My hunch is that is because there aren’t so many entry points in most of the posts: what is to be debated in a group of thoughtful funders and researchers mostly affirming what they already know?

Instead, the conversation needed now has to dig deeper, looking major obstacles to equity in the face—without flinching. Three stand out for me: entrenched privilege; encoded prejudice; and risk aversion.

I’ve written many times on these subjects without having any evident influence, but what can I say? Hope springs eternal. (For instance, see click here for the half-dozen blogs on philanthropic questions I wrote while live-blogging GIA’s 2010 conference.) I’m not the only one who feels this way. In his blogpost, NCRP Executive Director Aaron Dorfman notes that “During a session at this year’s GIA conference, one funder lamented that we have been discussing equity in arts funding for 40 years and little has changed.”

Why not? The problem is stubborn: it’s not just about doing someting new, but giving up something old, wealth’s presumed right to control power, disguised as noblesse oblige. Mostly, people give up privilege and its benefits in one of two ways. Either overwhelming external pressure forces a change, or personal revelation sparks an epiphany that reshuffles assumptions and behavior. Both are hard to achieve. The former requires sustained organizing, social imagination, and luck. The latter requires an individual with an open heart, open mind, and willingness to break the chain of causality despite peer-pressure, stepping off the familiar and conventional path.

But if we don’t explore the deeper obstacles, neither change is possible. That alone makes it worth spelling each out once more.

ENTRENCHED PRIVILEGE. Who decides? By definition, philanthropy answers that question this way: “the wealthy.” Funding structures are created by those with surplus wealth to invest in social goals, and operated by those they appoint and employ. Our laws regulating private foundations are based on the presumption that wealth entails an expanded right to influence civil society: tax relief and other privileges are granted to those who make charitable contributions, as both incentive and reward.

They are also shaped by the strong personal frame we tend to put around the notion of private property. We are trained to think the same way about the owner of a fortune’s right to dispose of it as about our own right to possess, say, the contents of our refrigerator. But that’s only one way to see it. How would things look different if the law recognized that fortunes are not amassed by an individual, but through the efforts of multitudes, through many social and public support systems, entailing a commensurate obligation to share the wealth?

Most funders manage their money so as to perpetuate their status as philanthropists, granting no more than the minimum percentage of capital required by law each year. Nothing about the system as it is usually practiced calls into question the division that has lately been described as the “1% versus the 99%.” Instead, the tacit expectation is that this power imblance will persist, so that change will not be systemic, but individual. Consequently, the appeal is primarily moral: to think of others, to question one’s assumptions, to be fair.

The moral appeal has power, and what individuals do matters greatly, to be sure, and can be the fulcrum of change. For example, Paulo Freire and Amilcar Cabral talked about “class suicide,” the necessity of breaking with the interests of one’s class of origin in order to ally oneself with advocates of deep social justice. Class suicide is a staple of theology too: Moses and Siddhartha were both princes of the realm who voluntarily surrendered the trappings of royalty to join with those suffering from royalty’s excesses.

It would be very easy to overturn the imbalance in funding simply by changing allegiance: if the people most affected by these decisions were making them, they would be markedly different. A few funders have taken the huge risk of devolving decision-making power to board members deeply connected to the communities and practices Sidford’s report describes. But so far, they are rare exceptions. Some funders take baby steps in this direction, as by assembling diverse grantmaking panels that include people doing grassroots work. But giving someone the right to recommend isn’t the same as surrendering power: being anointed queen for a day isn’t the same as occupying the throne.

ENCODED PREJUDICE. Subtle or undigested racial prejudice is a significant factor, one I’ve written about often. By now, many funders are aware of the social impact of racism, and some take such steps as diversifying their staffs in response. Still, the imbalances in grantmaking persist. That is in large part because of an underlying prejudice that still remains invisible to many in the field: corporatism. Corporatists come from all colors and classes, dutifully promulgating a model of organization that intrinsically pushes grantmaking toward the already-haves.

Overwhelmingly, foundation leaders’ comfort zone is decorated in full corporate regalia: for decades now, despite epic corporate malfeasance and failure, corporations have remained the preferred model. There has been consistent pressure on arts organizations to conform to corporate ideas of good business: organizations expecting to compete for serious funding should apply for and receive tax-exempt status; build a board heavily weighted with donors and the types of professionals who work with them—attorneys, business executives, and so on; and invest in the planning and reporting tools and techniques that signal corporate solidity.

These are culling mechanisms. It isn’t that an arts organization adept at donning corporate trappings is guaranteed to produce the most exciting or effective work. It’s that willingness to continue turning this stuff out—to continue sacrificing trees to quantities of pointless paperwork for each grant application and administration—indicates that an applicant is pliant enough to slide into the corporate culture of philanthropy without making too many waves, and most likely, hungry enough to do it over and over again just to ante into the competition.

As an organizational consultant, I’ve seen the negative impacts of this prejudice. I can’t count the number of community-based organizations that spiraled into internal conflicts with powerful board members who, when it all came down, didn’t share their values and became de facto internal opponents. I can’t count the number of groups that exhausted leadership in the make-work of philanthropy, cannibalizing their own work in the process. It’s not that there can’t be viable corporate-style major institutions in communities of color, for instance: that’s one path, and some have trod it effectively, seeking to assert their own rightful places in the cultural landscape. It’s that wanting to work that way has been taken as an indication of seriousness and worthiness, while more creative, idiosyncratic, and community-grounded forms of organization have been perceived as inadequacy. Many people who hold this assumption aren’t even aware of it as a prejudice. It just seems natural: If you’re serious, this way of thinking says, you’ll want to be just like us. Really?

One GIA blogger, MK Wegmann of the National Performance Network, highlights the impact of this attitude:

There are some troubling responses I’ve already heard to the NCRP report, including in the discussion at GIA following its presentation when the conversation soon trended toward the age-old excuse that funders would like to support “these kinds” of organizations, but they’ve found that “they” lack adequate organizational structures to receive substantial funding.

Keep your eye on that word, “substantial.” A common way to direct funds toward corporate-model applicants is to think of grants as representing a certain percentage of operating budget. By that logic, it’s a no-brainer to give the biggest institutions the most money and keep the smaller ones marginalized. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle: without a budget large enough to employ all the staff needed to pass muster through the lens of corporatism, organizations can never obtain grants large enough to compete for the big bucks.

Staffing is one reason smaller organizations lose out in the competition for foundation funds. But another is that many cannot afford to (or bear to) invest heavily in impersonating conventional businesses when they might be spending more of the vast time it takes to generate all those board development campaigns, strategic plans, logic models, theories of change, and other “best practices” (i.e., corporate bells and whistles) on accomplishing the actual work.

There are so many ways to organize for artistic production, cultural development, creative organizing for social justice. Sometimes I think the best model—certainly one requiring far less investment in bureaucracy and adminstration—is to fund individuals with catalytic gifts and democratic commitments, reducing the pressure of constant fundraising just to support key people, and freeing them to invest more in in the work. Young cultural activists today often eschew the tax-exempt corporation model precisely because they don’t want to take on all the related paperwork and infrastructure management just to compete for grants; many prefer DIY models like pop-up projects, or crowdsourced funding models like Kickstarter.

RISK AVERSION. Much of this comes down to risk aversion. In truth, almost all meaningful learning comes through mistakes. But in philanthropy, as in many other social sectors in these times, there is a powerful pressure to avoid mistakes at all costs. Many funders fear looking foolish by betting on a project that fails to achieve its stated aims, so they insulate themselves from risk. They do it by keeping control of the pursestrings and putting applicants through arduous culling rituals that ensure their conformance to the favored corporate culture.

They also do it in countless other ways: the chief method of seeking advance assurance that a proposed project will yield the desired results is to ensure it does not depart too much from what has come before. This is especially puzzling, as much conventional practice is tidy—most often grantmaker guidelines and applicant claims are tailored to preapproved measuring-devices, and the results are duly measured, yielding expected indicators—but often not especially effective. Sometimes I think it comes down to a simple truth: that many funders are comfortable failing in the same old ways, the ones that everybody accepts; but they are terrified of attracting peers’ disapprobation by failing in new ways.

Obviously, checks and balances are needed. No one wants to throw away money. Foundations have a fiduciary responsiblity, and a reasonable desire to avoid fraudsters. But, having observed the field for many years, I see an ever-increasing obsession with risk aversion that results in multiplying instruments of application, assessment, and reporting, and ever-increasing investment in bureacracy, self-examination, and information collection and management. Meanwhile, funding for the important work that Sidford’s report describes is scarcer and scarcer. As MK Wegmann’s contribution to the GIA forum says, “It’s not about cutting the same pie in smaller, more even slices; the power dynamic that exists between grant makers and grant seekers has to be different also.”

Rather than slicing the pie finer, the just response is to create more capacity to bake. What can channel more wealth to those whose important work has been undernourished thus far? New and powerful arguments for art’s public purpose are certainly part of it (see my series, “Life Implicates Art,” for instance). From a social justice perspective, so is the understanding that the best solutions will come from those affected by the problem. Have they been asked? The philanthropic sector loves to examine itself, so roundtables, focus groups, surveys, and studies of “best practices” are daily fare. But thus far, most inquiries are premised on acceptance of so many givens of the philanthropic culture that any suggested changes they produce amount to redecoration, not restructuring; a new lampshade, not a new way of shedding light.

It requires substantial creative courage to actually surrender power, release the infatuation with corporate models, and voluntarily embrace risk. I salute the very few funders who’ve demonstrated it. To the rest, I pose a few questions not mentioned so far in the study or the forum:

• What would it take for you to face the assumptions and ways of organizing that perpetuate them-that’s-got-shall-get funding?
• What would it take for you to step up to the challenge of adopting egalitarian, democratic, social justice commitments in their place?
• What would it take for you step off the path on which so much philanthropy has been dependent, and truly share power?
• What would it take for you to embrace learning from failure, abandon corporate models, and truly break with the conventions that keep our philanthropic culture entrenched, inequitable, and stuck?

If the answers are within your grasp, what’s stopping you? And if—sadly—you can’t conceive answers that can actually be enacted, well, let’s try facing that truth now.

“God Bless The Child” belongs to Billie Holiday, but take a minute also to listen to Eric Dolphy turn it into a ballet for bass clarinet.

Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

THE BLOW-UP

On 15 November, the City Controller’s office released a memorandum entitled “Results of the Financial Management Review of the San Francisco Arts Commission.” Among the 12 recommendations, two, dealing with the Cultural Equity Grants (CEG) program, are the most controversial. They say that the program should:

• Cease funding and administering four of its eight initiatives, on the grounds that the program’s enabling legislation authorizes only the “Cultural Equity Initiatives Program (CEI), a Program for Commissions to Individual Artists (IAC), the Project Grants to Small and Mid-size organizations (OPG), and the Facilities Fund (CRSP). The other four are recommended for elimination because they are not cited by name in the city Administrative Code: Native American Arts & Cultural Traditions (NAACT), Innovations in Strengthening the Arts (ISA), Arts & Communities: Innovative Partnerships (ACIP), Arts for Neighborhood Vitality grant categories (ANV)
• Ensure that no recipient receives more than one grant at a time, on the grounds that 14 of the 172 grant recipients received multiple grants in FY 2010-11. The guidelines say no recipient may receive more than one grant for the same project, but the Controller finds “some risk that the same recipient may use multiple grants for one project” sufficient grounds to limit eligibility further. Over the last five years, the Galeria de la Raza, a long-lived and highly respected, Latino visual arts organization deeply rooted in San Francisco’s Mission District, received 12 grants totalling just under $237,000, an average of $47,000 a year.

The audit was undertaken in the aftermath of the resignation under pressure of Luis Cancel, who became Director of Cultural Affairs in 2007. In San Francisco, Cancel was an unpopular leader whose departure followed on disclosures that he had been phoning in his job from his vacation home in Brazil, making unauthorized expenditures, and acting abusively toward staff. By the time he left, it was widely acknowledged that the the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) was in disarray. The programs that had been doing good work continued, but without functional leadership at the organization’s helm—indeed, despite leadership.

In July, the Commission chose to appoint one of its own members—JD Beltran, an artist without evident experience at the helm of an organization—to serve as interim director. A hurried search for a new director commenced with a call on 1 August and a deadline for filling the position of 9 September. The process has been extended, but an announcement is expected soon.

Beltran requested the audit and has agreed to implement all 12 of its recommendations, which seems precipitous for an interim leader with scant agency experience. Many of them respond to the SFAC’s chaos, to be sure—one recommends ways to encourage employees to report misconduct, for instance—but most respond with bureaucratic solutions that would be identical for any city agency, whether it regulated a fleet of trucks or cleaned the streets. The SFAC’s public purpose—the values that should shape cultural policy in San Francisco—is not part of the frame.

THE CONTEXT

CEG is a stepchild of Grants for The Arts, a municipal funding program subsidized by income from San Francisco’s Hotel Tax Fund, which began in 1961. This is what is known as a “transient occupancy tax,” rooted in the idea that visitors to a city pay a tax on hotel and motel rooms to underwrite activities that attract more visitors. The program funds parades and public attractions like street fairs, but the bulk of the money goes to arts organizations.

In most places, this kind of revenue is distributed according to a “them that’s got shall get” formula, for instance, as a percentage of the successful applicant’s annual budget. The largest organizations, mostly red-carpet institutions, get the bulk of funding. In San Francisco, for instance, in the last fiscal year, the Symphony and Opera each received well in excess of $600,000, while the Ballet and Museum of Modern Art each received just under $400,000—in each case, dwarfing other grants in their categories. There is some diversity within the universe of grant recipients, but the disparity in funding is roughly the same as all those charts we’ve been seeing lately, graphing our growing polarization of wealth.

Over the years, artists have pressured (and sometimes sued) the city to expand the definition of eligibility. In one famous case in the 70s, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which had received grants from what was then called the “Publicity and Advertising Fund” until being rejected in 1966—evidently on account of its politics—successfully sued for inclusion (although it took a few years for the Fund to implement the judge’s ruling). CEG was created nearly 20 years ago in response to the reality of San Francisco as a multicultural city in which resources continue to be concentrated in largely white institutions. As its name indicates, CEG was created to bring about greater cultural equity, providing support and building capacity, especially among groups grounded in communities of color. Here’s how CEG puts it:

Grants to support the development, sustainability and growth of San Francisco arts organizations that are deeply rooted in, and able to express the experiences of a historically underserved community, such as African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Native American, Pacific Islander, Disabled, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered and Women.

The audit reflects a remarkably naive and uninformed relationship to these contextualizing purposes. It almost seems to have been written by a computer—or human beings impersonating a computer’s pristine disinterest in human events. For instance, the four above-mentioned CEG programs described in the enabling language basically come down to four categories: cultural equity, individual artists, small and mid-sized organizations, and facilities. In terms of content, the four programs targeted for elimination fit these broad categories as to intended recipients and uses, but they have been labelled for clarity of specific purpose. While Shakespeare pointed out that “a rose by another name would smell as sweet,” the machine-like logic of the audit is this: a rose by any other name…should be eliminated.

The audit, focused on financial management, also fails to take seriously key questions, such as leadership, as if the SFAC mess could be sufficiently cleaned up by tidying tracking and reporting systems. Then-Mayor Gavin Newsom reportedly sought a high-visibility national figure when he anointed Cultural Affairs Director Luis Cancel. This turned out to be a mistake, one that was allowed to ripen and fester at length, even as knowledgable, committed artists and administrators complained in vain. Such a lack of leadership emerges again and again in public cultural agencies. Someone with a high profile is parachuted into an unfamiliar community by officials who feel confident that reflected glory will accrue from bringing in a celebrity arts administrator. Cultural policy doesn’t come into it as much as photo-ops at art openings. Oversight is sketchy, dialogue with the larger community is pro forma or non-existent, and a system that was already on shaky ground falls apart from lack of care and knowledge.

THE RESPONSE

Let’s see, now, how does this read? Hmmm….

The city creates a special initiative to respond to residents’ deep desire for cultural equity, one small step toward equalizing access to resources. It is housed at the Arts Commission, along with many other programs and initiatives. This initiative supports artists and groups—mostly grounded in communities of color or other marginalized categories—who have not been able to obtain meaningful resources from mainstream sources. As the story unfolds, the host organism falls into disarray, rotting from the head. Supposedly objective (i.e., astoundingly under-informed and therefore unprepared) auditors are summoned to diagnose and recommend, but they are given a brief that covers only a few questions. Their recommendations are mostlly administrative and general, but they single out the special initiative for significant cuts.

I’m guessing the embedded racism of this story is invisible to the auditors, the tone of whose report suggests a touchingly naive belief in the objective, uninflected, universal applicability of its management philosophy and regulatory approach. No one has offered a better critique of the presumed neutrality of regulators than Anatole France:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

But the SFAC’s weak cultural competency is not invisible to countless artists in the San Francisco community, who are mobilizing to call attention to the audit and overturn its most damaging recommendations. Community meetings are scheduled, actions are being planned, and—if the circumstances that triggered it weren’t so deeply disappointing—I’d be happy to say a long-deferred public dialogue on essential questions of cultural policy is beginning to take shape.

A message from renowned performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena has been circulating at light-speed. Here’s a taste of response from the affected communities:

I have watched Galeria [de la Raza] over the years produce more exhibits and ad hoc cultural events than most organizations their size, and they manage to do it with a shoestring budget and a handful of part time staff members and volunteers. And their extremely well attended shows always get good reviews in the local press. So, the issue here is not “unfair funding” to a shady organization but rather a racist view on arts funding: THE FUNDING OF COMMUNITY ARTS IS UNDER ATTACK! The establishment is closing ranks and, I dare to say, would even consider unthinkable that the city’s large white arts organizations fairly share the ever-shrinking funds for the arts. And they will use audits, lawyers and the mainstream press to state their case.

If this trend continues, soon, not only the experimental and politically-minded artists will be expelled out of the city but the many non-profits of color that give SF a special character will have to close their doors due to insufficient funding. Then, the city will become what so many wealthy people and white politicians secretly wish: A bohemian theme park…minus the bohemians. And all the middle and upper class people will wake up one day to a world of unbearable sameness.

Paradoxically, this year the extremely “favored” Galeria was forced to let go of two precious staff members and to cut the salaries of the rest of the staff, including the director.

In response to the outcry, Interim Cultural Affairs Director JD Beltran has issued a letter to the community inviting people to a meeting on 5 December, saying, “I am reaching out to you to clarify some of the recent findings and our responses to the recent Controller’s Office report, which we have sensed are being widely misunderstood by the community.” Beltran writes that the Arts Commission’s acceptance of the audit’s recommendations “in no way indicated that any funding to the community through our grant programs would cease or decrease.” If that turns out to be true, it will be perceived as an appeasement in response to community mobilization, as the powers-that-be hoping that the promise of money will enable them to evade the larger conversation that needs to happen.

THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN CULTURE

Like many other U.S. cities, San Francisco treats cultural policy like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the arts world. The drama that unfolds behind the scenes is largely a tug-of-war between direct beneficiaries of arts grants: how big is the funding pie? How will it be sliced? Who gets to eat regularly, and who gets the scraps? If the system’s real goals can be deduced from the way things are run, they are first and foremost to satisfy those direct beneficiaries, and almost always, the largest presenting and exhibiting institutions—those with the biggest budgets and most prestitious boards—receive the bulk of funding.

In such an ecology, most community-based organizations—those that define their own work as a response to social conditions and local aspirations as well as an expression of artistic creativity—are forced into a perpetual state of emergence, fundraising mightily just to secure enough resources to survive, but almost never enabled to prosper, let alone attain the much-desired end-state of “sustainability.” Money is important, but true sustainability requires systemic change and support, which is seldom forthcoming.

In such an ecology, the scrutiny of auditors and the burden of punitive management systems almost always falls in inverse proportion to budget size. (I will leave it for another time to explore why regulators feel so much more keenly the fear of being cheated on a small scale by have-nots than of being robbed blind by the haves.)

In such an ecology, of course, there is honesty and hypocrisy, skill and ineptitude, discipline and laxity at all levels. I make no claim for the superiority of the artists and groups funded by CEG, nor for CEG itself in comparison to other public cultural initiatives. But neither is there any basis for the counter-claim—that the well-funded institutions are superior—which is implicit in the way this discourse is framed. There is as much good and bad art, as much good and bad management, in marble palaces as in rented offices. But by and large, the bad work of the prestige institutions costs taxpayers far more and attracts far less public scrutiny, far less draconian response.

I sometimes balk at a simple explanations, but this one seems to be true: taking on the biggest recipients of public largesse offends people who have the capacity to make trouble for whistle-blowers; whereas taking on those deemed marginal carries much less risk.

So what is a better way? I’ve written at length on this subject many times (read my book New Creative Community for a detailed look at means and ends of cultural policy). In brief, then, effective, democratic public cultural policy expresses the public interest in culture in four ways:

• It is reality-based. It is grounded in an assessment of a community’s character and identity, down to the granular level of neighborhood diversity. It is based on a rich account of cultural infrastructure in all its particularity, of what is strong and what needs development, of what is enduring and what is endangered, of what has been mainstreamed and what has been marginalized. Numeric data can be useful, but you don’t get this kind of thick description without engaging people from all social groups, the more deeply the better, ideally through action-research using arts work as its ground.
• It regards the entire cultural landscape as an ecology. It addresses cultural development in a way that’s analagous to economic development. Just as economic development initiatives address blockages in the flow of prosperity, cultural policy seeks to mend and strengthen frayed places in the cultural fabric: places where members of certain communities have been made to feel less than full cultural citizenship; places where rich cultural resources exist without adequate mechanisms to nurture, express, and extend them to the full community; blockages to participation in community cultural life, and so on. Interventions may be made in any sector—commercial culture, nonprofit organizations, independent artists, education, health, parks, libraries—always with attention to how each works as part of the whole. Public agencies support, facilitate, collaborate to fill gaps and strengthen existing work, rather than focusing on their own positioning and media visibility.
• It uses many tools and skills. It has many instruments, including funding, research, regulation, training, providing facilities, providing technical assistance, generating public dialogue, building capacity, and others. Grants matter a lot, but it isn’t only about the grants.
• The entire community is its intended beneficiary; it is accountable to all. Artists and arts organizations are important constituents for cultural policy, and support for them helps to enact it, but policy isn’t conceived as a special-interest initiative designed just for them. Instead, the ultimate goals are full cultural citizenship for everyone: a diverse, vibrant, and participatory cultural life; ample opportunity for creativity, participation, exchange; and a civic landscape that richly embodies the cultural heritages and contributions of all community members. Artists and arts organizations have critical, essential, and valued roles to play in realizing those goals, but their entitlement to public support is based on their commitment and excellence in those roles, not on budget size or their connection to VIPs. Transparency in public administration earns publc confidence.

Imagine a civic cultural ecology in which leaders are chosen for their alignment with the public interest in culture, for their knowledge of community cultural life, and their skill in engaging and inspiring others. Imagine arts commissioners and other appointees given the orientation and information they need to properly conceive and pursue their roles in enacting the public interest in culture. Imagine a way to audit public agencies that assesses, first and foremost, their effectiveness in embodying local cultural development goals and values, and recommends administrative and other arrangements that can enhance that effectiveness, encouraging a healthy flexibility and more emphasis on responsiveness and accomplishment than on creating a fortress of administrative systems.

Public agencies should track their money to promote accountability, of course. They should be managed rationally and fairly, of course. But they should infuse their every action with public purpose, ensuring that the way they work and relate supports the public interest in culture. Surely, one reason people have responded with such alarm to the San Francisco Controller’s recommendations is that they reveal no hint of alignment with larger cultural purpose.

As it happens, among SFAC’s initiatives, CEG comes closest to being grounded in democratic cultural policy goals, giving community members and policymakers a basis on which to judge its work. Its enabling language (from San Francisco’s Municipal Code, Part II, Section 515) says that:

The Cultural Equity Endowment Fund is established to move San Francisco arts funding toward cultural equity. The goal of cultural equity will be achieved when:

• when all the people that make up the City have fair access to the information, financial resources and opportunities vital to full cultural expression, and the opportunity to be represented in the development of arts policy and the distribution of arts resources;
• when all the cultures and subcultures of the City are expressed in thriving, visible arts organizations of all sizes;
• when new large-budget arts institutions flourish whose programming reflects the experiences of historically underserved communities, such as: African American; Asian American; disabled; Latino; lesbian and gay; Native American; Pacific Islander; and, women.

We see stories like San Francisco’s current drama unfolding over and over again in public cultural agencies: no matter how dynamic and charismatic leaders may be, no matter how good their intentions, when you put people in charge—whether as directors or policymakers—who lack the larger framework of knowledge and understanding that illuminates the public interest in art, they can’t accomplish much of value. Their focus sticks on placating powerful constituencies, or on generating a certain type of public profile; clueless about what they should really be doing, they exercise their power over underlings as a way to reassure themselves they are in charge. The employees who have a strong sense of context and direction are often able to go on doing good work under these circumstances, especially with someone running interference, protecting their work from cluelessness in high places. The work of those without that internal alignment and protection suffers most.

I hope this challenge will be perceived as an opportunity to align San Francisco’s cultural policy with the public interest in art, in pluralism, participation, equity, and transparency. In the meantime, it’s good to remember how often artists of color are put on show to support allocations to public agencies, as testaments to their commitments to social inclusion and cultural diversity. Listen to Aretha Franklin, As Good As I Am to You”:

If you have a dollar
And I have a dime
I wonder could I borrow yours
As easy as you could mine.
Because when you need my love
And I give time after time
And turn around and found me no returns
Then my friend you’ll be using my dime.

I’m returning to this site after nearly a half-year off for a sweet relationship that morphed into what we both hope will be a lasting friendship. My prior online dating experience was much fun and very interesting, and I’m hoping this will be too. I’m touched by the way we keep showing up, keep desiring, keep remaining open. I’m excited to see what comes next.

That is the first paragraph of my online dating profile, which I recently reactivated. Almost instantly, I began receiving commiserations from other denizens of the site who recognized my face or online moniker: “I have to say, I’m kinda sad to see you again,” wrote one thoughtful man with whom I’ve exchanged long philosophical emails. “You were my hero,” wrote another.

Potentially a heavy burden, standard-bearer for online dating success (or failure). But truly, I think the trick is to carry it lightly. It was disappointing for my erstwhile love and I to let go of our hopes for happily ever after. It took will and patience—despite disappointment—to encourage a romance to become an abiding friendship. I’m glad we didn’t try to force what didn’t fit. I’m glad to come out of it with a cherished friend and an open heart, without regret, and with a deeper self-knowledge to guide me in future.

There isn’t anything here that feels like failure, which seems to encapsulate the difference between my experience and that of some friends who hated online dating. If the only way to hold the experience is as a test of one’s worth—well, why sign up for that? But hold it as giving the universe an opportunity, more or less in the spirit of buying a lottery ticket, and it all falls within the outlines of enjoyment.

By now, I have refined my lottery ticket—my online profile—so that it truly expresses my nature and my wishes. I get a lot of literary feedback: “OK, hands down, you get the all-time best profile award ever,” and “Your writing is so clear, it’s refreshing. Your profile could be used as an outline for a class about writing profiles.” Even if it’s just a line, this is very nice; complimenting a writer’s words is bound to be one way to her heart. But of course, it’s not a literary competition. In the end, the good thing about writing this way about oneself is that it eliminates almost all of the drive-by daters, the ones who who can’t be bothered to read.

Not everyone who writes to me seems a likely prospect, of course, but they almost all seem sincere. Rarely, there’s an unpleasant message, or one that’s merely crude. But mostly, the messages are kind and warm. Like me, these seekers want to love and be loved, and are willing to risk for it. The invitation to empathy implicit in our shared experience must explain why some of them sent condolences when I reappeared at the site. There’s a sweetness in that I never would have discovered if I hadn’t tried online dating.

There’s something more, too. I love surprises. At the moment, almost every day brings some. The pace of new possibility may be because I’m new to many of the men who’ve joined in recent months, or who didn’t happen to coincide with me during the earlier few months when I ventured forth. I imagine novelty is a huge factor. But I think it must also be the time of year. December dawns, and people don’t want to usher in the new year solo. It’s poignant, and perhaps also opportune.

In other words, if you’ve been thinking of trying it, seize the time: ’tis the season.

Wish me luck—and let me know if you want help with your profile.

In tribute to my fellow seekers, a delicious blues of lingering sweet sadness. I’ve downloaded a dozen versions of “As The Years Go Passing By” lately. This is a beautiful version by Otis Rush, although the sinuous combination of voice and guitar on this Mighty Joe Young rendition rivals it. If you want to take the musical trip I’ve been traveling lately, click your way down all the versions on YouTube. You won’t regret it.