JANUARY SALE!
Through the end of January 2026, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 30% discount! And the ebook from Amazon at half off!I took part recently in a large online convocation about the future of the arts in this country. The 30 or so prominent individuals who conceived and organized it have good reason to be worried, as the MAGA regime stamps Trump’s name on cultural institutions, cuts funding for nearly everything cultural except his self-aggrandizing plans for the 250th anniversary of the republic, and packs advisory boards and governing bodies with cronies and sycophants who evidently have no objection to authoritarianism if they are cozy with the authorities.
To see one of the latest outrages, destroying murals widely thought to be the great Ben Shahn’s finest work, click here. For a stunning overview of what’s at stake, see this essay by M. Gessen.
It’s good that the meeting was called, although I would have preferred that they turned the process on its head, engaging with a very wide and diverse public first, and allowing leadership to emerge from what is revealed. But I’m always the annoying person who takes democracy seriously, so what I think about participation and organization holds little sway in such processes. I have no doubt of the sincerity and urgency of the conveners’ intentions, and only hope they come up with compelling ideas and actions that can have meaningful impact.
I’m just not sure they will. People deeply embedded in a subculture of advocacy often tend to believe that their approach is the only valid one. In arts advocacy, they mostly seem unfazed by its repeated failure. To move forward, the blinders have to come off.
There were several hundred participants on Zoom, and if the names I recognized are any guide, most were leaders of arts organizations or philanthropies—in other words, of the outfits that have consistently received the lion’s share of both public and private arts and culture funding. My impression is that a number of them hope that private wealth will come forward to replace federal funding. That’s not impossible, especially given this country’s paltry amount of federal arts funding, still less than a dollar per capita. Although there’s a well-funded advocacy apparatus created to lobby and plead for arts and cultural support—an apparatus that by consensus treats any budget allocation as a victory—the truth is that the spending power of the National Endowment for the Arts today is less than half what it was in 1980 when Reagan took over. Trump’s FY 2026 budget calls for the agency’s elimination.
But just refueling the coffers from new deep pockets doesn’t begin to address the real problems, the real needs. So what I really hope is that enough fresh thinking and energy emerges to address them.
The meeting featured three small group sessions, each focusing on a different theme. The first was this: twenty years hence, in 2045, what is participants’ vision for “a more fully-realized, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable arts sector?”
I was surprised to hear so many responses familiar from decades of arts organizations’ planning processes. Like all participants, I was only in three out of thirty or more small groups, but I’m guessing that those I took part in were not atypical. Most people answered as if the question were “what do want for Christmas?” They sketched a society in which everyone supports and appreciates “the arts” (however that’s defined), there is ample funding from many sources, communities value artists and organizations for their contributions to civic life, and so on and on and on.
One thing I learned from decades as a consultant was that it is often so tempting to believe you can lay out a blueprint and the future will fulfill it that many people fail to confront that fact that reality seldom complies. Whether it was smart to make long-range plans in the past (something I doubt, as I saw more of them moldering on shelves or dumped into recycling bins than being used as reliable and wise guides), it is a spectacular waste of energy now when the zone is being flooded daily with unprecedented acts of destruction and cruelty as the MAGA emperor flexes his belief in his own ultimate power to do whatever he pleases.
So I had to blink hard to see if I’d stepped into a time machine. When it was my turn to talk, I said that what is needed most are not wish-lists or blueprints, but to cultivate readiness, facing both the best and worst-case scenarios and making the best possible preparations for navigating whatever arises, for flexibility and improvisation, and for nimble navigation.
I was also surprised how many people shared visions in which arts organizations, agencies, and funders will be showered with support and approbation without ever having to reflect how their own past actions may have alienated many of those whose support they dream of receiving.
Every professional cohort has its on jargon, and often, it becomes so cozy and familiar it begins to sound like ordinary speech. What is “the arts sector?” Some people defined it as the universe of professionally staffed nonprofit arts organizations. Others included the for-profit cultural industries such as Hollywood, television, music production and distribution. Few in either category had much to say about the vast universe of community-based artists and organizations committed to cultural democracy (pluralism, participation, and diversity in cultural life and policy).
I used part of my few minutes to point out that “the arts sector,” generally understood in this company to focus on the first of the three definitions above, needs to clean house if there is any chance of realizing its advocates’ shared hopes. How is its house dirty? Let me count just two of the ways.
First, the embedded snobbery is repugnant. No one participates in “the arts,” which is an abstraction frequently used in advocates’ self-description and self-promotion. Instead, people sing or play an instrument, go to theater performances, draw or take photos, dance, and so on. Many, many arts institutions complain of the difficulty of attracting diverse audiences and participants, but fail to notice that the signifiers of exclusivity are everywhere around them. People need only walk through many of their doors to feel This place is not for me. I always think of the research the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu did that revealed that when people were asked what other social institutions museums and opera houses reminded them of, the most common response was church, another aspirational space requiring best behavior.
Second, in the US, cultural funding is almost entirely a scarcity-based competition. If you were to do a time audit of most public and private philanthropies—given that they typically distribute funds by calling for applications, then rejecting 10, 20, even 100 of them for every one that is funded—you would learn that their largest investment is in denying requests, thereby amplifying disappointment, demoralization, and opposition. The artists and groups who reliably get their applications approved form a kind of client group for whom the system is working, if imperfectly. They typically have enough resources to hire grantwriters, obtain reviews, create high-quality videos and other documentation, and get to know funders by hobnobbing at conferences and so on.
There are other modes of support that water the roots rather than pluck what those in power deem the prettiest fruits, and all of them, when conceived and implemented properly, benefit entire communities rather than a select group of professionals: basic income grants; public service employment; subsidizing shared space and equipment; providing necessary research, training, and documentation; and much more. Making the switch—acknowledging the horrific rise of authoritarianism, its cultural impact, the future its adherents desire—would open the possibility of partnership with the huge number of people who, facing this, would have much more power by making common cause with others rather than pulling in the fences to fortify the establishment arts sector.
I am all for artists and cultural organizations entering into dialogue, developing readiness to navigate what is coming, and reaching out to everyone in this society who shares a commitment to beauty and meaning, love and justice, equity and fellowship. To start the process, allow me to suggest it’s better to face the full range of possibilities and engage with allies than to keep the blinders on, wishing on a star that what we fear will magically disappear.
“Resist” by Rev Sekou. I think I’ve posted this one before, but it rings out today and definitely bears repeating.