This Week in Art (FYA)

Originally published on ForYourArt on February 12, 2009

We have a complicated relationship with art and there is a lack of consistency in the discourse around its importance and value. The question, our question, is being played out in Washington. Is Art Important? The art community must articulate a response that can be understood by those who are outside of it.

In last week’s letter, I wondered if the NEA was the right long term model for the survival of our cultural institutions. This week, the Coburn amendment (which passed in the Senate by a wide majority) killed the inclusion of $50m support for the NEA, approximately one seventeen thousandth of the entire stimulus package. (Keep up with the latest on CultureMonster.com) The amendment aims: "to ensure that taxpayer money is not lost on wasteful and non-stimulative projects such as funding museums, theaters and art centers." The Los Angeles Times' Mike Boehm summed it up: "Maybe the arts just aren't that stimulating."

Never the less, the viral support for Quincy Jones' call for a culture czar crossed into prime time on Sunday when Grammy president Neil Portnow publicly asked President Obama to create a Secretary of Arts. The groundswell of support currently on the internet for this idea may very well have been the impetus to include this idea in Portnow's introduction but, again, the question of whether Washington has the solution to the funding problems of cultural institutions in America needs to be addressed. A fundamental issue emerging for museums and cultural institutions is that although they are bound by their connection to material culture, they need to think themselves out of that box in order to draw people in. It all comes down to execution and leadership. A "white paper" on what this will look like is yet to emerge.

I was heartened by Music Center/Big City Forum's Leonardo Bravo's, who is one of many grappling with the problem of redefining the mandate of cultural institutions in this economy, response to my email last week:

I think for too long cultural institutions have relied on inefficient models of interface with their audience. One of the positives of this economic meltdown is that most of our assumptions about value are falling into disarray, which provides an incredible opportunity for institutions to become more nimble and responsive to audiences that are used to manipulating and engaging with content on an active basis.

Public program directors of many of our leading cultural institutions convened at the Hammer Museum in preparation for Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980 (PST). My encounters with them reaffirmed my belief that this sentiment is strong on the ground in L.A., and we are uniquely poised to act upon it. But only a collective response will succeed.

Marcia Stepanek (via Beth's Blog) who writes the CauseGlobal Blog mentioned an interview with new media guru Clay Shirky who described the importance of new activist leadership:

What I think is coming is a new type of leadership style that will expand into other kinds of collective action—in particular, real-world collective action. And so, for a traditional institution, this is really a moment where, if the organizational structure doesn't change, then the institution is essentially going to find itself working at cross-purposes with many of its members.

Tuesday, I joined a group of local arts administrators at Los Angeles Art Association's Gallery 825 for a meeting with Fractured Atlas, the national non-profit services provider to artists and non-profits. Their programs, like Place+Displaced, represent forward thinking approaches to cultural production and engagement.

This week we announced that ForYourArt will bring Postopolis! L.A to Los Angeles for Los Angeles Art Weekend which takes place in April. The brain child of Joseph Grima, the Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, this event will bring six influential art and architecture bloggers – David Basulto, ArchDaily, Plataforma Arquitectura, Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG, Dan Hill, City of Sound, Bryan Finoki, Subtopia, Jace Clayton, Mudd Up!, Règine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art – from the all over the world for what is potentially a model for the future. We believe that, in the future, this will be an effective way cultural organizations will reach out and engage—without walls.

The Getty is also leading the way. Tyler Green reported in his blog, Modern Art Notes, on a program which could transform the way museums catalogue their collections and share their content with the public: "The Getty's project is ambitious: It aims to replace the expensive dead-tree scholarly catalogue with an open-source, web-accessible-to-all, digital catalogue format." Getty Foundation associate director Joan Weinstein, who is managing the Getty Project, told him:

In transforming the catalogues to an online environment, they won't be just scholarly. The premise is that you can include all kinds of information online that you can't in a print volume, information for everyone from the general public to students to scholars. You don't have to wait until everything's complete to put it online. You can have multiple voices in single entries—for more recent work, you can have both artists and curators speaking. Same thing for older collections. You can have conservators speaking and you can put the conservation documentation online. You could even super-impose an x-ray onto the image of a work of art itself.

I'm hooked on Kevin Kelly's Lifestream, which I conveniently added to my "igoogle" home page. In a recent post, he pointed to more examples that systems are changing:

We now live in a new economy created by shrinking computers and expanding communications. This new economy represents a tectonic upheaval in our commonwealth, a far more turbulent reordering than mere digital hardware has produced. The new economic order has its own distinct opportunities and pitfalls. If past economic transformations are any guide, those who play by the new rules will prosper, while those who ignore them will not. We have seen only the beginnings of the anxiety, loss, excitement and gains that many people will experience as our world shifts to a new highly technical planetary economy.

To me, the fact that arts funding is in the realm of being considered "pork" is an indication of just how much work we have cut out for us. But together, we can lead a new charge and create nimble, inclusive models.