The struggle for arts and minds

There’s
no time like wartime for looking at the equation between the arts and society.

            If you read the equation one way, it
says art is our social critic and conscience. The other way around, the
equation says society must conscientiously support the arts so our humanity,
sensitivity, and generosity can stay alive.

            But when war looms, all equations
are off. The death cult prospers. And artists are up against one wall or
another.

            Many of them deal just fine. Look at
actor Sean Penn, who recently visited Iraq to form a human connection with the
people George Bush hankers to bomb.

            More often, though, the artists who
speak out are less well-known people working on their own turf.

Last week, for
example, a group of local performing artists staged a “Spirit of Peace” event at the
First Unitarian Church. The event included dance, music, comedy, drama, and
combinations of these.

            Sure, it’s easy to say this was
preaching to the choir. Like a few other local religious groups, the Unitarians
so regularly (and admirably) support peace that there’s a risk of
“ghetto-ization.” But to turn that equation
around: Why do so few congregations actively resist war and promote peace? Anyway,
it’s about synergy. All efforts merge into a kind of wave-action that gets
people thinking, and possibly more willing to do something on their own.

            Liz Hallmark, a performer-teacher
who directs Hallmark Danceworks and helped organize Spirit of Peace, says an
artists’ anti-war movement “is percolating up.” She describes her own
evolution: “Back in November,” she says, “I got pissed off at what Bush is
doing. I began to start imaging ideas for an anti-war piece. I put out a call
to the general community.” She says she’s been contacting local congregations
to host performances of a new piece. “I’m calling it Breach,” she says. “There’s a kind of Zeitgeist about this.”

            Another Spirit of Peace
collaborator, Vicki Duval, helped roll out a classic, maybe the classic anti-war play, Aristophanes’
Lysistrata for a March 3 performance
at the Jewish Community Center. The plot hits militarism where it hurts: Women
on both sides of a war conspire to withhold sex until their men make peace.
Duval’s work was not in isolation. SUNY Brockport women’s and anti-war groups
staged the play that same night. It was all part of the international
Lysistrata Project (www.LysistrataProject.com), which covered more than 40
countries and hundreds of productions. But Duval, a BOCES arts-education
coordinator, makes modest claims. “The arts,” she says, “are a way for us to
document our times, to try to organize chaos in a way we can look at it and not
be overwhelmed by it.”

            In the same vein, the mass media
recently were filled with something they usually won’t touch on a dare:
contemporary poetry. Politics was the real story, though. When First Reader
Laura Bush sought literary lights for a White House symposium, poets everywhere
seized a teachable moment. Led by Copper Canyon Press editor Sam Hamill, they
formed Poets Against the War (www.poetsagainstthewar.org), whose online archive
had more than 10,000 contributions at last count.

            The national project spawned local
Poets for Peace readings, etc., all over the map. Here in Rochester, SUNY
Brockport English prof Ralph Black led an afternoon reading at the Central
Library downtown. The readings included original work, snippets from the canon,
and off-the cuff volleys at US foreign policy. (Proud disclosure: I read an
anti-war poem of my own. The rest of the time, I sat there in total
objectivity.)

Yes, the arts and artists
do respond when society runs amuck.

            But it’s just as clear that society
— through the public sector, the closest we’ve got to something that
represents everyone — usually fights back. Money is the weapon.

            I’m not saying that government
agencies today are hammering artists for opposing war against Iraq. That
punishment will come later, with many an invitation unwritten, and worse. (In
my nightmares, I already hear the distinguished senator from a Red State: My fellow Americans, why should the taxpayer
support this unpatriotic filth?)

            The arts are whacked every year. In
fact, they’ve been underfunded practically since the day government money
started making a difference. During the Great Depression, public funding helped
unemployed artists keep body and soul together. But the old regime prevailed
during the McCarthy Era purges. Since then, it’s been axiomatic: Artists and
arts groups are basically on their own, and those who get out of line are up
the creek. So it’s fair to anticipate that excursions into anti-war organizing
will cost somebody eventually.

            But regardless of history, how are
the arts faring at the moment? Look at the local scene. Even after the Monroe
County legislature softened the draconian cuts that County Executive Jack Doyle
wanted to ram through last fall, the arts came out a loser. The Rochester
Philharmonic, for example, got its annual allocation reduced from $330,000 in
2002 to $160,000 in 2003.

            And the RPO is thankfully better off
than some orchestras during this quadruple-whammy time of recession, withering
stock portfolios, permanent war, and promiscuous tax givebacks. Last fall, for
example, the Tulsa Philharmonic ceased operations entirely. (Tulsa Phil
officials blamed it on not just “tenuous financial conditions” but on the usual
suspects, unionized musicians negotiating a new contract.)

“Yeah, it’s a
difficult time,” says Sarah Lentini, executive director of the Arts and
Cultural Council for Greater Rochester. “It’s not easy to be a non-profit.”

            Lentini recalls the New York State
Council on the Arts took a 10 percent hit two years ago, after climbing back
from a 50 percent cut a decade before. “It’s not that someone is out to do
damage to the arts,” she says. And she emphasizes that arts organizations
really are foundations of local economies — especially in a town like
Rochester, with institutions like the Eastman School of Music and the George
Eastman House.

            I think someone or something is out to damage the arts. It’s just
that the damage is chronic and thus easily missed or mischaracterized. The
mechanism is persistent underfunding by the public sector, causing artists and
organizations to waste their precious energy begging. (Consider poor Public
Broadcasting’s endless pledge drives.)

            The National Endowment for the Arts
published a study comparing total government funding for the arts and museums
in 11 advanced nations. As you’d guess, the US was dead last in per capita
annual spending. But the gaps are amazing. In the mid-1990s, while our economy
supposedly boomed, our government support came to $6 a head, versus $9 in much
poorer Ireland, and a world below the $91 in Finland.

            In 1995, US government arts support
— again, on the federal, state, and local levels combined — totaled around
$1.5 billion. How’s that compared to what the Pentagon gets?

            I get sick just thinking about it.

            I know, there are more urgent
priorities. Lots of people get sick thinking about the lack of universal health
insurance, and get sick from the lack
thereof.

            But during this new Scoundrel Time,
artists should be protesting their own impoverishment as a class, as well as
fighting the war machine that robs their lifeblood.

This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2003.