2006 Disciplicity & Academics Excerpt – OAC First Impression

I’m always fascinated by arriving at the headquarters of an influential, well known organization that has impacted my daily life indirectly for years and finding an insignificant looking, bland little building from which so much influence flows. It was somehow refreshing to arrive at what is considered one of the best state arts councils in the nation, if not the best, and to find it housed in a humble little converted Victorian. It lent a sense of open-mindedness to my attitude as we walked in to sit in an under-heated room for an interview with the man who had more or less defined the Ohio Arts Council (OAC) for three decades.

The interview was a short hour, and it was followed by a perfectly contrasting interview with a bureaucratic subordinate. The director was tanned, dashing, well spoken and he seemed to know exactly what to say about the motivations and processes behind the OAC. In contrast, the bureaucratic subordinate was less than plain, spoke in sporadic over-detailed garble about the admittedly complicated functioning of the organization, and was almost unbearably boring to listen to. The sales pitch was much more pleasant than the product, after a fashion.


The director went right to the point and spoke about the OAC’s commitment to public value based on qualitative rather than quantitative criteria. He spoke about the recent shift of the organization from a transactional process to a transformational one. He mentioned significant and exciting programs that sent Ohio artists overseas and brought foreign artists to Ohio. In a description of the political difficulties faced by an organization such as the OAC, he told us about the Appalachian phenomenon and how he dealt with the political goals of those in power in the state legislature, and how these goals shifted continuously. He spoke about the difficulty in judging public good – how a mural on a river wall in a small town in eastern Ohio had to be almost directly compared to the needs of the major orchestral symphony in the state’s largest city. One could easily tell that the director was a master salesman and politician. Nobody that white tans that well unless they are a master salesman.


The subordinate, as mentioned above, rattled off an endless stream of organizational details, budgets, grants panel processes and errata. I sat back and wondered where the true nature of the organization lay. As I had no direct experience working with the OAC, I had only the opinions of colleagues who had to guide me, most of which were not completely positive. According to the director and subordinate however, the problems about which my colleagues had complained had been recently resolved. As a matter of fact the subordinate explained these solutions in intimate and excruciating detail. So, all in all, I wasn’t quite sure what to take away from my visit to one of the best, or the best, state arts council in the nation. Other than maybe that they had been led by a director very good at directing, and who believed in the mission, and that satisfying the numberless constituents necessarily attached to such a public organization was a very complicated and ever-changing process indeed. It gave me a mixture of inspiration and dread.

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2006 Disciplicity & Academics Excerpt – Art Hates Democracy

As a historically and by design multicultural nation, cultural policy in the United States has been necessarily enigmatic. One can easily say that in defining the driving policy not only for culture, but for the majority of domestic matters, the government looks to the tenets of free market economics. Where the free market fails to provide ample opportunity for citizens to achieve a maintainable pursuit of happiness or some such thing, the government steps in and tries to establish a method of repairing the market. There are a few places where the government cannot get the open market to support real equality of opportunity (or a lack of industrial infrastructure which can create the market), and so we have permanent semi-social economic fixtures like welfare, social security, the postal service, education and health services, and certain sections of the arts industry. The key to the semi-social economics of the arts industry is that it is only certain art forms that make use of government protection from the free market, indeed, only certain sections need it. There is a thriving arts industry in the free market – many people are making a lot of money from art of various forms, whether it is film, design, theatre, dance or visual arts. So, assuming that the main reason arts administrators talk about cultural policy is to fathom the depths of public funding and tax incentives, they are faced with two difficult caveats in justifying a semi-protected market for the arts. The first one, difficult as it may be, is easy compared to the second. The first caveat is justifying the arts as important to communities while not being sufficiently supported in the free market by those communities that it is so important to. The second, and as of yet hardly approached caveat, is to answer the question of why some arts need protection and others don’t, and more importantly, what constitutes the types of arts that are to be protected.


American cultural policy has in general recoiled from directly dealing with the above policy questions. Although administrations and bureaucrats have produced numerous and flowery (and some not so flowery) documents and statements declaring their view of the arts as integral to a citizen’s education and quality of life, real money is in short supply. The entire NEA is only worth a few B-bombers. The basic federal policy is to supply seed money requiring matching funds to organizations which then act as distributors of funds to artists, whether they are symphonies or basket weavers. State and local policy mirrors this (as do unfortunately many foundations) but of course there is much more variability in policy across that spectrum. Arts organizations in general have tried to increase the amount of public funding by proving the value of arts to a community, by hook or by crook (i.e. by showing art’s positive effect on educational, tourist, or economic factors or anything else not having to do with the actual art), while opponents have tricked them into tying the value of art to public good. Of course it’s hard to argue for the public good of something that very little of the public seems actually interested in. It is my opinion that the nonprofit arts industry has been handed a losing proposition on this matter. In a country where democratic values reign supreme, it is always a losing proposition to argue for public money on the basis of positive public or community effects – for a cultural phenomenon that is inherently subjective, personal, aristocratic and undemocratic due to its true value lying in personal cathartic effects. Art will not be subjugated to democracy, mob rule, or quantitative valuation without losing an important and necessary portion of its true value. Sorry kids, equality does not go to bed with individualism without a few spats and compromises. Regardless, non-profit arts organizations have cornered themselves into proving the value of their product to foundations, the government and wealthy individuals because on some deep level they long ago gave up (or maybe some never really tried – or never wanted to) on convincing the free market of the value of their product. The whole public good junk comes in and says well maybe you’re having so much trouble because your product is not truly valuable. And that, unfortunately, sadly, may be true. Because, as said previously, there is a thriving for-profit arts industry.

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