Study Cites Gulf Between Artists, Public

Stunning increases in the numbers of American artists and arts groups over the past 30 years have far outpaced the growth in public and private support and cannot be sustained, a new federal study says.

What’s more, the report holds artists themselves partly responsible for the growing alienation it sees between the public and the arts - a gap that made recent cuts in government arts spending possible.

“Sad to say,” the study concludes, “many American citizens fail to recognize the direct relevance of art to their lives.”

Too often, the report says, arts institutions are elitist, racially segregated, class-based and isolated from the “communities they claim to serve, but don’t.”

The 193-page document, prepared by the National Endowment for the Arts for release on Wednesday, was provided in advance to The New York Times by an endowment official.

While some artists predict that the leveling off of arts spending during the 1990s will give way to better times and what the report calls a “Renaissance Lite,” the heavy spending seen in the previous three decades was probably an anomaly, the report concludes.

The report expresses the views of dozens of artists, arts officials and social critics who attended privately financed National Endowment forums in six cities in 1996, as well as the conclusions of scholars who have studied the nation’s thousands of arts groups.

It also reflects growing anxiety about the future of the arts from Jane Alexander, outgoing chairwoman of the embattled endowment, whose budget has been cut almost in half during her four-year tenure.

But unlike most arts surveys, “American Canvas,” as the report is titled, does not attribute the “marginalization of the arts” in American life mainly to the loss of support from federal, state and local governments.

It emphasizes factors like the increasing commercialization of American culture, the aging of audiences, the decline of corporate and private giving, the loss of arts education in public schools, and the attitudes of artists and cultural groups themselves.

“The arts community itself bears a measure of responsibility,” the report says, because it “neglected those aspects of participation, democratization and popularization that might have helped sustain the arts when the political climate turned sour.”

The survey quotes Alberto Duron, a Los Angeles lawyer and cultural activist.

“What’s happened to public arts funding is in no small measure the fault of the arts institutions and the individuals who run them,” he said. “Critics in Congress and elsewhere would never have been able to galvanize large segments of the public if it were not for the vulnerability of the arts community brought on by its isolation and intransigence.”

In a 1996 study cited by the report, John Kreidler, a veteran arts writer, credits the federal government, which created the endowment in 1965, and the Ford Foundation, which made $400 million in arts grants between 1957 and 1976, with helping to ignite the explosive growth of nonprofit arts groups during that period.

According to the endowment, between 1965 and 1994 the number of professional orchestras in the United States grew to 230 from 100, professional opera companies to 120 from 27, dance companies to 400 from 37, and theater companies to 425 from 56.

But the Ford Foundation saw itself as a catalyst, not a permanent provider of money for the expansion, Kreidler added. While those employed in the arts increased by 48 percent from 1970 to 1980, their earnings decreased by 37 percent, he said.

“The Ford era could not be sustained,” Kreidler said.

Arts groups today, the report argues, are battered by tensions between the marketplace and public responsibility that are crowding out nonprofit culture, often at the expense of quality.

Though surrounded by myriad forms of art and entertainment, a “staggering” number of strikingly original American voices “find themselves so far from the cultural mainstream as to be virtually silent,” the report says.

By “enshrining art within the temples of culture - the museum, the concert hall, the proscenium stage,” the report says, “we may have lost touch with the spirit of art: its direct relevance to our lives.”

Meanwhile, even those institutions like art museums, whose visitors are multiplying, are increasingly hard pressed financially. For instance, the report cites a 1995 survey of 174 members of the Association of Art Museum Directors that showed that museum expenses outstripped income by 22 percent.

Similarly, Dance/USA’s survey of the 65 largest dance companies, all with budgets over $1 million, reported total expenses of $257 million and total revenue of $163.7 million, for a 36 percent overall deficit.

While private contributions to the arts will remain the financial linchpin of the nonprofit arts economy, private support from foundations, corporations and individuals has fallen from an all-time high of $10.23 billion in 1992 to just under $10 billion in 1995, the first three-year period of no or negative real growth in the 31 years that such statistics have been kept, the report states.

Corporations’ share of the donations declined from 11.8 percent in 1992 to 9.3 percent in 1995.

“Given the many social challenges facing American society,” the report asserts, “it’s unlikely that the competition for funding will be any less keen any time soon.”

Even when the operating incomes of art museums were included, along with public and private contributions to the arts, the nonprofit arts sector of the economy totaled just $7.3 billion, or “slightly more than one-thousandth of the gross domestic product that year,” says the report, citing a 1993 study by economists James Heilbrun and Charles Gray.

Americans spent $4.31 billion for admission to live nonprofit performing events in 1990, the report says, less than half of what they paid “for flowers, seeds and potted plants that year.”