The sad state of state arts agencies

The nation’s beleaguered state arts agencies have turned into “cash machines without clout,” according to a study from the Rand Corp., the Santa Monica-based nonprofit research institute on culture and public policy. If those agencies want to replenish their dwindling cash and increase their clout, the report says, it would behoove them to pay less heed to their core constituency of artists, arts lovers and nonprofit arts organizations.

Instead, the study contends, agencies such as the California Arts Council, which has seen its per capita funding plummet to last in the nation amid the state’s budget crisis, should be seeking ways to generate cultural experiences for a wider public of “Americans who aren’t comfortable or aren’t interested in traditional nonprofit arts venues.” The more people who are served, argues the study’s author, economist Julia F. Lowell, the more the governors and legislators who set spending priorities will feel compelled to ante up funding for the arts.

Jonathan Katz, chief executive of the Washington, D.C.-based National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, complains that the study paints too narrow a picture of state arts funders’ allegiances and underestimates their ability to reach a broad public. “The thesis is that state arts agencies have been in league with major organizations” to the exclusion of others, Katz said. “I don’t think an objective and broad-based look bears that out.” The need to broaden audiences, he said, “is not news to state arts agencies. It’s how they work.”

For her report, titled “State Arts Agencies 1965-2003: Whose Interests to Serve?,” the Santa Monica-based Lowell drew on interviews with staffers in 13 state arts agencies -- including California’s -- that are part of an ongoing project by the Wallace Foundation to increase the national arts audience. She advocates “going to where the people are” and hails an Ohio initiative that’s seen international performing groups playing to near-capacity houses while touring churches and synagogues instead of traditional venues.

The Rand study found that, although state arts agencies want to broaden their reach, they lack follow-through because they are “quite anxious about diverting scarce resources away from artists and arts groups they have long known and respected. They still see themselves primarily as advocates for arts providers” and consequently “have not always ensured that the arts providers have, in turn, met the needs and interests of the broader public.” By aligning themselves with the nonprofit arts establishment, Lowell writes, state arts agencies have fallen into “near-irrelevancy to their states’ political establishments.”

“It’s not like they’re sitting on their bottoms. There’s all kinds of experimentation” to reach new audiences, Lowell said in an interview.

But she thinks it’s crucial for those experiments to succeed and supplant old grant-making policies if arts agencies are to accumulate political clout and, with it, cash. Even in the expansive 1990s, she said, state arts agencies saw their collective budgets grow just 57%, compared with an 89% spurt for state governments overall.

The study, published Friday, is the first in a series of reports that Rand plans to issue on the challenges facing state arts agencies.