This week, the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington will cut its staff to 148 positions, a loss of 131 persons from the start of its 1995 fiscal year and an overall 47 percent reduction.
It is the final blow in what has been a very bad year for government support of the arts. The Endowment, established in the 1960s during the “Great Society” administration of President Lyndon Johnson, is closing out this year with a 1996 budget penciled in for $99.5 million, a falloff of about 40 percent from its already reduced 1995 budget of $162.3 million. And to add insult to injury, that new budget is saddled with two legally debatable amendments, tacked on by Sen. Jesse Helms, which prohibit denigration of religion and depiction in a “patently offensive way” of sexual or excretory activities.
Jane Alexander, the able NEA chairman who began her administration trying to charm such conservatives as Helms, is now faced with what she bravely calls “reinventing” the Endowment with a new set of guidelines in which grant requests from non-profit arts organizations are reduced to four umbrella categories.
And it’s not going to get any better. The same battle over the NEA will go on next year, with Congress still debating whether the Endowment should be phased out altogether.
Meanwhile, on the state level, the budget for the Illinois Arts Council has been cut from $6.7 million to $5.5 million, the lowest level in 10 years. Cuts in grants to major Chicago cultural institutions were particularly sharp. The Art Institute, which has just ended a Monet exhibit that brought millions in tourist dollars to the state, went from $199,000 to $50,000, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra dropped from $137,000 to $50,000.
“It’s everywhere, and you can’t just blame it on the Republicans,” says Peter Zeisler, a pioneer of the not-for-profit movement and former head of the Theatre Communications Group, a national advocacy organization. “It’s happening all over the world.”
The best advice Zeisler can offer is the cold caution, “Forget about government support of the arts. This slashing of funds is not going to end soon.”
In arts organizations across our city, that warning already is being heeded. Roche Schulfer, executive director of Goodman Theatre, says he is mapping out next year’s budget assuming that most if not all of the $157,000 in NEA grants Goodman received this year will not be there.
And at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, an invaluable cultural resource for Chicago, director Barbara Scharres is trying to adjust programming without $29,000 in NEA funds, which represent almost 10 percent of the Film Center’s total annual operating budget. One method, reluctantly undertaken, has been to raise single ticket prices from $5 to $6, beginning in January.
Zeisler’s suggestion that arts organizations will have to explore new avenues of funding and put greater emphasis on contributions from individuals gets a cool response from Scharres.
“We’ve been exploring new avenues for years,” she says. “Benefits, fundraisers, anything we can think of. And despite that, we’ve seen a reduction in individual gifts. There’s so much pressure for contributions from every social and arts cause.”
Looking at the unpromising year ahead, Scharres reflects the feelings of many an arts administrator as she contemplates the cold new era. “We’ve had the time to see this coming,” she says, “but we haven’t had the time to solve the problems.”
