The FY 11 Arts Budget: Is My Hair On Fire?

There is concern about the state of arts funding in D.C., including the potential for a tax on live performance. Policy-makers must find money to preserve social services, and it’s reasonable to be concerned. The arts are frequently pitted against social services in funding battles. However, due to regular and informed advocacy over the last 48 months, it seems likely that the arts will not be cut further.

The Safety Net for the District’s most needy was a major issue in last year’s budget deliberations, and it remains a major concern this year. The budget fight happening in the District is mirrored in similar fights across the country. The Americans for the Arts are tracking budget debates nationwide, and they recently shared an article which noted,

“Children’s welfare supporters faced off against art advocates in Sacramento because of a proposal to spend a half million dollars on new exhibits at the future Crocker Art Museum…. ‘We’re in a crisis. We’re in a situation where kids are going to die,’ child advocate Bob Wilson said.”

That terrible crisis occurring within California’s budget battle highlights two things: that the most important social service politicians can provide – long term – is sound fiscal policy; and that the biggest mistake arts advocates can make right now is to turn a blind eye to the most needy. Arts advocates must speak out to preserve arts education, arts investment, and public art. But we should also be fighting for affordable housing, meals for the homeless, and education. Because we are in a down economy, it is critical that arts advocates take the time to inform themselves, and participate in these discussions intelligently. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “We’re each entitled to our own set of opinions, not our own set of facts.”

The proposed FY 11 budget includes a 10% cut for the arts this year, which is in line with general reductions in development spending. Due to no fault of their own, many city Safety Net programs have been decimated by the economic decline, including, as an example, low income housing. The Housing Trust Fund, which supported affordable housing for the most needy in the District, had grown over the last decade based on a dedicated appropriation allocating15 percent of deed recordation and transfer taxes (from sale of real estate) to the fund. But when the market crashed, and people stopped buying homes, the fund also crashed, and money for low-income housing projects disappeared.

Policy-makers have to find new revenue streams because money for existing programs has disappeared. Last year, the council took a number of steps, including: DC’s general sales tax rate was increased from 5.75 percent to 6 percent; The Cigarette tax was raised from $2 per pack to $2.50; The Gasoline tax was raised from 20 cents per gallon to 23.5 cents, matching the rate in Maryland, and revenues from the tax were moved from DC’s highway trust fund to the city’s general fund. With all of the things they did do last year, there were a number of things that they considered, and did not do. One example is a tax on live theater performances.

In some ways, a ticket tax would make sense. Last year, Ed Lazere, Director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, wrote a post in Greater Greater Washington, suggesting that the city should impose a theater ticket tax. He noted, “If you go to an event at the Verizon Center or a Nationals game, the ticket sales tax is 10 percent. Movie tickets are taxed at the basic rate of 5.75 percent. But people who buy tickets to theater performances — plays, musicals, opera, dance, etc. — don’t pay any sales tax at all.” Ed was one of the people responsible for securing the housing trust fund appropriation mentioned earlier, and is a respected voice in public policy considerations.

When the DC Advocates for the Arts visited with Councilmember Kwame Brown last year protesting arts funding cuts, his staff discussed the possibility of a dedicated tax for the arts generated from a ticket tax. Before the bill could even be introduced, however, arts businesses, already completely strapped by the down economy, were successful in convincing policy-makers that the proposal would actually reduce total revenues. (A tax would effectively make ticket prices more expensive, and this could affect number of tickets sold.) This year, again, council members want to raise revenue so that they can save programs. So again this year, a lot of ideas are being floated, including the same theater tax idea. Given that it’s election season, it’s unlikely that arts interests will be completely ignored to raise a small amount of tax revenue. The DC Advocates for the Arts will keep you informed as the budget debates proceed, and we hope that you will participate to whatever extent you are able.

Dr. Heschel, meet Dr. Ehrlich. Dr. Ehrlich, meet Dr. Hanna…

When I was a young puck – and I was more puck than buck – I was a research assistant in the Environment and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Environment and Security Program looks at connections between Environmental degradation and devastation, and national and international security. There are centrally two connections: scarcity leading to wars, and environmental degradation and devastation adversely affecting national security (through inability to sustain physically, and/or fiscally.) A growing number of us continue to be concerned with those issues today.

I recently started following Geoff Dabelko, the current Director of the Environment and Security Program, on twitter (#geoffdabelko.) Yesterday, Geoff tweeted a blog post on The New Security Beat titled ‘Reading Radar: Population and Sustainability.’ ehrlich_400pxThe post opens considering a paper by Paul Ehrilch (The Population Bomb) about the Millenium Assesment of Human Behaviour (MAHB.) The post states that the MAHB was created “because societies understand the magnitude of environmental challenges, yet often still fail to act.” It goes on to quote Ehrlich, “The urgent need now is clearly not for more natural science… but rather for better understanding of human behaviors and how they can be altered to direct Homo sapiens onto a course toward sustainability.”

This coming summer an article I wrote extracting material from my book (Somatic Ecology) will be published in the journal Somatics. In the article I write,

“Science is a superior tool for understanding the world, but it cannot provide perspective on how to interpret or act on the data collected. The environmental crisis, which threatens the long-term health of our cultures and our economies, is not the result of incomplete science. It is the result of incomplete perspective.”

…Which is pretty similar to Ehrlich’s understanding.

Rational actors in the economic system balance the cost of invested debt with the benefit of current equity. If you’re not an economics person another way to say that is: you know if you spend everything you have at the beginning of the month on fancy dinners, you won’t have anything to eat at the end of the month, so you don’t. But what if the end of the month is a time period at an indistinguishable distance in the future? How would that affect your behaviour? AND, what if you the actor involved were responsible to an electorate over a far shorter time span than it will take for the benefits of savings to register? Well, then you get inaction.

2008-06-05-heschelI argue in my book that we have lost an immediate understanding of ourselves in the real world. Because we no longer have a strong, grounded, animal experience of the world, our own shadows are threatening to envelop us. As the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs, but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.”

We are not adequately seeing, and we are not adequately feeling. The thesis of Somatic Ecology is that by developing a healthier relationship to our personal ecologies, we will develop a healthier relationship to the global ecology. I’m encouraged by recent developments, and look forward to sharing more of my research. You can see a few things here and here.

Kathe Kollwitz and Communal Memory

Artists are individual, but we are also representatives of communities. Eventually though, artwork becomes simply part of human history. Art and art forms are shared.

For some reason this makes me think of Kathe Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945.) The current Kollwitz wikipedia entry says she “was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor, whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war.” Here is a small gallery of her work:


I saw her work as a child in the home of my paternal grandparents. They had two of her prints in the hall of their home. The met in New York having fled the Holocaust, and as a child, and a generation removed, I had no idea what that really meant. That reality, their reality, was told to me, but it was so far removed from my experience (blessings) that of course I couldn’t understand it. One of the ways that I did consciously, in my childish way, relate to it was through the memory I experienced in the Kollwitz images. Art is like that; it eventually becomes unhinged from the personal and communal associations that fed its creation.