It was clear during the campaign which aspiring leader of the free world was the arts candidate. Barack Obama—his earnest mug the inspiration for a thousand loving portraits—had a brief but strong voting record on arts issues and a platform that called for more money for the National Endowment for the Arts and more art in the schools. Artists across the country took up his cause. But two months after the election, with the economy in free fall and the Middle East on fire, they’re still waiting to see exactly what his administration’s arts program will look like.
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Work was begun on the Obama campaign’s arts platform back in the drastically different old days—a year or so ago—by a 33-member national arts policy committee whose Chicago contingent included philanthropist Joan Harris, DePaul law professor Patty Gerstenblith, Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell, and attorney Michael Dorf. It was noticeably short on specific promises. Sure, the president was committed to using his bully pulpit to talk up the arts and arts education and to promote cultural diplomacy through artistic exchange. And yes, the visa process for visiting artists would definitely be streamlined. Support for pending legislation that would give artists the same tax advantages collectors get when they donate work to museums was reiterated. And artists were promised the same health care coverage Obama was pledging for every American. But the call for more money for the NEA didn’t say how much more. The proposal for creating an artists corps to teach in low-income schools didn’t make it clear whether the teaching artists would be paid. Nor did the plan for expanded public/private partnerships between schools and arts organizations—which implied endorsement of the existing arrangement, in which art is an add-on provided by outsiders rather than an integral part of the school curriculum—offer any details about how things would be amplified. Crafted to be flexible, the platform was optimistic but vague. Its bounty could be large or small.
Their document, completed shortly after the election, notes that “federal policy towards the arts has been fragmented,” and calls for a holistic approach. “There were a whole bunch of issues we could have brought up,” Rome says—each organization had its own priorities—”but we wrote not for just the next year, or for an appropriation cycle, but for the next four years. It’s a long-vision document, and we were pretty modest in what we requested. You don’t see actual appropriation numbers other than [those for] the NEA.”
In a world that’s changing before anybody’s ink can dry, the coalition’s wish list is already looking a little wimpy around the edges. Last month former Kennedy Center head Michael Kaiser suggested an outright arts bailout, and calls for stronger action are bubbling up from the same fertile electronic field that helped get Obama elected. One online petition takes the coalition’s vision of a new presidential assistant to another level, proposing a cabinet position for a Secretary of the Arts—an idea promoted by Quincy Jones, who might even be a candidate for the job. Another demands that 1 percent of the rapidly expanding Obama stimulus package be used to implement something like the New Deal arts projects. Quick now, all you art majors, what’s 1 percent of a trillion dollars?v
