Omar Lerman Eric Larrabee Financial Statement 1971-72

Statement In Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pseudolus, contemplating a flagon of wine, asks, "Was 1 a good year?" For the Council, Year 1, the first year of major State appropriation for the arts, was indeed a vintage year.

Year 2—which is what 1971-72 represents—was its equal. True, there was a significant drop in the amount of money appropriated for Council distribution—$5 million, to be exact, or $2.7 million if one discounts the previous year's special appropriation of $2.3 million for the New York Public Library. Equally true, there was a significant growth in applications for financial assistance, which—again to be exact—jumped from 850 to 1,216. This awesome double threat to the funding process was faced with purpose and dedication by staff and Council alike. The consequences were that 805 organizations were supported by the Council in Year 2 compared to the 600 supported in Year 1.

Several questions had to be answered, of course, before the Council's funding plan for Year 2 could be brought into focus. The principal one was how to insure appropriate and necessary support to the many organizations "saved" by Council assistance in Year 1 and remain responsive to organizations applying for first-time assistance in Year 2. Balance and selectivity were recognized as the determining factors. Maintaining this balance between support of the established New York State arts resources and the newly applying ones required painstaking scrutiny and perception. Although a total of 805 organizations receivedsupport from the Council under the Local Assistance Act for 1971-72, some received funds for several activities within different disciplines. The table below, which shows the number of organizations assisted by each Council program, therefore reflects interdisciplinary activity to the extent that 938 instances of assistance benefited 805 applicants. In this connection, it is also worth rioting that the Special Programs support to arts organizations serving predominantly black and Puerto Rican audiences encompassed a wide range of disciplines. (The 116 Special Programs assistance grants went toward programs in the following disciplines: 1 in film and TV/media, 2 in literature, 14 in dance, 19 in music, 34 in theatre, 17 in the visual arts, and 29 in a combination of art forms.) These figures do not take into account the 573 organizations served by the Council-sponsored Touring Program, Exhibitions, Technical Assistance, Film Speakers Bureau, Visiting Artists, The Composer in Performance, Poets and Writers, and Isolated Communities Program. Nor do they include the numerous organizations represented among the estimated 3,500 inquiries handled by the Council's InformationCenter. Year 2 was a vintage year.

Council programinstances of assistance

Arts Service Organizations24 Film, TV/Media, Literature110 Film 57; TV/Media 37; Literature 16 Performing Arts482 Dance 121; Music 158; Theatre 130;Presenting Organizations73 Special Programs116 Visual Arts206 Museum Aid 125; Community Projects 81 The Arts and Government in New YorkState - a statement by the Executive Director of the New York State Council on the Arts for the Council's 1971 -72 Annual Report Earlier this year there was an exchange of letters in an upstate newspaper between a member of the Legislature and one of his constituents, the president of the local art society. The latter was defending government support of the arts against the charge that the arts are a luxury, or only the concern of an elite. Calling the legislator's attention to the officers named on his society's letterhead, he listed their occupations: schoolteacher, plumber, operator of an employmentagency, wife of an electrical contractor, school administrator, wife of a printer, blacksmith, wife of a doctor, and so on. "Very enlightening," he added, "and the rest of our membership runs the same way—not one professional artist, but all very much involved, everyone finding a chance for much personal meaning and happiness; and to them it is not a frill, but a very important part of their lives." "In this time of financial crisis for our state," the legislator replied, "I believe it to be most unjust that millions of small taxpayers are forced to help subsidize activities in which they have no interest, and in many cases are much opposed to. I have no objection to people who want to indulge in such activities, but I don't think the general public ought to pay for it. We have far more pressing needs such as schools, hospitals, and highways, and money must be found to carry on the essential programs rather than diverting funds for programs which may be enjoyable, but are certainly not essential." One could scarcely ask for a clearer contrast between the opposing views that the arts are or are not properly a public concern, or a clearer indication of the fact that the very idea of state funding for the arts is so new that challenges to it are still fundamental—whether it should in fact exist, whether among the competing priorities of a sorely stretched society the arts rank high enough to merit support from the taxpayers. It is important that these questions be asked, for an agency of government, if it is not to go stale, must be subject to constant scrutiny and criticism; and the New York State Council on the Arts—which this year administered an appropriation of over $14 million to support arts organizations and to make their resources more available to the public—is no exception. The purpose of the New York State Council on the Arts, is to provide the people of the State with services they desire but could not, for reasons that are primarily economic, otherwise obtain. It does this in large degree by funding in part, but only in part, the operations of many hundreds of organizations which, taken together, compose the sector labeled "non-profit arts" in the economy of the State. That is to say, they constitute an industry, and one which further stimulates other forms of business and industrial activity. But it is also somewhat peculiar, since it is essentially a handicraft industry which is undercapitalized and has hitherto sustained itself by relying on private patronage and by systematically underpaying its personnel. It can no longer do so. The services provided by the arts organizations of the State take a wide variety of forms, ranging from music to museum exhibits, poetry to film, fiance to drama, opera to sculpture, literature to multimedia—in short the full spectrum of means by which men and women, in every time and place, have tried to add meaning and value to their lives. The arts are among the oldest human enterprises of which we have record. We know of no society which has nottriven—in color and sound and shape and word and gesture—io pin down in permanent form its feelings and highest aspirations. If the arts in New YorkState were not regarded as valid and necessary by a substantial and widely distributed number of its citizens, the Council could not and should not exist. New YorkState has the largest concentration of cultural resources in the nation. It has three major symphony orchestras—in Buffalo, Rochester, and New York—and in the years since World War II New York City has become the international capital of music. It is the theatre capital, generating plays which are now performed everywhere in the world. It is also the dance capital for both classical and modern dance and something close to the painting capita] as well. New YorkState's museums are world-renowned and, together with historical societies, they number over five hundred. The arts are what New York is noted for —as Texas is for oil, or iowa for corn. Without its cultural institutions, as Governor Rockefeller has said, this would not be the EmpireState. When the term "arts" is used, moreover, it should always be remembered that this is no bloodless abstraction, but an endless range of living, immediate experience. The arts deal with the human ability to perceive and feel—deal with it, indeed, in the most organized and powerful way we know. They deal with human emotion, with every possible combination of pity and fear and anger and laughter. They deal above all else with pleasure, because they appeal directly to the senses of seeing and hearing and tactile feeling. Such direct, vital contact between the arts and their public is what keeps them alive, and readers of this annual report will therefore find throughout it an emphasis on the purpose towhich public monies have been put, the service provided. The mandate of the Council fromthe Governor and the Legislature is, among other things, to preserve the artistic heritage ofthe State, but not by putting it in dead storage, as though in a bank vault. Rather, the Councilhas been enjoined to make the State's cultural resources more accessible and available, andto larger and broader audiences. For if the arts can be "saved" in our time, they can only be saved by making them an integral part of everyone's daily life, a natural and legitimate activity which does not constantly need to be justified and apologized for. Paradoxically, those like the members of the upstate art society, for whom the arts are already "a very important part of their lives," sometimes end up agreeing with skeptics liketheir legislator who think the arts are the concern only of those "who want to indulge in such activities." For those who care about them the arts are their own justification—which is onereason why we defend them so badly, and why some people still regard them as unnecessary. A commitment to the arts is usually made early and irreversibly. There will have been that moment when the glowing colors on the canvas, the unfolding intentions of the playwright, or the intricate interplay of chord and melody demonstrated their power to engage not merely the mind but the entire being. The poet A. E. Housman once said that he couldnot let a line of poetry come into his head while shaving, since the goosefiesh it caused made him unable to continue. The satisfaction of the senses, that is, is supposed to be self-sufficient. We are assumed to be happy with what we have got, just as the artist is assumed to derive such ineffable rewards from his work that he need not be paid a living wage. The legislator's view is essentially the same as that of the minority which used to think of the arts (as a few, unhappily, still do) as their private domain, bought and paid for. With this attitude went a tone of hushed reverence before the masterpiece, to make it clear the cognoscenti knew something you didn't, which effectively drove away whatever members of the general public had not already been antagonized by pure snobbery. We are still suffering from this inward-looking complacency, but its days are numbered. What has happened is nothing less than a revolution, a radical transformation in the relationship between art and society in the United States. What was once peripheral and functionally dispensable is now central and essential. What we have witnessed, as Alvin Toffler put it in The Culture Consumers in 1964, is a conversion "from cult to culture"—from a minority preoccupation to a major phenomenon permeating the whole society. The nonprofit arts (to use that ugly phrase again) have achieved a social and economic importance so far in excess of their traditional role that our cultural institutions, our systems for supporting them, and—perhaps most of all—our ideas about them are still struggling to catch up. The many factors which brought this about are familiar: the sustained prosperity of the American middle class, the increase in leisure time, the wider availability of higher education, the growing concern with the quality of life. In combination they have filled the museums with crowds; stimulated the building of new theatres and art centers; brought into existence thousands of new music ensembles, theatre groups, and dance companies; and multiplied the sales of books, phonograph records, painting materials, and musical instruments, in the process they have permanently altered the conditions within which the artist works. His audience, for one thing, is now enormous. Formerly the major leisure activities outside the home were assumed to be movies and sports, but that is no longer the case. An independent study of arts organizations in New YorkState for the year 1970-71 conducted by the NationalResearchCenter of the Arts (an affiliate of Louis Harris and Associates) confirmed earlier Council staff estimates of huge statewide attendance at arts events. While in the past three years attendance for all professional sports and college basketball has remained stable at about 23 million and the figures for movies have stood at no more than 110 million, those for the nonprofit arts have been increasing appreciably each year. If present trends continue, it is thoroughly possible that in five years the arts audience will be greater than those of sports and movies combined. The economic impact is no less staggering. The NationalResearchCenter survey includedindependent, nonprofit cultural organizations from all disciplines whose annual budgets are more than $5,000. These 543 organizations showed total expenditures of $184 million, covering not only their payrolls but goods and services in their communities ranging from general contracting, printing, advertising and public relations, legal and accounting consultation, cleaning and maintenance, security, mailing and postage, to paper, wood, liability insurance, costumes, cosmetics, and al! the materials and equipment necessary to their work. A conservative estimate of the total of these expenditures for 1970-71 is $23,272,800, of which about$6.5 million went to construction activities such as carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, etc., and $3.1 million to printing alone. Most noteworthy of all in the NationalResearchCenter figures is the function of government money. State support of the nonprofit arts is unusual in that it stimulates vastly larger support from other sources, accomplishes much with little, and is amply returned to the people in the further economic activity it generates. State government support for the arts in New York is exceptional in that the organizations to which it goes' receive $15 in income from other sources for each State tax dollar spent. Furthermore, State funding of these same 543 organizations was $8.8 million, or slightly less than 5 per cent of their total expenditures, and since they spent more than $23 million on goods and services, then the State's subsidy was returned to its economy three times over. Another point too seldom remembered is the economic dependence of commerce and industry on the resources, services, and stimulus of the nonprofit arts for which no charge is made. An obvious example is the connection between the tourist trades in New YorkState—the hotel, motel, restaurant, taxi, automobile, gasoline, and souvenir business—and the cultural institutions and activities which draw tourists to the State in the first place. But note also that the two major industries of New York City—fashion and communications—are there, and will stay there at some cost to themselves, because they have to, because only there can be found the ideas and energy on which they depend. Can anyone imagine industrial design in this country, over the past quarter century, without the design collection of The Museum of Modern Art? Can anyone imagine the $12.5 billion advertising industry without a continual supply—from museums and performing arts centers and from independent writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers whom it presently does not pay—of the verbal, graphic, musical and cinematic raw material which it indefatigably consumes? In the words of the NationalResearchCenter's report, "Few industries with such modest capital and manpower served so many with so much as the arts and cultural industry in 1970-71"—and, one might add, for so little.