There are some things in life that the more you know about, the less you understand. Funding for the arts seems to be one of these things. At a quick glance the situation seems straightforward enough: As a nonprofit organization you might have a small, underpaid but dedicated staff who work days, nights, weekends, and holidays to fill out and mail the interminable government grant applications - federal, state, and local - and who spend what spare time they have thinking up special projects for next year's proposals. Next you have a Board of Trustees, equally overworked but usually not paid at all, who provide the necessary entrance into the business and corporate world. Then you have your individual contributors who, year after year, give donations and emotional support. If you are lucky you have some women's auxiliary to organize special fund-raising events. If your are even more fortunate, you have a volunteer or intern to research the countless local and national foundations to find those few who might, just might, be interested in your company, over and above thousands of others whose proposals drop through their mail slots every year.
And, in the meantime, you try to get a show together.
Complex Situation
Upon closer examination, however, the situation proves far more complicated. Having worked for several years in the nonprofit arts, I thought this description was a fairly accurate one; but now, after conversations with administrators, artists, marketing consultants, and government employees in charge of funding for the arts, I have discovered that there is more to this kind of giving than the well-known staples of individuals, foundations, corporations, and federal government support. Potential donors also include state and local arts commissions, regional arts commissions, business arts commissions, physicians' and lawyers' groups, arts service organizations, and innumerable combinations thereof. When Doug Wheeler, managing director of the Washington Performing Arts Society, described a Woman's Committee Annual Ball as an event that, in addition to raising funds from individual guests, was also underwritten by American Express, it became apparent that the "state of the arts" in this country has reached a hitherto unparalleled degree of sophistication, convergence, divergence, leading ultimately - or so it seems to me - to chaos.
Which is not to say that funding sources are laying themselves out on a tray, buffet-style, for arts administrators to spear with a toothpick. True to some version of Murphy's Law, the only thing in this country that seems to be multiplying faster than funding sources is the far greater number of arts companies themselves. Orchestras, ballet companies, theaters, presenters, arts agencies, workshops, and experimental groups have mushroomed over the past twenty years. Some are managing to survive; others are not. The key to successful competition in the field these days seems to be an adept and resourceful company manager who can not only produce noteworthy forms of art, but also successfully develop a sophisticated staff able to cope with the complex and ever more competitive funding situation.
It has not always been this way. Public memory is short, but a few of us probably can remember the Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts projects of the post-Depression era. This was the first major attempt at government patronage of the arts in the United States. It proved to be the
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