At a town hall meeting at City Hall on Friday to discuss the budget for the arts and announce his Arts Advisory Council, Mayor Michael Nutter again acknowledged that, yes, things are bad right now, and they will almost undoubtedly get worse. Tax revenues will continue to decrease as consumer spending plummets and the growing unemployed population finds it has less and less to spend on tax-generating goods and services.
Funding for the arts is one of the few areas that, as a whole, has actually seen net growth despite cuts, and this meeting was less gloomy than others past. The Philadelphia Cultural Fund alone grew by $750,000, or about 30 percent. Nutter and the four advisors that accompanied him — including Arts Director Gary Steuer and Finance Director Rob Dubow — were generally well received by the crowd that fully occupied City Hall’s conference room. When you look at how other cities’ arts funding has plummeted – from New York’s 7 percent cut to Atlanta’s 40 percent cut — the 4.5 percent increase Philly gets makes things seem almost utopic.
But no one asked the one question I thought someone would bring up: In light of the growth in arts funding, why don’t we transfer some of it into other areas to offset some of the other cuts? There are a few potential answers to this, I think.
- Even though city money has seen an increase, the real threat to the arts comes the damage to charitable endowments that have been swept into the economic whirlwind. I’m not certain how big the chunk of funding that originates from those sources truly is, but it’s almost certainly more than what will be offset by the growth of the city’s arts budget. Because the arts rely so much on private and non-profit sources, the increased city spending might be necessary to keep it zero-sum, or at least more so.
- Nutter looks at the arts like he looks at sustainability, a spend-money-to-make-money strategy that in the long run will make the city more financially solvent. It’s the same strategy behind moving the Barnes Foundation to Philly. The more people we can draw in with artistic and cultural attractions, and the more residents we can get to spend money at events, the better off we’ll all be.
(And of course, last night wasn’t without its cameos by Friends of the Barnes members, who time and again have proven themselves to be some of the most unstable interest group members in the city. Before the meeting started, one member stood in front of the audience and called us all to attention before giving the group’s mission statement, this time presented in a way that will somehow make leaving the Barnes in Montgomery County better for Philly. Another member later addressed Nutter directly with the same complaints: It will cost the city more money than it’s worth and consistently operate at a deficit. She asked Nutter to reconsider the move. Nutter told her he wouldn’t.)
- Nutter made big campaign promises to increase funding to the city’s cultural fund and arts institutions. The arts community is a powerful one, and many of the community’s members were just appointed to the city’s Arts Advisory Council. To shortchange them would not be a good idea.
There’s a fine line between teaching and indoctrination, and Jeremy Zilber treads it like a tightrope walker. His new children’s book, 
