The Art Newspaper

A standing-room only audience crammed itself into a lecture hall at Columbia University on a crisp, sunny morning last May for a symposium titled “Measuring the Muse”. The conference was co-hosted by the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP), which I ran at the time, and the Alliance for the Arts, a research and advocacy group which serves New York’s cultural community. The subject was arts-policy research, not your typical crowd-pleaser, but enough to draw more than 300 cultural professionals to Columbia’s uptown Manhattan campus and, with major speeches by the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Cultural Affairs Commissioner of New York, the event attracted considerable attention from people involved in the arts.

Any stranger in the room that day would have come away feeling that cultural-policy research was alive and well in America. Yet only weeks later, the 11-year-old NAJP—a programme which had hosted over 130 arts writers, including many of America’s top critics, for residencies at Columbia; and which had compiled a library of research and publications on arts journalism and on arts issues—was closed, leaving New York without a widely recognised academic think tank for the arts. With few exceptions, all the organisations that presented papers at the conference are struggling to make ends meet.

What happened? The brief history of America’s independent arts-policy infrastructure can be traced back to the “Culture Wars” of the late 1980s and early 90s. The attacks on artists and arts funding left some foundation officials believing that the terms of the debate needed to change. Anecdotes and politics would have to be replaced with clear data and professionally formulated policies. If the ship was under attack, plugging holes in its hull was not going to do the trick. One needed strategy, not just tactics, to master the battlefield. Investments in policy institutes, conferences, and publications soon followed.

The need for coordinated policy, its proponents argued, was tied to the astonishing growth of the arts since the 50s. Cultural activity was on the rise everywhere, commanding an increasing share of America’s exports and workforce. But not enough was known about the arts sector: how it worked, how it contributed to the health of cities, and how arts funding—some of which flowed directly or indirectly from taxpayers—could or should be managed. Running such a colossal industry with a Romantic disdain for facts was proving to be a luxury.

From the beginning, the idea of “cultural policy” was controversial. It did not sit well with critics who conjured alarmist visions of Soviet-style ministries propagating officially sanctioned art. Arts groups feared that scarce foundation dollars would now be siphoned off from deserving new work. Worst of all, nobody knew what the catch-all phrase “cultural policy” really meant.

What it meant, at the start, was basic research—and in hindsight it would have been best to leave it at that. Armed with proceeds from a booming stock market in the mid- to late-1990s, several foundations—led by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation—set about professionalising public discourse around the arts.

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