Author: Benedict, Stephen

Publication Year: 1981

Media Type: Book

Summary:

Despite am economic and political climate anything but conducive to growth, the large picture of the arts in the United States is one of continued development in breadth and depth.

Abstract:

Highlights of the discussion include the following. Despite am economic and political climate anything but conducive to growth, the large picture of the arts in the is one of continued development in breadth and depth. It is vital to hold the line with respect to past gains. It is even more important to keep pressing forward in the effort to state the case for the arts more effectively and to expand public awareness of the benefits they bring. If there are limits to growth, they have not been reached - or even sighted. The attempt to polarize the audience for the arts with the simplistic formulations elitist and populist is an intellectually disreputable exercise. The dichotomy implied by those terms is not descriptive of the American experience, and it never was.

The potential private funding universe available to the arts is vast and largely untapped. Corporate support is still in its infancy and large prospective individual donors continue to enter the scene. The individual donor - small as well as less small - remains the backbone of philanthropic giving and should continue to be the primary target of development efforts. The National Endowment for the Arts has survived its ordeal by politics in the past year and a half, but its defenders cannot relax vigilance. The President's Task Force on the Arts and Humanities reaffirmed the federal presence on the cultural scene, but the proposition that public monies should help sustain the arts is still fragile in many quarters.

National Endowment programs have been and are of crucial importance, but more sophisticated understanding is needed by both private and public funding agencies of the requirements of some of our finest artists for a scale and continuity of support that has never yet been given them. The arts still have far to go in developing political skills commensurate with their public needs. Especially necessary is a coherent agenda for the arts that consolidates, on a continually updated basis, all those legislative, regulatory and other governmental objectives toward which the arts community should direct its political energies. A watchdog for the arts in the Executive Branch, preferably in the White House, should be a central item on the agenda. (Overview, p. 1-2).

CONTENTS
Preface.
Members of the symposium.
Overview.
The state of the arts in 1982.
Evolving patterns of support and limits to growth.
The National Endowment for the Arts on trial.
A national policy for the arts?

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Funding