What Would Happened If they Cut All Arts Funding and Nobody Noticed? If Money That Was Never There Continued to Be Never There, Would Anyone Care?

So let me see a show of hands? Who Cares about the Kennedy Center as now programmed by Il Douche Bag? Who cares about cuts to arts organization and the NEA? Who here has seen any benefits to the arts as they practice them from these various programs that are essentially either administrative aids or drained of funds by fees from well-known artists who don’t need the help?

I have been a working artist for over 40 years; I have gotten by with virtually no institutional support; as a musician I just do most of it myself (though after all these years I finally found a great label with a terrific person in charge but I still finance and produce and manufacture all of my own recordings). In those 40 years I have gotten maybe 3 small grants, which I appreciate. But in the last 10 years, as I did my best work, the local arts functionaries (or infrastructure as I call them) has ignored me and my calls and emails. I am too white, and not woke enough – let’s face it. I support DEI and Affirmative Action, but they have been replaced, in the arts and culture world, by Racial Profiling of a different sort.

I live right next to the city of New Haven, Connecticut and its Department of Cultural Affairs does nothing to support real arts but instead periodically issues pronouncements about what it thinks are “radical” ideas about arts but which are instead their friends saying the same empty political phrases over and over again. Everything it does in the arts is racialized; you can be a person of non-color who has spent your entire life supporting social justice and actually putting that support into action (I have written over 5 books on music with an emphasis on Black music and its essential place in the USA; I almost single-handedly forced a racist promoter to integrate the local arts festival in the 1990s). No one has gone into greater depth than I on the subject as a writer and educational advocate. I have embraced what I consider to be my own African American cultural heritage and its essential place in American life. But I, and others like me, are treated like racial lepers. We don’t fit into their image (and btw much of the jazz world has regularly mimicked these kinds of thing, with age and image and what they believe are audience concepts of “authenticity” as guideposts. There are certain musical habits and methods you are expected to have and employ if you are white, as opposed to if you are black. The critics have largely and dutifully fallen into place; and what this does is create an artificial cultural/racial stratification that keeps everyone in their stylistic place; it is not good for either white OR black musicians).

That New Haven Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs has said “all art is social justice” and then blocked me on social media when I disagreed.

On a local level, where I live, the money from the area Arts Council goes to what are thought of as “woke” projects but which are instead just a way for someone who has no connection to the arts to pick up a little cash just for writing a proposal about “healing” – whatever that really means, which, in artistic terms, is exactly NOTHING.

Let’s beat this national administration back, but trust me, if we do, if won’t make a difference to the arts or our artistic lives – so yes, I am virulently against these folks in Washington but when it comes to the arts, whether they are in or out, I and you will still be on our own.

Take the Kennedy Center – please. Are you a jazz musician? Ever written them a query (Jason Moran is the Jazz Director – nice guy and an ok pianist)? Since this is YOUR government and they are working for you, I assume you got a response, even a form email?

Hmmm….once again, I don’t see any hands up in the air –

Back in the 1980s, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts sponsored a series of regional meetings to discuss with artists what their needs were and how they thought the commission was doing in this regard. I attended the meeting in my area, which yielded a wave of hostility to the Commission and its representatives. They were yelled at and criticized and clearly surprised by the local response.

A few months later they issued a report about that meeting and advised that it had gone well and that local artists seemed satisfied with the work the Commission was doing. Clearly they were either lying or living in a parallel universe – but either way they were just being inert and indifferent and dishonest.

A few years later, when Connecticut Commission on the Arts’ funding was threatened, I got a call from a local arts “activist” (yes, an oxymoron) saying “we have to get artists to Hartford to protest these cuts.” So I made some phone calls – and guess what? No one gave a sh*t about the Commission or the cuts. The Commission was so far out of touch with what real working, independent artists needed that your average artist hardly knew it existed.

And what do arts organizations do? Well, in my experience they love doing surveys to find out what artists want and need; and guess what the answers always are? ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS: WORK, WORK, and MORE WORK, and housing and medical care and a place to rehearse of perform and money to get paid to perform. NEXT! Oh, is it time for another survey so we can act like we really care about the arts? Good; so what should we try and find out this time? How about: “What do artists want and need?” Surprise.

When I lived near Portland, Maine locally they got a grant (around $200,000) to form an arts district and arts organization to encourage local arts and artists. So I joined; what was I thinking? At meetings I suggested we do a localized festival with Maine artists, and actually PAY them.

Silence. After about three years of – SURVEYS (see above; for which they hired their friends and paid them thousands of dollars) and the hiring of a small staff, they ran out of cash. At a meeting I suggested that this whole process had been corrupt; this ensured that I was pretty much blacklisted from performing in Portland, and just to ensure this, a local jazz promoter started spreading the word that I had falsified my musical resume, had not really worked and recorded with Julius Hemphill, Marc Ribot, Hamiet Bluiett, David Murray, Doc Cheatham.

So much for arts organizations, but one last story –

For many years while I was stuck in Maine I tried to get the idea of a little jazz festival going. I attracted some attention and they called a meeting to organize it. It was clear, and they knew it, that the idea had been mine. No one questioned that. Fast forward and a group of people actually organized such a festival, kept me out of their meetings, and of course would not hire me to play. They put it together, and the lead act was someone’s friend whom no one had heard of. The first year happened and they took a financial bath from paying this guy an absurd amount of money for a concert that almost no one attended.

Year two came and they started organizing again, even getting some state money. And then one day they announced: “The Portland Jazz Festival is shutting down;” and then they were gone, along with the several hundred thousands of dollars that might have gone directly to artists. There was no further explanation, no accounting for where all that dough ended up (probably paid their salaries and severance), and the local press made no inquiries.

So you see why I remain cynical about Arts and Arts Funding? They can make Mickey Mouse the head of the Kennedy Center and it won’t make a difference to your average artist. It all remains trickle-down economics, as though we at the bottom will feel the ripple effects of economic stimulus. We never have and we never will. They even invented a new category, “the creative economy,” to include furniture stores and crafts stores and stores that sell clown paintings, all to pad the numbers to make it look like the arts actually exist and help the places in which they live. But it’s all a scam to cover up a lack of real support for artists who continue to work for next-to-nothing, to obscure the neglect and the substitution of empty rhetoric for active support.

We as artists are, to quote Lily Tomlin “all in this…alone…”