The State of Cultural Policy
in America:
A Perspective
The Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies
was created by Stanley N. Katz and Paul DiMaggio in 1994 to address
the serious and damaging deficit in the information and thinking available
to inform the development and implementation of policies related to
arts and culture. As the 20th century comes to a close,
the arts and humanities face an array of challenges. There is a "quiet
crisis" (more audible each day) in financing arts and cultural
institutions, especially mid-sized institutions in the major disciplines
and most nonprofit cultural organizations that lie outside conventional
disciplinary definitions. There is uncertainty as to the future and
appropriate role of the federal presence in the arts and humanities,
and there is also concern about the fiscal capacity of state and local
governments to maintain their cultural budgets. Furthermore, the imminent
union of digital multimedia and the "information highway"
is redefining the relationship between nonprofit and for-profit cultural
enterprises and changing the very categories we employ to think about
the arts and humanities. The immediacy and significance of these challenges
require private and public policy makers to be prepared to take rapid
action. It is critical that when they do, their behaviors be informed
by a shrewd understanding of both the current state of play and the
systematic relationships between different parts of the arts and culture
enterprise.
Unfortunately, the arts and humanities have been characterized
by a chronic lack of the evidentiary and analytic resources that
policy makers need in order to make informed decisions. One reason
for this deficiency is the field's lack of human resources.
For a variety of reasons, very few academic social scientists or
policy analysts have been engaged in policy research in the arts
and humanities. Nor has cultural policy emerged as a distinct area
of public policy studies, alongside education, welfare, health policy,
crime, or even science, in schools of public management or public
affairs. We believe that no step is more important at this time
than that of building a cadre of able researchers working in this
area.
In addition, the sector faces a lack of dependable data resources.
Policy makers in such fields as education, health, and social services
have mountains of regularly collected statistics to inform their
deliberations, and hundreds of studies to help them anticipate the
results of the policies and programs they devise. Policy makers
in the arts and humanities have few such resources.
In no area of policy are conversations so poorly informed by empirical
evidence. In no area of policy are data resources so sporadic and
poorly developed. Throughout the cultural sector, there has been
a tremendous hunger for evidence and analysis that would permit
more sophisticated conversations and more empirically informed policymaking
and program design.
The lack of information is particularly damaging at the current
moment because the arts and humanities are experiencing such dramatic
and rapid institutional change. Without clear information about
the parameters of this change, policy makers and scholars are likely
to interpret contemporary challenges from within a set of assumptions
that better characterized the world at mid-century than the world
today. At that time, the arts and humanities conformed to a model
developed by the cultural entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century--far-sighted
patrons who recognized the capacity of the nonprofit form to provide
a space in which great art and thinking could be nurtured and developed.
These men and women created our great symphony orchestras, libraries
and museums. In the ensuing years, other patrons drew on these models
to build institutions devoted to opera, theater and the dance. Over
several decades--roughly between 1880 and 1940-- Americans came
to understand culture as coming in two varieties: popular entertainment
distributed by profit-seeking commercial media, on the one hand,
and high culture, presented by patron-supported nonprofit organizations,
on the other. This model served as the framework for the efforts
of private foundations to support culture in the 1950s and 1960s
– the Ford Foundation’s theatre program was largely an effort to
create a nonprofit stage on terms similar to those governing the
nonprofit orchestras – and, by the late 1960s, for federal patronage
through the National Endowment for the Arts, whose program areas
neatly recapitulated the topology of the nonprofit arts industry.
Since the 1960s, all this has changed. The image of arts and culture
as a nonprofit enclave in a sea of commerce, supported by the gifts
of the community’s wealthiest members, no longer adequately describes
the vast extent of cultural activity in America. Social, technological
and economic changes fundamentally challenge the boundaries between
high and popular culture, and between patronage and commerce. Three
changes, in particular, are altering dramatically the institutional
context that the arts and humanities will face in the coming century:
 New
relationships between cultural providers and local communities.
Once it was possible to identify a community’s "cultural institutions"
relatively easily. Before 1965, in most large cities, they consisted
of an encylopaedic museum of art and history, and perhaps a specialized
gallery of contemporary arts; a prominent public library; a symphony
orchestra and perhaps a chamber group; one or two professional theaters;
and, in larger metropolitan areas, an opera company, a ballet organization,
and one or two other dance companies. Between 1965 and the l980s,
cultural institutions experienced an explosion in numbers as well
as a mutation in forms. A 1995 planning study for a national census
of arts organizations, undertaken by the Princeton Center in cooperation
with the NEA, found 309 nonprofit arts organizations in Philadelphia
and 264 in Dallas/Fort Worth. Using a broader definition of arts
provider – including amateurs and all organizations that present
cultural programming to persons other than its own members – an
earlier study found more than 1000 such providers in New Haven,
Connecticut alone.
Change has occurred not just in numbers but in types of organizations
and activities. Increasingly, cultural programming is undertaken
by organizations connected to particular local communities, often
minority communities, and by community service agencies or colleges
whose primary mission is not in arts and culture. Today, there are
more presenting organizations, more institutions devoted to forms
like jazz or folk arts that span the commercial/nonprofit divide,
more programs that bring professionals and amateurs together around
common goals, and more partnership between nonprofit cultural providers
and for-profit firms. Many of these same changes are taking place
in such institutions as libraries, colleges and ethnic cultural
centers. Yet this new world of activity has yet to be mapped. We
know little about the role that culture plays in community life,
or about the ways in which audiences are developed and the extent
and forms of competition and synergy, respectively, between different
types of cultural institutions. Nor do we understand the impact
these changes are having on how talent is developed and how artists
and writers build (or fail to build) careers.
New
digital technologies and their impact on culture. The digital
revolution is shaping the arts and humanities as much as any field.
We are just beginning to fathom the implications of our capacity
to convert every kind of artistic and intellectual expression to
digital form and the accompanying opportunities for new forms of
creativity and broader aesthetic experience. Nor do we have a strategy
for dealing with confusion, created by some digital forms, between
reproduction and original, and its dramatic impact on the nature
and regulation of property rights to cultural works. Because these
developments are breaking so quickly, they threaten the capacity
of cultural philanthropists and policy makers to keep up with them.
It is crucial that we understand how cultural institutions are using
new technologies and how these will influence both their audience
reach and the quality of the experience they provide.
Additionally, we must examine changes in control over artistic
programming and access to artistic careers. Those who care about
the arts must understand the economic implications of digitalization
and the cultural impact of the legal frameworks that will allocate
property rights in the new media. Moreover, it is critical to understand
how the World Wide Web is organized, where the levers of control
exist and what implications this has for the arts and humanities.
Change
in the intersectoral division of labor. Perhaps the most important
developments influencing culture in the next century are those that
will change the division of labor between the nonprofit, commercial
and government sectors. The relationships between the sectors are
growing closer in many cases, more distant in others. Changing business
strategies lead commercial enterprises to cast off some functions
that are no longer sufficiently profitable (for example, publishing
significant books with audiences of only moderate size) with some
of these functions being picked up by nonprofit organizations. Technological
change enables for-profit institutions to undertake activities (for
example, broadcasting arts programming by cable) that were once
reserved for the nonprofit sector. At present, the cultural community,
including philanthropists and policy makers, has little purchase
over these changes. Ironically, far more attention has been lavished
upon marginal changes in the grants budgets of public agencies than
on fundamental structural changes that will shape arts and culture
in the coming century.
In conclusion, two related dilemmas – inadequate human resources
and inadequate information and analysis – define the challenges
that the Princeton Center was designed to surmount. The problem
is less a lack of funds for research support than it is a lack of
research infrastructure: people to do the necessary research and
regularly collected data that can be used to document change in
the condition of the arts and humanities in the United States. Consequently,
when urgent problems erupt – for example, debates over the value
of public funding for the arts, or over censorship of controversial
arts events – policy makers have found themselves flying blind in
the face of powerful political passions. Ultimately, we can hope
to improve this situation by training young scholars with a commitment
to empirical research on cultural policy and an understanding of
the issues at stake, by working (often in partnerships) to improve
the quality and availability of baseline data on the arts and humanities,
and by providing a model that scholars at other universities can
emulate.
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