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Overview:

The California Arts Council (CAC) is a state-run agency that provides funding to schools, individuals and groups to promote arts and crafts within California. Using money from the National Endowment for the Arts, the state General Fund and an arts license plate program, the Council contributes to a wide variety of artistic endeavors, both in public and private venues. It helps build arts organizations at the local and statewide level, directly supports arts programs for all citizens, assists with the professional development of arts leaders, supports arts education in schools in all areas of the state, and promotes awareness of the value of the arts. The Council does this by administering a number of competitive grant programs and special initiatives at the grass-roots level, collecting and disseminating information, and assisting organizations and individuals.

What Exactly Is the Arts Council? (California Arts Council)

Funding and Grant Making (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies) (pdf)

History:

The Arts Council was established in January 1976, replacing the 15-member California Arts Commission that had been in existence for 13 years. The original commission was not empowered to administer funds or promote cultural and artistic programs. Its main function was to show government solidarity with private patrons, institutions and professional organizations to encourage the freedom of artistic expression. In 1973, the commission was given authority to accept private and federal funds. It then expanded its activities to include the promotion of state-wide cultural exhibitions.

At its inception, the Arts Council received $750,000 during Governor Brown’s first term. The next fiscal year, 1976-1977, its funding increased to more than $1.9 million thanks, in part, to an infusion of federal money from the National Endowment for the Arts that supplemented support from the state General Fund.

The Council’s budget increased for several years, peaking at more than $32 million in fiscal year 2000-2001. But within three years, the Council saw its budget plummet to just over $1 million per year in state assistance, the minimum funding requirement the National Endowment for the Arts sets for agencies to receive federal dollars. This was due in major part to California’s so-called “dotcom bust” of collapsing technological firms which devastated state revenues. The budget crisis, which also contributed to the recall of Governor Gray Davis and replacement by film actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, did little to change the Council’s fortunes.

California Arts Council History (California Arts Council)

How the Tech Boom Terminated California's Economy (Fast Company)

What it Does:

The Arts Council’s basic goal is to encourage public participation in, and appreciation of, arts and crafts throughout the state. It helps local groups develop their own art programs, helps promote artists for employment and offers opportunities for art exhibits in public buildings throughout California. The Council provides a variety of services to artists and art lovers throughout the state. Council members meet throughout the year in various locations in the state and also hold annual meetings every January.

The Council is headed by an 11-member board that is partially appointed by the state legislature. Until 2010, its director was appointed by the governor, but going forward the position will be filled by the Council itself. The members serve various terms, chosen by a lottery. Five hold office for four years, four serve for three years and the final two are in office for two years.

The Council’s board and staff have experience in various artistic fields that include movies, graphic arts, music, dance, theater, photography, architecture, literature and animation. Its official primary mission is to encourage “widespread public participation and appreciation of the arts and creative endeavors.”

But an early chairman of the Arts Council, actor Peter Coyote, described it this way: “The premise of the Arts Council was that art isn't just high-status western European art forms like opera, symphony, or ballet. There are 50 disparate cultures in California. They are all taxpayers; they all have cultural traditions. These people have a right to tax dollars and to cultural expression. What we managed to do that was so clever was come up with a way of funding this that obviated liberal/conservative dichotomies and brought everybody onboard.”

Artists in Schools Program

This program is designed to support artists in residency activities that take place in schools, both in the classroom and in after-school settings. It is designed to mesh professional artists and arts organizations with community arts groups.

Creating Public Value Program

This program is meant to partner with smaller arts organizations in rural and underserved communities by using state resources to assist the local agencies. The Public Value Program has its own set of “The Three Rs:” Relationships, which means building new or expanding on existing projects; Relevance by expanding public participation; and Return on investment, which involves local arts organizations promoting themselves and their relevance to the community.

State-Local Partnership Program

This program fosters cultural development on the local level through a partnership between the Council and a designated local arts agency in each county. This partnership includes funding, cooperative activities, information exchange and leadership. A local arts agency is a nonprofit organization, or agency of city or county government, officially designated to provide financial support, services, and/or other programs to a variety of arts organizations, individual artists, and the community as a whole.

Poet Laureate

The official position of California Poet Laureate was created in 2001, but the state has had poet laureates since Governor Hiram Johnson bestowed the honorary title on Ina Donna Coolbrith in June 1915. State recognition of a poet laureate was intermittent until 2001. The governor appoints the poet laureate after receiving recommendations from the Council. They can serve two two-year terms.

In 2002, Governor Gray Davis named Quincy T. Troupe as California’s first official Poet Laureate. Carol Muske-Dukes, selected in 2008, is the most recent person to hold the position. She is stepping down in 2011.

As part of their service, for which they are provided a stipend, poets must give six public readings in both urban and rural areas across the state; educate civic and state leaders about poetry’s and creative expression values; and undertake a significant cultural project. One of the major goals of the project is to illuminate the poetic arts to students who may not have had exposure to poetry.

Artists in Schools (California Arts Council)

Creating Public Value (California Arts Council)

California Poet Laureate (California Arts Council)

State-Local Partnership Program (California Arts Council)

Arts Council Programs (California Arts Council)

Where Does the Money Go:

Expenditures

California is last in the nation in per capita support for its governmental arts agency. It used to be in the top tier of states. In 2000-2001, the state’s General Fund contributed $25.5 million toward the California Arts Council’s $32.2 million budget. But that year the dotcom bubble burst. Within three years California was wallowing in debt and the Arts Council’s budget was one-tenth its former self. It never recovered.

The lion’s share of Arts Council funds are used for grants; 65% in 2009-2010. Nearly 16% was spent on wages and salaries and most of the rest on operating expenses.

In 2009-10, about a quarter of the grant money, around $1 million, was spread out among 122 Artists in Schools programs, with most grants approaching, but usually not exceeding, $10,000 each. The next largest recipient of grant money, $900,000, was the State-Local Partnership program, which provides support for local arts agencies designated by County Boards of Supervisors. The Creating Public Value program, which garnered around $700,000 for 75 projects, is aimed at new and expanded projects in rural and underserved communities. The next two largest programs were one-year-only distributions. $487,900 in federal stimulus money went to 29 projects and $549,708 was distributed to 42 projects for free or inexpensive public concerts. The latter funds were from the settlement of a lawsuit against the music industry for fixing the prices of CDs.

Revenues

About 53% of the Arts Council funding in 2011-2012 is expected to come from the California Arts License Plate program. Residents opting to buy Arts’ plates can write it off as a charitable tax deduction on their state income tax form. And, new for 2011, Californians can voluntarily contribute to the arts on their state Franchise Tax Board forms. The personalized license plates sport an image called “Coastline,” designed in 1994 by artist Wayne Thiebaud, which depicts palm trees and a sunset on the Pacific Ocean. It was the first “specialty” license plate produced in California.

About 24% of the Council’s funding comes from the National Endowment for the Arts, a program that has been under fire from Republicans for years and is facing steep cuts. In 2009, the NEA received three cents per $100 of non-military discretionary spending. Thirty-two years ago, it received four times that amount.

The rest of the Council’s money comes from the General Fund.

2011-2012 Proposed Budget (California Ebudget) (pdf)

2009-10 Annual Report (California Arts Council)

Creating Public Value Program (California Arts Council)

2010 Strategic Plan (California Arts Council) (pdf)

Controversies:

Poet Laureate

Governor Gray Davis appointed Quincy T. Troupe as California's first official Poet Laureate on June 11, 2002. Troupe is a celebrated poet and writer, who had published 13 books including six volumes of poetry. Troupe's verse is characterized by his use of jazz, bebop, blues and rap music rhythms. It also takes a variety of poetic forms, utilizing African and American myth, and black dialect. Many of his poetry readings were accompanied by music. At the time of his nomination, Troupe was teaching creative writing and American and Caribbean literature at the University of California, San Diego. He had won two American Book Awards as well as the Peabody Award.

But during the Senate confirmation process, a required background check revealed that he had not earned the bachelor of arts degree from Louisiana’s Grambling State University that he had claimed for decades. He immediately resigned and shortly afterward left his UCSD teaching position.

An Interview With Quincy Troupe (By Jan Garden Castro)

Words of Welcome for State Poet (Los Angeles Times)

California Poet Laureate History (Netstate)

Malissa Feruzzi Shriver

In 2009, Malissa Feruzzi Shriver was elected chairman of the Arts Council by her fellow board members and, in her own words, received her “initiation into the ‘big time’ ” two weeks later when Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote a scathing opinion piece about her. Knight questioned the propriety and taste of selecting an “art dealer” who owns a gallery that specializes in “kitsch,” a generally pejorative word used to describe art that may appeal to the masses but is generally considered unserious and inferior. He likened her selection to picking a slot machine manufacturer to run the California Gambling Control Commission and called it a “blatant conflict of interest.” Knight also slipped in a charge of nepotism, pointing out that her husband, Bobby Shriver, was the brother-in-law of the man who put her on the Council, Governor Schwarzenegger. He contrasted the selection of Shriver with New York’s choice of a university dean and former museum curator to head its Council on the Arts.

In her defense, Shriver wrote in the newspaper’s comments section that she wasn’t an art dealer, just an artist who sells her own works. She said she came by her appreciation of art through watching her father, a billboard sign painter, ply his trade. Shriver credited the arts programs she encountered in school for fostering her love of sculpture, lithography and pottery and that the heartbreak she felt over seeing those programs destroyed informed her every public action on behalf of the arts.

A number of people rushed to Shriver’s defense. Some cited bulwarks against conflict of interest (like the Fair Political Practices Commission); others decried the attack as personal. Rick Stein, executive director of Arts Orange County, argued that the most successful public lobbyist for the arts in New York history was Kitty Carlisle Hart, a singer and actress probably best known for her appearances as a panelist on the game show “To Tell the Truth.” Randall Rosenbaum, executive director of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, defended her “amazing resume” and asserted that no conflict of interest exists unless she has a financial relationship with one of the recipients.

Knight responded to that last point by saying that he hadn’t claimed she had an improper relationship with a recipient. “That would be graft, not conflict of interest.”

But there was nothing Knight could say to the writer who mocked him for picking on Shriver since Knight’s main “claim to fame is having played Peter on ‘The Brady Bunch’ TV show.” … That was a different Christopher Knight.

Eye-Rolling at the California Arts Council (by Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times)

The Other Christopher Knight (The Internet Movie Database)

Suggested Reforms:

The Arts Council read the writing on the wall 10 years ago, and knew it wasn’t a new form of artistic expression. Major government support of its artistic endeavors would no longer be coming from the state’s General Fund and it needed to look for new sources of revenue. In its 2004-05 budget analysis, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office recommended that the last vestiges of General Fund support, $1.5 million (down from a recent high of $25 million), be deleted from the Arts Council’s budget. The report noted that the Council had already been forced to end all of its grant-making and local assistance activities the year before. Its staff had been reduced 40%. The report suggested that the Council ramp up its solicitation of private donations, but noted that hadn’t been successful to date. It recommended relying solely on the sale of designer license plates and matching federal funds as it wound down the last of its projects.

The advice was not taken and funding from its meager, but slowly growing resources, allowed the Council to re-invigorate its local assistance activities.

The Arts Council received a similar lack of love from the Legislative Analyst in 1991 when the office recommended eliminating it because it “funds only a minor portion of the total arts activities in the state, most of which are either self-supporting or rely on a combination of private donations, admission fees, and other revenues.” Almost all of the Arts Council budget back then, $15 million, came from the General Fund. That’s nearly 15 times what it gets from the state now.

Legislative attempts to restore funding in 2003, 2005 and each year since 2007 all failed. The latest bill in 2010 would have transferred 20% of sales tax collected on arts-related businesses to a fund for distribution by the Arts Council. The bill authorized a city, county or district or a nonprofit arts organization to apply to the Council for a local assistance program grant for organizational support.

Graphic Design License Plate Account (DMV website)

2004-2005 Budget Recommendations (Legislative Analyst’s Office)

Debate:

Public funding of the arts has long been a source of contention at the federal, state and local levels. The funding tends to fluctuate according to the state of the economy, but even in good times there are many who contend that there shouldn’t be government involvement in the arts at any level. Since the Arts Council relies on federal money for a quarter of its budget, the debate reverberates in California on multiple levels.

Government Involvement: Problematic or a Necessity?

Jonathan Chait at The New Republic magazine has been making the argument for years that the problem with government support of the arts is twofold: “It's problematic to force people to subsidize art that offends their religion or their values. It's also problematic to have the government vet art,” i.e., deciding what is worthy to view. Art is not an entitlement, like education or health care, he argues. Nor is it a project so big that it needs government intervention, like a highway or a national park. He likened it to clothing and entertainment, two items even good liberals would be content to leave to the marketplace. So why do it at all, he asks. “I suspect arts subsidies survive because their core constituency is rich and influential. But given that the government only provides 1% of art funding, is it really worth the trouble?”

Actor Peter Coyote, who was a member of the Arts Council from 1975 to 1986 and served three years as its chairman, thinks government support of the arts is critical. “Art is R&D (research and development) for the culture, and failing to understand that costs the culture the same thing it would cost an industry when its R&D funds are cut,” he said in a February 2011 interview. He acknowledged that “art” can be viewed as a commodity, and as such, perhaps not the specific sort of commodity that the state should be concerned with. But “creativity,” which leads directly to the production of art, is a human resource that needs to be nurtured as a part of education and aid, and rightly belongs among government’s concerns. “One cannot be ‘excellent’ as a plumber, legislator, doctor or carpenter, unless one can integrate practical, problem-solving skills with the intuitions. The arts are the primary mechanism for teaching this process.”

Bang for the Buck, or a Shot to the Wallet?

Ken Schram, a newscaster in Seattle, echoed an argument heard back in 2003 when California gutted the budget for its Arts Council: “When it comes to choosing which families will go without health care; when it comes to deciding which food programs must be eliminated; when it comes down to decimating basic education and when scores of social service programs must be slashed, then art becomes a luxury we can't afford.”

Americans for the Arts disagrees and says government spending on the arts is an investment that pays off handsomely. In a comprehensive study of all 50 states, the report says $63 billion in spending by organizations and $103.1 billion in event-related spending by their audiences resulted in 5.7 million full-time equivalent jobs, $104.2 billion in household income, $12.6 billion in federal taxes, $9.1 billion in state taxes and $7.9 billion in local taxes.

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies further argues that funding the arts encourages tourism, a huge market comprised of 118 million cultural travelers annually, helps rural development by “creating sustainable small businesses, improving quality of life for residents and attracting visitors and investment,” and acts as a business magnet.

The Rand Corporation questions the methodology and results of studies that show big returns on investment in the arts. They say the studies fail to compare the effect of arts spending with other possible uses of the money which allows for an overstatement of benefits based on a false “multiplier” effect on other revenues like tourism.

While some arts advocates warn against relying on economic arguments and instead encourage emphasizing the intrinsic value of exposing people to the arts, others say money is the only language politicians understand and downplaying the financial benefits would doom their cause.

Why Should Government Subsidize “Obscenity”?

In 1998, during a debate over whether the federal government should continue funding the National Endowment for the Arts, House Majority Whip and Texas Republican Tom DeLay said: “Is it fiscally responsible to give taxpayer money to some artists who offend taxpayers? I don't think so.”

Established in 1965, the NEA was embroiled in controversy over a series of art exhibits it helped fund in the late ‘80s that some considered obscene. They included exhibits of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic images and a photograph by Andres Serrano of a crucifix immersed in urine. Congress passed an arts-funding law in 1990 that required public values be considered when handing out grants. The Supreme Court upheld that law in 1998, ruling that the government need not subsidize art it considers indecent. Justice Anton Scalia told an audience in 2005 that he understood why that decision, giving government the power to make artistic decisions, didn’t sit well with people. But he thought the solution was simple: "The only remedy is to get government out of funding."

Peter Coyote Interview (Western States Arts Federation)

Why Should Government Support the Arts? (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies)

Arts and Economic Prosperity (Americans for the Arts)

Why Are Politicians Obsessed With the Arts? (Why Arts?)

Gifts of the Muse (Rand Corporation) (pdf)

Arts Funding Study Causes Stir (Los Angeles Times)

The Problem With Funding Controversial Art (by Jonathan Chait, The New Republic)

Mapplethorpe Censorship (Political Research Associates)

Mapplethorpe Battle Changed Art World (Cincinnati Enquirer)

Former Directors:

Marilyn Nielsen, 2011 (interim)

Muriel Johnson, 2005-2011