The August Compass features an article on the recently proposed cuts by Governor Charlie Baker to the Massachusetts Cultural Council budget. We also broadly discussed the nature of cultural funding in this city of ours, and its implications and impacts.
To update our readers, the Massachusetts State Legislature overrode Governor Baker’s veto, and restored funding to previous levels. The Massachusetts Cultural Council has a press release on the issue which can be found here. Though there a variety of criticisms that are often levied against elected officials, their efforts, and the efforts of cultural advocacy organizations across the state are commendable, a reflection of the kind of long-term thinking that can often escape policymakers facing budgetary crises. We are grateful to have politicians in our state who are meaningfully engaged with their constituents. We cannot stress how lucky we are to serve such a mobilized community,
However, as we have stated, not all arts funding is equal in its impacts. Support for collaboration between placemaking consultancies and real estate developers does not have the same effect as support for independent nonprofits working on a grassroots basis. Policymakers must consider the pathways through which we experience culture, and the complicated nature of its effects.
Culture has always been seen through the lens of its economic value. Take it out of the equation, and people are less excited and interested in calling a place home, every social science derived indicator of quality-of-life being tied to cultural development. Policymakers understand this basic fact, and resulting illustrations of input and output: For every $x spent, there is some output, a returns. It’s vaguely reminiscent of middle school algebra, some kind of x being influenced by some knowable pathway to get y. Such narratives are neat and fit into a rhetorical world where “everybody wins,” a saturated portrait of smiling Warby-Parker bespectacled youths laughing effervescently, the standard-bearers of community vibrancy.
This narrative misses multidimensionality. Culture can create echo chambers if it is not democratic, and not participatory. A show or a piece of art can deconstruct an individual’s everyday, a portal into insular self-reflection, or an impetus for macro community activism. It’s not that we need a local culture to tell us the types of lifestyles we should espouse, a back-and-forth pantomime between artists and the public. Rather, culture is coloration of memory and of the immediate experience, a means to synthesize narratives of everyday living into visceral feeling. Music and media and images whirr in the background and foreground of our thinking, attached to the most mundane and most consequential of our motivations and experiences.The argument isn’t that culture shouldn’t be seen as a plus delta to local economies, but rather that it is much more than that, and therefore its genesis matters. In fact, a population that is able to experience and access culture that is meaningful to them might be more economically productive in the long-run.
As far as policymaking goes, it is true that public money only goes so far. But, it can be used in a way to fill these need. The development of culture is also not a “linear” process. Small organizations can make large impacts, disproportionate to the amount of funding they’re taking in. Such organizations may be able to mobilize donors and corporate sponsorships, but only after collecting a threshold amount of capital funding to develop their programs. The Massachusetts Cultural Council’s cultural facilities fund recognizes this, providing much needed infusions of capital to organizations that are generally able to operate at least partially, without public funding. Sponsorship and public-private partnerships are also often reserved for large scale institutions and top-down endeavors. Smaller, community-based organizations aren’t often at the table. If public funding could help facilitate relationship building between brands and cultural organizations of all sizes, such organizations could significantly expand their operations, and better contribute to the community.
Continually striving to introduce new voices into Boston and New England’s heady cultural brew is vital. Clearly, public funding matters to this community, which means we must carefully consider the impact of its allocation and advocate for a diverse variety of recipients.
