The Arts Left Twisting in Wind; City’s Well-Being Demands We Support Them

Something is dreadfully wrong in San Diego. The symptoms are obvious every day. Witness just one week of The Times San Diego County Edition, which from May 30 to June 5 carried these stories:

1) The San Diego Symphony Orchestra, which has been silent for a season, is now ready to play again but must find $1.9 million to stay solvent in the coming year.

2) The San Diego Repertory Theatre must raise $750,000 in the next 12 months.

3) It has taken four years for Ian Campbell to rid the San Diego Opera of its deficit, an accomplishment achieved by unhappily shortening the season.

4) Danah Fayman, in this space, tells of the demise of the downtown Art Center and of the city’s unpredictability in matters of art support.

Moreover, one hears from those involved in running other arts organizations that they lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation, begging, scheming, flattering and praying as they balance on the rim of fiscal ruin.

Our arts organizations are not lavish employers. The new symphony contract will pay highly trained and talented musicians $18,400 per year. Compare that to $50,000 paid in first-tier orchestras. Some of my former theater students with master’s degrees work in theaters for little above minimum wage, without health insurance, vacation pay or retirement benefits. Office staff, production workers and, in smaller institutions, performers are paid embarrassing wages. Sweat shops went out years ago except in the arts.

There is no way the performing and visual arts can be self-supporting through ticket sales. Operas, symphonies, museums and dance companies never were. Now, serious theater has joined this group.

In our industrial world where everything, including health care, is examined in terms of cost-effectiveness, it is important to realize that the arts, no matter how efficiently managed, cannot be compared to business. The opera cannot have parts made in Korea, nor can the Old Globe have its product assembled in Taiwan. Playing a symphony still takes the same number of musicians and the same amount of time that it did 200 years ago.

Nevertheless, some people say there is too much art in San Diego. Their solution is to let competition weed out those activities that are “unnecessary,” leaving only the financially healthy to survive. This formula would force arts institutions into the role of merely entertaining, presenting only that which is easy, familiar and marketable, reducing the arts to the level of sitcoms and game shows. No one in his right mind would claim that this is the role of the arts.

Dedicating a new museum in Houston, its patron, Dominique de Menil, said, “This (museum) is justified only by the work of artists who are economically useless but absolutely indispensable. We need artists and saints to make us contemplate the essential, the mystery of life and God.”

The arts, at their best, also tell us about ourselves, about how we treat one another. Sometimes, the truth of art makes us look at unpleasant reflections of ourselves. At other times, the arts connect us to the rest of mankind and foster an understanding of our common humanity. As the novelist Saul Bellow says, “Culture means having access to your own soul.” The arts provide insights about civility that are necessary in an urban culture.

Therefore, as San Diego becomes more and more an urban culture, we must understand the important place of art in cities and look on our arts institutions as vital services.

It is commonly understood that art is a product of cities. There are examples of painters and writers who work in the country, but cities provide the critical mass necessary for performances, museums and libraries. Moreover, cities allow for the specialization of labor that frees some people to become artists. The presence of other artists provides for the cross-fertilization of ideas that creates schools of art and local styles.

It seems to me that art is necessary to the city dweller because it answers and asks many of the same questions that nature does for those who live in rural areas. It dares to confront the meaning of life for those of us who live in an artificial and manufactured environment.

We may not be forced into contemplating the mystery of existence by the capriciousness of nature--by the failure of one year’s crop or the bounty of another--but we are faced with the whims of fate in our personal relationships and in the complexities of a mechanical society that is often difficult to understand. The arts give us moments of awe, grandeur, mystery and humility that are not the same but are related to those marvels of nature that help us see our own existence as part of a greater whole.

For these and many other reasons, the arts are a necessity in a city.

What may disturb San Diegans is the realization that they do indeed live in a city. It is hard to ignore this fact as we sit in a traffic jam or work in hermetically sealed offices in the Golden Triangle or downtown. A day at the beach may involve as much contact with strangers as it does with sand and water. And the mile after mile of look-alike condos create urban, not rural, problems. We may not like to see San Diego turning into a big city, but no amount of denial will change the fact that it is.

Cities offer services that are unnecessary or unavailable in the country: traffic lights, sewers, water, garbage pickup. Most European cultures also provide arts as needed service. England, much smaller than the United States, gives five times the amount of money to theaters as does our National Endowment for the Arts. Austria gives more to its arts than it does to its foreign service. And every town in Germany has its opera, theater and symphony supported by state funds that provide security and continuity to artists.

San Diego has made a start by giving some of the Transient Occupancy Tax money to the arts, but that is simply a quid pro quo. We need political leaders who recognize that the arts are essential and must be funded. The attitude must be changed that supporting the arts is, as one councilwoman put it, “cultural philanthropy.” She went on to say that higher priority must go to “replacing infrastructure, sewers, streets.”

Even though “philanthropy” is used by the lady to mean a charitable handout, its real meaning, “love of mankind” is more to the point. It is hard to see how resurfacing a street shows more love of mankind than does support of the arts. And how many cities do you know that are famous for their smooth streets or great sewers? (Well, maybe Paris has terrific sewers, but it took a famous novel to publicize the fact.)

The soul of a city is not its physical infrastructure. The well-being of our society depends just as much on those immeasurable benefits we receive from the arts that form our intellectual and emotional infrastructure.

Let us then salute those underpaid and overworked administrators, fund-raisers, technicians and artists who have given us far more than we have returned. It is time that we help them and ourselves by insisting that city and county government support their efforts.