Recession Puts Brakes on America's Arts Boom
By Paul Farhi and Jacqueline Trescott,
Washington Post
With its investment portfolio shrinking from $6.4 billion to $4.2 billion since mid-2007, the Getty said last week that it would slash its operating budget by 22 percent and its staff by 14 percent. While the Getty says admission will still be free, the cost to ride that magic tram will effectively go up, when parking fees increase from $10 to $15 in July.
Arts organizations large and small can relate to the Getty’s problems. Once flush with corporate and private donations, rising ticket revenue and government subsidies, many nonprofit arts groups now find themselves reeling. Cuts of every kind — staff and artist layoffs, furloughs, canceled performances and tours, truncated seasons — are widespread.
“I have never seen a situation like this in my 25 years in the business,” says Michael M. Kaiser, the president of the Kennedy Center and a veteran arts administrator. After cutting its own budget by 6.5 percent — a modest trim by current standards — the Kennedy Center in February started an Arts in Crisis program to counsel troubled organizations. Some 350 have already sought advice.
Some major institutions, like the Getty and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, have scaled back exhibitions amid mounting portfolio losses (the Met says it has lost $800 million, or 28 percent, of the value of its portfolio since last summer). Other noted organizations have closed: Among them, the Milwaukee Shakespeare theater company, the Connecticut Opera, the Las Vegas Art Museum, Opera Pacific in Orange County, Calif. In March, the 58-year-old Baltimore Opera Company voted to liquidate. The Sacramento Ballet has canceled the rest of its season. To raise funds from reluctant lenders, the Metropolitan Opera in New York had to use its Chagall paintings as collateral.
Continue reading at The Washington Post
Photo: kevindooley/Flickr
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