happy new year! leave your cliches at the door.

Hello

The blog went dormant as I lost my way from the arts to obsessing on the election. Not wanting to be one more of the several million election bloggers, I decided to wait until now. New year, new president, new economic reality. This is a blog about the convergence of art, politics, money and memory.

Everyone is saying that we are in an unprecedented economic reality, that "everything has changed," and that we are in "uncharted waters." At this point, they're way ahead of themselves. We are in a recession; the wall street ponzi scheme has collapsed, for now; a major sector of the economy (or two) is reorganizing; we don't know how long this recession will last or how deep it will be.

What we do know is that the vulnerable get hurt first. That's true with individuals - this will be our country's first test of "welfare reform," which works well when the economy's humming, but now?

In the arts, underfunded organizations are going down. Museums are selling off collections and performing groups are cutting back on seasons. This happens every recession. The question is, will this recession cause us to revisit good ideas like --
real government funding of the arts; substantial support for individual artists; a resurrection of WPA/CETA concepts that would employ artists to document and describe this sprawling society; and new forms of funding for arts organizations.

The Panglossian approach ("the hybrid model of funding with waning government support is great") will have to sharpen their arguments which sounded good when the society was awash in cash..

This spring, I'll be teaching cultural policy and financial management. One is a theory course, the other a how-to. Both will have a tinge of crisis about them that wasn't there a year ago, when we addressed the arts going broke as a theoretical possibiity, not as today's news.

Happy new year. May the recession be brief but good lessons be learned!