More than nine months after former chair Rocco Landesman announced he was stepping down, the search for a new National Endowment for the Arts chairperson has stalled – just in time for the fall budget debates to ramp up in earnest. Sphinx Organization founder and president Aaron Dworkin confirms in the article that he was one of the candidates considered for the position earlier this year. Former NEA Senior Research Officer Joanna Woronkowicz tells us not to worry about the delay. Meanwhile, remember that kerfuffle last year about how Kickstarter was on track to provide more funding for the arts than the NEA? Well, not that this is a surprise, but by now it’s actually happened.

The United States cut off its support of Unesco in 2011 after the international cultural agency recognized the Palestinian Authority as a member nation. The measure was required by U.S. law, but was never supported by the Obama administration, which is now trying its darndest to be supportive of Unesco anyway.

STATE AND LOCAL

At long last, we have had a good year for state arts agency funding. With the economy rebounding and the pall of uncertainty lifting over state budgets, a number of arts councils have managed to claw back a measure of compensation for the dramatic cuts endured over the last four years, though there is still a long way to go. State arts budgets in the aggregate are up nearly 11% or $30 million, the largest nominal dollar increase in over 13 years. Notable success stories from this fiscal cycle include:

• Texas, whose Commission on the Arts got nearly double its appropriation from last year;
• Delaware, which received $1.6 million for a new Arts Trust Fund to provide general operating support for large institutions;
• Arizona, which eked out $1 million in general fund appropriations for its Commission on the Arts for the first time in three years;
• Florida, continuing its climb back to relevance with $5.7 million in new funding, mostly from line items;
• Michigan, also continuing a remarkable climb back from near-death with the second year in a row of multi-million-dollar increases;
• and South Carolina, whose arts commission defeated a gubernatorial veto for the fourth time in four years and on top of that got a hefty 52.4% increase.

California arts advocates did not succeed in dramatically changing the landscape for the California Arts Council, but at the last moment Assembly Speaker John Perez ensured a nearly $2 million increase to the agency’s coffers, bringing California out of the cellar as the cheapest state supporter of the arts on a per-capita basis. Other states with notable increases included Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Utah, and Vermont.

Not all the news was good for state arts advocates, though. The Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, only a year after coming back from being the first state art agency to be vetoed out of existence, has now been slashed almost entirely to the bone again with a paltry appropriation of $200,000, the lowest in the country. Arts councils in Tennessee, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Connecticut, West Virginia, and Wyoming also endured double-digit cuts.

In other state news, a tale of two tax policies: Rhode Island is eliminating taxes on the sale and purchase of artwork, while North Carolina is introducing a new 4.75% “privilege tax” for “admission charges to any live performance or event, any movie screening, any museum, cultural site, garden, exhibit, art show or guided tour.” The North Carolina tax applies to both nonprofit and commercial groups but carves out a number of confusing exemptions for certain festivals, state-supported museums, etc.; basically it sounds like terrible legislation. With that kind of environment, it will be interesting to see if the state extends its sunsetting film tax credit beyond 2014.

INTERNATIONAL

My goodness, the blows just keep coming for arts funding in England. The cuts to Arts Council England over the past few years were bad enough, but it turns out that local funding for the arts will fall another £124 million next year, even though local government budgets in general are up!  Better to be an artist in Britain than Portugal, however, which eliminated its ministry of culture two years ago and shows what happens when you pull the rug of government funding out from under a society that has no tradition of private philanthropy.

The giganta-budget West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong is running into trouble, with construction costs (surprise!) almost double the amount originally planned. The authority has decided to postpone seeking an additional $3.2 billion (I told you it was giganta-budget) payment from Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, presumably until things are in better shape.

Three profiles of new/new-ish culture heads: in Canada, Shelly Glover is settling into her new role as Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages; in France, embattled French Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti presides over $3.2b in government spending on culture, which is down 2.8% from last year. France also has gone ahead and ended the “three strikes” provision of its copyright enforcement policy. Finally, Ines Abdul-Dayem is the new culture minister for Egypt. She has quite a story: earlier this year, she was dismissed from her post as head of the Cairo Opera House along with many other cultural officials by Alaa Abdel-Aziz, the man she is now replacing. In June, though, “artists stormed the Ministry of Culture and began an open-ended sit-in to demand the removal of the [now former] minister and the revocation of his decisions.” Shortly thereafter, following the ouster of president Mohamed Morsi, Abdel-Aziz resigned his position.

FEDERAL

Beyond the official departure of Rocco, it’s been a slow news season at the federal level for the arts. One series of developments, however, has involved the Internet Radio Fairness Act, or IRFA. If you listen to Pandora (as I do), you might have heard advertisements in the fall urging action on this bill, which would lower what Pandora claims are high rates it has to pay to rightsholders in order to broadcast their music. Trouble is, the royalties that artists actually receive from Pandora and other streaming services are already extremely shitty, so as you can imagine artists aren’t a huge fan of this one. After a hearing that didn’t go well for IRFA, the bill is shelved for now – but may be re-introduced under a new name this year.

STATE AND LOCAL

Appropriations season has begun for state arts councils, and we are getting an early look into how things might go this spring through the stories that are developing now. Overall, there’s some of the usual attempts to cut budgets, but they don’t seem to have the same teeth as in previous years. Two years after Kansas temporarily zeroed out the budget for its arts council, a proposal to gradually eliminate funding for the state arts council in neighboring Oklahoma is thankfully dead in the water. In South Carolina, Governor Nikki Haley is trying to mess with the state arts commission yet again, though she has given up on doing away with the agency’s grant budget and only wants to get rid of its staffing (how she expects the grants to get awarded without a staff is anyone’s guess). And the California Arts Council is set to lose about $160,000 per year it was getting from donations via California taxpayers’ tax returns.

Meanwhile, as we know, states support the arts through other means besides direct funding. For years, many states have offered tax credit to lure film studios; now, several are trying to do the same with Broadway productions. Illinois passed a law just over a year ago allowing shows such as the Cyndi Lauper musical “Kinky Boots” to receive a tax credit for previewing in the state before hitting New York. Louisiana and Rhode Island have similar legislation on the books. Now Massachusetts wants in on the act as well, though Jeff Jacoby sees trouble down that road.

On the local front, after a millage (property tax) measure to support public art in Ann Arbor failed in November, the city council has voted to suspend the existing public art program so that it can be retooled, hopefully to allow more flexibility in how the funds are spent. At Oregon Arts Watch, Barry Johnson gives an incredibly in-depth account of how Portland’s more successful ballot initiative came to pass (literally) – a must-read for anyone involved in arts advocacy. And ticket sellers take note: Maryland’s highest court has ruled that Ticketmaster’s annoying service fees amount to scalping – in violation of a Baltimore ordinance outlawing the sale of tickets above their face value.

INTERNATIONAL

Great news coming from Toronto, as a billboard tax that advocates have long sought is now going to be diverted toward the city’s arts funding. The tax will eventually bring in $22.5 million per year, boosting the city’s cultural budget by nearly 50% over current levels. It probably doesn’t hurt that arts funding enjoys overwhelming support in Canada, with 87% of respondents to a recent poll saying that government should place a “moderate amount” to a “great deal” of importance on the arts.

Over in merry England, though, things remain chaotic. Arts Council England’s budget will fall £11.6 million between now and 2015, on top of much more drastic cuts enacted in 2010. Meanwhile, multiple cultural leaders in the UK are under fire from the arts community there, including British Culture Secretary Maria Miller. A backlash against the policies of Creative Scotland got so bad that its head, Andrew Dixon, resigned in disgrace. Through it all, England’s cities are facing crushing budget crises: Somerset has already cut its entire culture budget and Westminster is threatening to do the same. The biggest city to contemplate 100% cuts to arts funding was Newcastle, but shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman has stepped in at the 11th hour to prevent that from happening.

Further afield on the Continent, the Netherlands’ arts scene is reeling from budget cuts totaling €470 million, a huge amount for this tiny country. According to the article, “about 40 of the 120 cultural arts organizations in the country became ineligible for federal grants this year. Some of them have been able to secure financing from other sources, but at least two dozen had to fold at the beginning of the year.” Head-scratching policies include a rule that no more than one dance company can be supported per city, leading to the closure of the country’s premier modern dance group, Dansgroep Amsterdam. But hey, at least a tattooed composer and performing arts professor ran fifth in the presidential election of the country that brought you Vaclav Havel!

Recently, Brazil made headlines by promoting a new government policy that gives workers earning up to five times the minimum wage the equivalent of $25 a month to spend on cultural purchases. Ninety percent of the bill is footed by the employer, with the remaining 10% coming out of the worker’s pocket, so it’s like one of those Groupons where you pay $2.50 for a $25 gift card. (The employer expenses are offset 1:1 by tax credits, so it’s still effectively a government subsidy.) The workers really do get a card, which is controlled so that it can only be spent on cultural purchases. Joe Patti wonders why something like this couldn’t work in the United States, although Maria Vlachou isn’t convinced the measure is solving the right problem. For my part, the idea reminds me of my old proposal for income-sensitive tickets (that I think is perhaps worth a revisit).

Finally, we’d written previously about the ongoing tragedy in Mali as Islamist militants took over much of the northern part of the country, threatening artists and destroying cultural heritage sites. Thanks to France’s military intervention, the rebels were driven out of the ancient city of Timbuktu last month, but not before they set fire to two libraries containing thousands of manuscripts from medieval times. The materials presumed destroyed include an ancient history of West Africa and texts on astronomy, poetry and medicine dating back to 1204. There are lots of items that survived the conflict because they were hidden away from the rebels, but it’s still a terrible loss. Meanwhile,  UNESCO has announced that it will help to rebuild Timbuktu’s destroyed mausoleums using local mud-based materials and the buildings’ original plans.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Congratulations to the South Carolina Arts Commission, whose funding was preserved when elected representatives overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the commission’s entire budget. An additional veto that would have invalidated a one-time $500,000 increase for the commission was also overturned, so all in all the Arts Commission will see a significant bump in its budget this year. It’s the third time in three years that the Arts Commission has staved off an elimination threat from a South Carolina governor.

ART AND PLACE

• Hot on the heels of ArtPlace’s similar announcement, the 2012 Our Town grants have been announced. The geographic distribution is striking, and quite literally all over the map. In contrast to last year, there were no grants to New York City, Los Angeles, or any of the nation’s other largest cities with the exception of Dallas, and more than half the grants are going to communities with fewer than 50,000 people. The NEA also held a series of webinars about the awards, which have been archived and are available here.
• Richard Florida, Darren Walker, Rocco Landesman, and Dennis Scholl participated in a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival called “Making Cities Sing.” Partial video from the event is here.
• In the wake of debates about whether Portland, Oregon is truly a creative class success story or not, Barry Johnson offers an interesting perspective on the role of the creative economy in that region.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Jacob Harold, program officer for philanthropy for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who has been appointed the next president of GuideStar (succeeding Bob Ottenhoff). Harold had previously been on GuideStar’s board of directors, as well as a funder.

IN THE FIELD

• The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance, a first-of-its-kind amalgamation of the region’s SOBs (symphony, opera, ballet) into a single organization, is officially live. Good luck to them – it’ll be interesting to see whether the arts scene finds it easier to coexist with one performing arts behemoth instead of three.
• Congratulations to Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch for being named one of the NonProfit Times’s Power & Influence Top 50 for the first time. Lynch is the only 100% arts person to make the cut, though Lisa Paulsen, president & CEO of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (which supports social and medical causes), as well as the leaders of the arts-supporting foundations American Express, Pew, and Knight, are on there as well.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

•  The Philadelphia-based William Penn Foundation will retain its local focus, despite a recent infusion of money that has made it one of the largest foundations in the country.
• Barry Hessenius has an interview with the Knight Foundation’s VP of the Arts and man about town, Dennis Scholl.
• An interview with outgoing Hewlett Foundation Vice President (and #2 under Paul Brest), Susan Bell.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, or SNAAP, has released its annual snapshot of arts graduates and their careers. SNAAP’s Sally Gaskill has more at ArtsBlog.
• Americans for the Arts held a blog salon for its Arts & Economic Prosperity IV report earlier this month. I tweaked the premise of AEP IV in the last Around the Horn, but I don’t want to take away from the fact that a lot of work on the part of many, many people went into creating it. Ben Davidson tells some of the behind the scenes tales, Maria Munoz-Blanco draws a picture of impact, and Createquity superfan Paul Tyler describes the power of mapping in Kansas City.
• Data alert: Nina Simon dissects her museum’s attendance growth over the past year.
• “Simply put, price seldom impacts demand in the arts.”

ETC.

• Stanford Social Innovation Review has an article about the value of “backbone organizations” in a collective impact context, based on the experience of FSG consultants working with the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. The article is in four parts: I, II, III, IV. It’s not the sexiest topic, but if you believe in the relevance of infrastructure to the arts, as I do, it is worth a read.
• More on the Collide@CERN project that Shane Crerar wrote about for Createquity earlier this year.

FEDERAL

Looking forward to Congress’s “lame duck” session after elections this November, Americans for the Arts projects choppy waters ahead for the arts. Indeed, the fun has already started with a proposal from the House of Representatives Interior Subcommittee to cut the NEA’s current appropriation by $14 million to $132 million. At least this means we won’t be fighting over whether the NEA should exist at all this year, but the proposed 9.8% cut comes on top of a 13% cut from the agency’s recent high water mark of $167.5 million. It looks like conservatives are pursuing a strategy to gradually chip away at the Endowment’s appropriations base, figuring that a 10% cut here or there isn’t likely to arouse public outrage but will still further ideological goals.

The Supreme Court had a busy month. You’ve heard, of course about its ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Adam Huttler (head honcho at Fractured Atlas, where I work) came out and praised the Supremes’ 5-4 decision upholding the act as a victory for artists, who are likely a bellwether for the 21st-century knowledge worker: mobile, untethered, and most importantly, self-employed. But the Supreme Court decided some other cases as well, and the Future of Music Coalition weighs in on one of them, in which the Court ruled that Fox and friends don’t have to pay indecency fines for failing to bleep out swearing on a live broadcast and some nudity on an episode of NYPD Blue.

STATE

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA)’s annual appropriations report is out, and after four straight years of declines that saw appropriations to state arts councils drop by more than a quarter, it appears the corner has finally been turned. For Fiscal Year 2013, state arts agencies will receive 8.8% more money than in FY12, with more arts councils seeing increases than decreases. There were still stories of hardship and difficulty this year, most notably in Missouri, which survived for a second straight year mainly by drawing down endowment funds; Louisiana, which saw a 12.6% decrease overall; and Utah, which lost $2 million in line item funding. Meanwhile, the poor New Hampshire State Council on the Arts is locked a war of attrition with conservatives and the state now gives less money to its arts council than the US Virgin Islands. But this year, for the first time in a while, there were some astounding successes. In the past we would celebrate when an arts council got a double-digit increase in funding, but this year a few states broke triple digits: an eye-popping bump of 366.8% in Michigan, 178.4% in the District of Columbia (the largest increase in dollar terms at about $7 million), and 109.7% in Florida. And then of course there was the arts council in Kansas being brought back to life as the Creative Arts Industries Commission. (All four of these places had been hit particularly hard in recent years, so these increases are more about getting things back to where they were rather than achieving new heights.) States and territories achieving less dramatic but still important increases include the Northern Marinaras (63%), Ohio (26.3%), and Iowa (21.7%).

Of course, the legislative appropriations process is not completely finished in all states, and unfortunately for the South Carolina Arts Commission, the Palmetto State is one of the laggards. The SCAC had triumphantly reported to NASAA a 26.4% bump in state appropriations, the increase coming mostly from a one-time special infusion of $500,000 on top of the regularly appropriated budget. But for the third time in as many years, South Carolina’s Republican governor exercised line-item veto power to nix all funds for the SCAC. Arts advocates successfully beat back similar vetoes by Governors Nikki Haley and Mark Sanford with the support of overwhelming majorities from their own party in 2010 and 2011. However, this year is a little different because the legislature did not pass a budget before the July 1 start of the fiscal year, meaning that Haley’s veto has the effect of immediately (for now) dismantling the Arts Commission. Meanwhile, the legislature is being called back into session to vote on overriding the vetoes, and the SCAC bills will be taken up on July 17 and 18. Follow the South Carolina Arts Alliance on Facebook for the latest updates. (Barry has more.)

LOCAL

Arts advocates in Atlanta are having a good month. First, Mayor Kasim Reed is proposing to double the city’s direct investment in arts and culture. That would sound more impressive if not for the fact that the new appropriation to the Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs is still not enough to break $1 million, a fairly amount for the “capital of the South.”  Meanwhile, the more influential Metropolitan Atlanta Arts and Culture Commission (MAACC) is coming under the umbrella of the Atlanta Regional Commission, a move welcomed by arts advocates because the funding streams for MAACC had become more precarious in recent years. The Commission just, uh, commissioned a creative economy inventory from MAACC whose results are available here.

INTERNATIONAL

Canada’s conservative government is seeing the wisdom of supporting the arts, according to an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail. In addition to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the article quotes Harper’s Heritages and Official Languages Minister (who is also a Conservative member of parliament from British Columbia) “gushing” about Canada’s vibrant arts industry, which, in his estimation, includes Justin Bieber and Michael Bublé.

Portuguese blogger Maria Vlachou offers up a guest post on Egyptian cultural policy by Reem Kassem, a young cultural activist whose accomplishments are quite impressive. It’s hard to imagine a context more different from the United States than post-Arab Spring Egypt, but much of Kassem’s assessment sounds strangely familiar: “Inevitably, cultural activities are very much centered in Cairo, followed by Alexandria, while the rest of the country is totally ignored. On top of this, traditional forms of cultural activities held in concert halls or conference centers failed to attract new audiences – it’s always the same old faces.” Kassem reports that Egypt’s “underground” arts scene has become very much a part of the revolution against the old order and the new freedoms being sought, and argues that the activation of public space for participatory art will continue to be a critical issue going forward in Egypt.

FEDERAL

The President’s FY13 budget request is out, and (as has been widely reported) it includes a modest increase for the National Endowment for the Arts to about $154 million. This is a welcome turnaround from last year, when he kicked arts advocates in the nether regions by proposing (and thus setting up as the best-case scenario) a 13% cut to the agency’s budget, but color me unimpressed nevertheless. The arts community had big hopes upon President Obama’s inauguration that he was finally going to make cultural funding a priority, but at the end of his first term things are pretty much the same as when he came in. We had the best opportunity in decades for a game-changer at the beginning of 2009, and BHO passed it up.

But that’s yesterday’s news, and our cultural policy is what it is. AFTA’s Narric Rome points out some of the easily-overlooked details in the NEA budget request, including the fact that (if funded) the Our Town creative placemaking program’s budget will nearly double to $10 million; the travel budget is being cut by 25%; and Donald Trump (of all people!) is buying out the NEA’s current office building to convert it into a hotel, necessitating a search for new digs.

As we all know, the NEA isn’t the only recipient of federal arts funds. Mike Boehm of the LA Times rounds up the other figures: the Smithsonian gets a 5.6% increase including both its operating and capital budget; the National Gallery of Art gets an 11.2% increase; the Kennedy Center is cut by 2.4%, the Institute for Museum and Library Services essentially gets level funding. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ budget is once again tied to that of the NEA, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stays flat.

STATE

Finally, some good news from the state arts council front! After three years of financial carnage, from which Michigan did not escape, ArtServe Michigan scored a threefold increase in the governor’s budget request for the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and from a Republican no less! Granted, a threefold increase is a lot easier to achieve after your budget has been cut by 81% as Michigan’s was three years ago, but every little bit helps. This also is a success story for the power of data visualization and storytelling, as I’d be willing to bet that the very effective infographic on the promise of the creative economy that ArtServe put out in December had something to do with the victory. Florida is also looking at a welcome potential boost after several tough years in a row.

Unfortunately, some states still can’t seem to catch a break. South Carolina’s governor Nikki Haley has once again called for the South Carolina Arts Council to be eliminated, despite failing to kill it last year; there is now a proposal in the legislature to direct a portion of the state admissions tax to the arts council. And New Hampshire conservatives continue to apply pressure to the state’s Department of Cultural Resources, whose budget is practically nonexistent at this point.

Finally, we have an interesting situation in Kansas, which as you may remember was the first state to have funding for its arts council completely eliminated last year. Governor Sam Brownback is now proposing the restoration of a $200,000 pittance in state subsidy, with the caveat that it will go to a Creative Industries Commission under the Department of Commerce.

Barry Hessenius (former director of the California Arts Council) has an extensive interview with Craig Watson, current director of the California Arts Council. Because of the dire state of California’s finances, Watson reports that more general funds for the agency are unlikely this year, even though governor Jerry Brown is a huge supporter of the arts. For that reason, the CAC is pressing ahead with its campaign to sell one million arts license plates, a strategy that (if successful) would increase the Arts Council’s budget to over $40 million.

Americans for the Arts’s Justin Knabb has a helpful roundup of what’s going on with other states over at ARTSBlog. And if you’re curious about where everybody ended up last year, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies just put out its annual summary (membership or purchase required).

INTERNATIONAL

We close with a few cautionary tales about the public arts funding. As I wrote earlier this year, it’s entirely possible for governments to have a pernicious influence on an arts ecosystem. Western Europe has managed to sustain cultural norms by which governments generously fund the arts while maintaining a largely hands-off orientation towards content (case in point: Arts Council England’s new £37 million “Creative Places and People” fund), but that doesn’t mean we can count on that always being so. Hungary’s recently elected national conservative government, for example, is making waves for “systematically replacing key figures in cultural institutions, staging pro-government exhibitions, rethinking permanent museum displays and replacing historic statues to fit its political agenda.” On the other side of the political spectrum, Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chávez has received criticism for trying to appropriate the legendary El Sistema youth symphony program that preceded his presidency by 24 years. (Doug Borwick rightly points out the amazing fact that an arts program would be popular enough to be seen as propping up the political fortunes of a sitting president.)

Don’t get me wrong. I do think there is a role for government arts funding in the United States, especially at the state and local level, and I think that role could and should be expanded substantially in this country. (Hence my frustration that the opportunities to do just that three years ago were not taken by the current administration.) In a way, though, I think the fact that we’ve had to get by without much help from the government has been good for the long-term development of the field. It’s forced us to be much more creative and resourceful about finding allies, building partnerships, and cultivating earned revenue than we might otherwise have been. And in a political environment in which the “culture wars” are expanding beyond cultural organizations, perhaps it’s to our advantage that arts groups simply don’t have that much left to lose from government. That said, with diversified revenue streams in place, increased government support can only make us even stronger – and, more importantly, help to even out the inequities in arts production and access that market-driven alternatives tend to exacerbate.

Governor Sanford was tainted by scandal when his veto was overriden, so some observers wondered if the SCAC was as likely to gain the 2/3rds supermajority votes required in both houses to survive Governor Haley’s veto. It wasn’t even close. It is perhaps interesting to note that FY2012 grantees were already announced, pending the outcome of the budget bill and veto process. Advocates could call their State Representatives and State Senators knowing precisely who and what they were fighting for, including approximately $250,000 in arts-in-education funding. Still, funding levels are 16% lower in this budget (which begins July 1st) than the previous one, when the SCAC received $250,000 in one-time stimulus funds, and 55% lower than in 2008. New in FY2012, the SCAC is required to spend 70% of its funding on grants.

Also worthy of note, the news was distributed widely across Facebook and Twitter before the SCAC’s website and others could be updated.

Unlike in the case of Kansas, however, the story is not (quite) over. The legislature will have the opportunity to override the veto, and in fact it has happened before. Jonathan Katz, CEO of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, writes:

Overrides are never easy to accomplish, but the South Carolina legislature did overrule 56 of former Governor Mark Sanford’s budget vetoes last year. Included among those was an attempt to zero out a significant portion of SCAC’s FY2011 funding, an action that triggered loud public protest and was overturned by both houses of the legislature by overwhelming margins. Arts advocates in South Carolina have been mobilizing once again to urge lawmakers to override this most recent veto of state funding for SCAC. Legislative action on Governor Haley’s FY2012 budget vetoes, 35 in all, is anticipated tomorrow.

As the statement on the SCAC’s website points out, however, legislators need a two-thirds supermajority in both the House and Senate to override a veto. Yes, legislators overrode Sanford’s veto last year, but at that point Sanford was a scandal-ridden political carcass, whereas Haley still has net positive approval ratings. Will South Carolina lawmakers risk political capital over the Arts Commission? I guess we’ll find out.

If you know people who know people in South Carolina, now would be a good time to make sure they are aware of this.

• Andrew Taylor reports disturbing news for the Wisconsin Arts Board. It now looks like their best case scenario is likely a 66% cut, way out of proportion to what other agencies are looking at.
• Meanwhile, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies has updated its report on state agencies facing elimination or restructuring proposals, and the list has, unfortunately, grown since February.
  • Arizona’s governor Jan Brewer succeeded in eliminating general fund appropriations to the Arizona Commission on the Arts. The Arizona Arts Trust Fund (a vehicle for funding the arts through business tax filings) was reduced by 8%.
  • It looks like the Georgia Council on the Arts will see its funding cut nearly 30%, after suffering reductions last year as well.
  • Kansas is still not out of the woods. Although the legislature overrode the Governor’s executive order eliminating the Kansas Arts Commission, the Governor (who hasn’t signed the budget yet) still has line-item veto power over the arts council’s appropriation. Meanwhile, layoff notices have been issued to the Arts Commission’s staff by the Department of Administration, which reports to the Governor.
  • Two years after facing potential elimination, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts is under fire again – the Pennsylvania House Appropriations Committee passed an amendment which would cut the PCA’s appropriation by 68%.
  • While so far South Carolina’s legislature has not gone along with Governor Nikki Haley’s multiple entreaties to eliminate funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission, the budget isn’t signed yet.
  • Looks like the Texas Commission on the Arts is going to squeak through with a 50% reduction to its funds.
• NASAA also published a more general update on state arts agency appropriations for FY12. 61% of member agencies are looking at cuts, with only West Virginia and Hawaii potentially seeing significant increases. Notably, however, 86% of states are facing budget gaps, and 79% of governors proposed major reductions in core public services. (I’m not sure how they got 79% with 50 states, but whatever.)
• This hasn’t had any budget implications so far, but apparently the existence of the New Jersey Council on the Arts is pissing off that state’s Lieutenant Governor. (PS – the comments on that story are pretty priceless.)
• Interesting drama playing out in San Diego, where Mayor Jerry Sanders is preserving funding for the city’s Office of Arts and Culture at the expense of (among other things) libraries, recreation centers, and public art projects. Notably, San Diego is the site for this year’s Americans for the Arts Annual Convention.
• Sigh…
  

  A Republican lawmaker on Wednesday grilled the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts over grants to San Francisco mimes and an international accordion festival.

  “Those just kind of grants lend themselves to ridicule,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing. “These are a bit tough to justify … how can we justify these types of grants?”

As you might have heard, public funding for the arts has been under pressure at the local and especially state levels ever since the recession hit a few years ago. This year, those pressures have spread to the federal government as well, and during the recent negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress to agree on a budget for the remainder of the current fiscal year and avert a government shutdown, there was worry that the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arts in Education program at the US Department of Education, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would face some of the heaviest burden in the drive to cut $39 billion from the current year’s budget.

As it turned out, the arts did suffer as a result of the cuts – but all things considered, it could have been worse. According to Mike Boehm’s excellent roundup at the Los Angeles Times’s Culture Monster blog, the National Endowment for the Arts‘s budget was given a haircut of 7.5% from this year’s approved level of $167.5 million to $155 million. That’s the same amount as was funneled to the Endowment two years ago, excluding one-time stimulus funding, but still below the level from 1981. The National Endowment for the Humanities, whose budget has been informally tied to the NEA’s for a few years now, saw the same cut. A reduction at the Institute for Museum and Library Services was more serious, from $282.2 million to $237.9 million – or 15.7%. Meanwhile, the US DOE’s Arts in Education program, which had been zeroed out in the temporary continuing resolution passed earlier this year due to a misconception among lawmakers that it represented an earmark, was partially reinstated at a level of $25.5 million – 36% below the original appropriation of $40 million for this year.

Other arts-and-culture-related line items were affected as follows:

• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides partial funding to both NPR and PBS, saw its budget essentially unchanged at $445 million as a result of negotiations. This was a huge loss for conservatives, who had pushed a bill defunding CPB entirely through the House of Representatives earlier this year, only to see it go nowhere in the Senate. NPR had come under attack from the right wing last year after conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Juan Williams was fired for making remarks perceived as anti-Muslim.
• The Smithsonian, another cultural institution that had drawn negative attention from Republicans as a result of a controversial exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, also did just fine, retaining level funding at $761 million.
• On the other hand, Washington arts groups are scrambling because of a steep, seemingly mean-spirited midyear cut to the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs grant program. The agency’s appropriation dropped from $9.5 million to $2.5 million, a 74% drop. The NCACA money had distributed large grants to a limited number of organizations, representing nearly a fifth of some grantees’ budgets, but only two-one-hundredths of one percent of the total savings achieved by the spending bill.
• Two more federal expenditures on the arts, State Department funding for cultural exchange programs and funding for the National Gallery of Art, took modest hits of 5.5% and 7.2% respectively. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts saw its funding remain steady.

Meanwhile, at the state level, the last couple of months have been a mixed bag. Three state arts agencies that had been at risk of elimination or drastic cuts look to be in good shape after significant local advocacy efforts on their behalf. First up, the Kansas Senate voted to override Governor Sam Brownback’s executive order to eliminate the Kansas Arts Commission last month and reinstated funding for the agency at the current year’s levels. The House’s version of the budget still zeroes out funding, however, so arts advocates still have their work cut out for them in the Sunflower State. Second, both the Washington State House and Senate have passed budgets preserving $1.1 million in funding for the Washington State Arts Commission, which Governor Christine Gregoire had proposed to cut to $250,000 and eliminate as an independent agency. Finally, both legislative houses in the Palmetto State have proposed budgets calling for essentially level funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission, in defiance of Governor Nikki Haley’s attempt to eliminate the agency.

On the other hand, pressures continue elsewhere in the country. The news is not good for the Texas Commission on the Arts, which has been taking quite a bit of heat this year. After Governor Rick Perry suggested eliminating the arts council in his State of the State address (but not in his budget), the Texas House passed a budget that zeroes out funding for the TCA. It seems the best case scenario for the TCA now is the 38% cut that was proposed in the Senate. And now two new states are on the chopping block for significant arts cuts. Governor Scott Walker, in his spare time between presiding over the most explosive labor relations battle in the country, has proposed the elimination of the Wisconsin Arts Board as a separate agency and a 68% cut for arts funding by the state. And the New Hampshire House has eliminated support for the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts entirely in the budget it has sent to the Senate in that state. The NHSCA’s state appropriation had already been cut almost in half over the past two years.

You can keep up to date with the legislative appropriations process on a state-by-state basis via the Americans for the Arts State Arts Action Network website, which also has links to the arts advocacy organizations in each state.