Artful Infrastructure
The arts have barely been mentioned during the primary election, nor in the general election sweeping President Barack Obama into The White House on January 20, 2009. A meager $50 million has been requested by the new Congress for The National Endowment for the Arts. Although some state arts councils, like Ohio's, remain well funded, The City of Cincinnati City Council eliminated all funding for the arts for its 2009 budget. I foresee Kennedy-like arts evenings at White House dinners, but the near void in discussion may leave new opportunities for artists themselves to step up into the economic priorities being established by the new President and Congress, with $850 billion dollars being sought for new infrastructure jobs.
President Obama comes from a background of community organizing, believes in personal responsibility and in volunteerism. How might artists capitalize on these beliefs and the influx of taxpayer monies into the economy?
They will have to find ways of organizing into larger blocs with bargaining power. Although we may not think of artists as group organizers, community outreach programs and the original community action programs established under President Johnson provide precedents: monies from the latter led to the formation of The Arts Consortium, for example, by Cincinnati artists Robert Harris and Robert O'Neal. The wisdom of these aging boomers is still around and mentoring available.
Think of preexisting artists' groups in Cincinnati's The Pendleton and Essex Studio buildings with their regular open houses; Artworks, the brains behind The Flying Pigs, urns, baseball bats (and an impressive artist data base). The Manifest Gallery and The Fifth Street Gallery are artist inspired and managed. The Ohio Arts Council provides user-friendly data, lists, information.
Now think Infrastructure. Fields such as industrial design, architecture and planning can integrate the work of graphic designers, and - why not? - visual artists. The roads and bridges and schools which will be rebuilt will benefit enormously if artistic activity is integrate into them early in the planning process. The Roebling Bridge connecting Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky, has been lit at night since the late Mrs. Walter Langsam thought of the idea; The Purple People Bridge is, well, purple. Laser lights can make infrastructure mysteriously beautiful (an old Contemporary Arts Center project lasered up Fountain Square). We need artists on the design teams; we want murals on the noise walls on expressways: we want beauty and art built into the remake and the redo (so many nineteenth century bridges were graceful, as were water towers and reservoirs). The interiors of tunnels do not have to be bleak. Think of numerous cities where subways/metros/airports have been enlivened and beautified by artists. Do we want billboards, electronic or not? What criteria shall we use to make them felicitous and harmonious?
Our urban public schools are a disgrace, although many of them still reveal their early grandeur (Cincinnati photographer Robert Flischel's book An Expression of the Community: Cincinnati Public Schools lovingly captures the mosaics, the fountains, the elegant details barely surviving our civic neglect.) Think of the possible jobs for artists - from design through fabrication. And let us have our artists certain to include classrooms user-friendly to and for all the arts. This opportunity is not coming again soon.
I was in public elementary school in Cincinnati in the 1950s. Someone had established The Art League, and we were encouraged to donate pennies for the purchase and upkeep of the paintings, which were installed in the hallways of the schools. These paintings turned out to be examples of the yet-undiscovered great Cincinnati school painters, from Duveneck and Potthast and many others. Although always hung too high for the kids, the idea of going to school surrounded by art was imbued in us (the deterioration of the schools and surges in discipline and crime caused the paintings to be removed: most will become part of the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2008-9).
Let us do it again, and surround our youth (and their parents and teachers) with art made by artists who live in the regions where schools will be rebuilt.
Let us suppose that school budgets remain low, and the arts marginal: we come to another part of the Obama philosophy. If artists are willing to donate some time teaching in the public schools, at a certain level of commitment, they would be offered free health care as a trade. This barter model can be suggested throughout infrastructure ventures, so that volunteerism is tangibly rewarded to the betterment of the whole system (how long the artist teaches, etc., is not in the purview of this article, but the health care would remain). The Obama plan is meant to create private sector jobs. (If some hospitals are included in infrastructure, any beautiful art will help their bleakness.)
We will, concurrently, need artist-lobbyists who will get the arts integrated into any new energy/environmental programs as well. I imagine a country with paid artists-in-residence all through the culture. The MBAs have had their turn, and they have blown it. How about some aesthetic judgement and amenities. People work better and more happily (and probably more productively) when there is beauty around. There never was any business point to a Beaux Arts building, but the downtown headquarters of Western & Southern Financial Group anchors East 4th street with its elegant and graphical façade.
Without attempting a laundry list of possible new government-inspired economic rejuvenation, we can create organization models for artistic inclusion in any sector. The era of corporate sponsorship of everything is probably over, arguably, and maybe artist inclusion can mitigate against its excesses. As one of Cincinnati's major arts patrons put it to me at lunch about a year ago, "I don't know why everyone wants my opinion on what should be developed downtown. The patrons aren't the creative people. I respond to a business plan. I don't come up with the ideas. I pay for them."
