Revision in System of Grants Allocation Urged : Arts: An L.A. panel recommends defining recipients only as artists or presenters of art, not by discipline. Fair access to funds within a diverse community is sought.

A civic task force studying ways to make the arts more accessible to diverse communities in Los Angeles has proposed a revolutionary restructuring of how government and private foundations allocate money to artists and arts institutions.

The panel making the recommendations is the Multicultural Arts Working Group, part of the larger 2000 Partnership organization that is studying ways the city will evolve as it nears the turn of the century. The 2000 Partnership was established by Mayor Tom Bradley and other civic leaders in 1989.

Under the radical plan advanced by the panel, the traditional system by which arts grants have been awarded for decades--in which grants are made within disciplines such as visual arts, music, theater and dance--would be largely abandoned.

In its place, the plan would try to ensure that ethnic artists and arts organizations could compete more equally with their larger, established counterparts by tossing all artists--from Anglo novelists to Cambodian dance troupes--into one grant-making category. Another category would include all organizations that present the arts, from the Music Center to the smallest ethnic art gallery.

While the report confines its formal recommendations to altering local arts grant-making decisions, the proposal is clearly intended as a blueprint for state and federal arts agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts.

The report, which was released in mid-June, is the organization’s first foray into arts policy. The working group was headed by Gerald Yoshitomi, executive director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, and included 15 executives of large, mainstream arts and arts-funding groups and public officials.

Yoshitomi said the proposal, even if fully implemented, might not require complete replacement of the existing discipline-based arts funding system. He agreed with a characterization of the plan as “revolutionary” but sought to reassure traditional arts organizations that the plan was not intended to lead to their extinction.

“We’re talking about (retaining elements of) the current system but also suggesting that there needs to be a second means of (support),” Yoshitomi said.

Adolfo Nodal, general manager of the city Department of Cultural Affairs and a member of the arts task force, acknowledged that the proposal is so radical it is unlikely to replace the existing funding system immediately--and that even over time it would have to be phased in gradually. Nodal said he personally believes in the existing discipline-based funding system, if only for pragmatic reasons of the difficulty of finding a grant-review apparatus in which the comparative creative worth of a writer could be compared to that of a jazz musician.

But, he said, “The bottom line is to realize the shifting of our social and demographic reality and to develop ways to better address arts support in an equitable way across the board. (The proposal) does not mean that the large organizations are automatically out of it. Many of them will be very sharp in terms of recognizing what they must do to handle the changing situation.”

The arts funding recommendations are largely the product of a study by arts consultant Hope Tschopik, who said the radical plan resulted from a process of trying to make the arts more broadly accessible “in an increasingly pluralistic society.”

In an interview, Tschopik said that at the national level, funding issues today have reached a critical point similar to a situation that existed in the early 1960s, just before Congress passed legislation establishing the NEA. At that time, she said, established arts institutions recognized that their traditional reliance on private philanthropy would have to become more diverse, or wealthy individual donors would no longer continue to function as the cornerstone of a nationwide system of arts patronage.

The establishment of the NEA--which, in turn, spawned state and local arts councils--raised government arts support to an unprecedented level in the United States, Tschopik said. But today, with government budgets at all levels in crisis, she said, a funding crisis perhaps more severe than that of the ‘60s looms--but this time, there are few, if any, untapped sources of money.

At the same time, Tschopik said, it has become clear that an increasingly multicultural society requires that traditional concepts of what kinds of artists and organizations receive support must be completely re-examined. Half in jest, Tschopik characterized the existing system of arts funding as predicated on a “butt in seat” philosophy, in which cultural organizations expect to receive money to attract traditional, but largely passive, audiences to large venues where they do little more than occupy seats or gallery floor space.

“Are we trying to have a city where everyone goes to the Music Center (for largely European-based artistic traditions) or are we about saying that there are multiple aspects of the culture of this city?” she said. “This is about (having) a bigger table and having more places at that table.”

The task force plan would also establish a grant category for all forms of cultural education and another to help mid-sized arts organizations expand so that the region’s arts infrastructure grows beyond a small handful of large institutions.

Despite the implications for national policy-makers, neither NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer nor Anne-Imelda Radice, the endowment’s senior deputy chairman, would discuss the proposal. After reviewing the plan for nearly two days, the NEA issued a one-paragraph statement saying the proposals as they pertain to the Los Angeles community “deserve further study from a national perspective.”

Juan Carrillo, deputy director of the California Arts Council and another member of the 2000 Partnership panel, said his agency will open formal consideration of what its options might be under the proposal at a July 26 meeting in San Diego. He said the state agency has already begun employing multidisciplinary grant-review panels and does not find the concept entirely alien.

But Joy Silverman, an advocate for artists’ rights and founder of the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, said that while “this report is great in that they are trying to develop a new model,” the apparent exclusion of working artists from the panel might result in the opposite effect from what was intended. Silverman charged that the plan would actually result in “promoting the same agenda that is being forwarded at the federal level by ultraconservative legislators--the prominence of traditional arts and culture at the expense of contemporary critical work, and the overemphasis on audience and community over the needs of the artist.”