Rob Bettmann

There was an interesting court case recently (“Night Moves vs the State of New York“) in which a Strip Club owner sued the government, arguing that his patrons should not have to pay sales tax on their entry fees, and lap dances. The merit of the case related to a statute that waives sales tax for professional live entertainment, including dance performance. Dancers in strip clubs are professionals, and what are we, puritans?

The line between porn and modern dance actually launched the career of renowned choreographer Anna Halprin, who was famously arrested in 1965 after performing her work “Parades and Changes” (which involves everyday movements, including undressing.) But even within the avant-garde dance community, it is offensive to compare exotic dance to professional modern dance.

The values embedded in stripping and the values embedded in non-profit dance are entirely different. If one tries to twin them, to pretend that they are of the same family, it degrades non-profit dance and threatens its survival. Making the case for government support (arts funding) and government subsidy (the non-profit tax deduction) is a challenge in the current political environment. Sexuality continues to be a lightning rod for controversy, and even considering extending the non-profit tax deduction to exotic dance makes the deduction’s defense more difficult.

We shouldn’t waive the sales tax for exotic dance because professional modern dance is good, not because exotic dance is bad. It’s not uncommon for people to try to twin concepts together, and the problem in this situation and others isn’t so much the approval of the one, but the pollution of the other.

Lance Armstrong recently went on Oprah to apologize for his theft of seven Tour de France titles, and subsequently fraudulently soliciting over $470 million dollars in donations to his foundation. Armstrong has a number of apologists, including his biographer the Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, who recently penned a column explaining all of the reasons why she’s not angry with him. As with the Strip Club court case, Lance Armstrong is another one of those cases where people are trying to wrap reasonable arguments around an inexcusable proposition.  Lance Armstrong’s success was predicated on a narrative that was a lie, constructed around an athletic success that was a sham. His deception is all the more terrible because of the tremendous honorable effort he marshaled using his fraud. What now?

There are real heroes out there that we never knew because we were paying attention to Lance. The Livestrong Foundation raised over $470 million dollars between 1997 and 2011, and someone who wasn’t lying should have had a chance to solicit those donations, but Lance Armstrong’s championship wake swamped and prevented that. His fraud as an athlete underwrote every check written to Livestrong. A similar non-profit fraud was perpetrated by the founder of the Central Asia Institute, and exposed in 2011 by both Sixty Minutes and John Krakauer (Three Cups of Deceit.) If we accept Lance Armstrong’s apology, the message it sends is that the ends justify the means.

In his famous Supreme Court opinion on obscenity, Justice Potter Stewart, who was being asked to define the difference between art photography and pornography admitted simply, “perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Stripping and concert dance are not twins, and success and fraud are not twins either. Sometimes we over-complicate our judgments, and as Justice Stewart might agree, we risk sending a terrible message to youth when we do.

The Arts are a tool for activism in the Occupy Movement, but they are also a front on which Occupy is attacking conceits of the economic system.  The Occupy Museums working group, “calls out corruption and injustice in institutions of arts and culture,” and the attacks focus on labor issues, and service to the one percent (generally.) The Occupy Museums manifesto calls the Arts, “a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite.” Those inside the Arts field may find it hard to embrace these criticisms, but as the Arts wrestle with issues of diversity and aging, the Occupy attacks are an affirmation of the relevance of the Arts in civic life.

The arts are a part of Occupy in at least four ways.  The Arts are a tool in the movement, an expression of the movement, a support in the movement, and also a target.  Erin Sickler, a journalist within the movement, wrote that the Arts economy is “reproducing inequitable and oppressive economic relations,” adding that, “the moguls who 
sit on museum boards are often the 
same people who contrived the runaway financial speculation which has blighted economic life for the rest of us, in the U.S. and beyond.”  To some, the Arts are another example of an economic system that enriches and benefits the 1%, dis-empowering and disenfranchising the 99%.

Just as Occupiers lament the undue influence of one-percenters in the banking sector, they are concerned over the influence of that same group in cultural banking establishments, including museums. In one recent creative action, a group of activists circulated a very convincing parody press release imagining a world where the Whitney Museum and its Biennial dedicate themselves to the 99%. The fraudulent release includes,

As an institution dedicated to the public interest, the Whitney has an obligation to use its platform to facilitate actions that promote the good of the many over the greed and profits of the few…. As Biennial curator Elizabeth Sussman remarked, “We’re delighted we naturally got involved with Occupy Wall Street.” Documentation of the event and a full transcript of the assembly will be published online and as a supplement inserted into the Whitney Biennial 2012 exhibition catalogue, currently available in the Museum bookstore.

These activists are concerned that the producers of professional culture have been co-opted into the service of the 1%, and the Occupy Arts movement is fighting to ensure that the Arts are relevant to and reflective of the modern world. As one Occupy LA blogger wrote, “if history has taught us anything… it’s that art is among the most honest and lasting of cultural indicators.” Occupy activists believe in the Arts enough to fight for it.

Carl Jung wrote that the Arts, “dream the myth onward and give it modern dress,” and in this way, the 99% Arts movement is an expression of faith, an insistence on the importance of the Arts. As the Occupy Museums website argues, “Art and Culture are part of the commons. Art is not a luxury item.”

Last week, arts advocates visited with District of Columbia City Council members to learn which policy-makers support an increase in arts funding within D.C’s FY 13 budget. Some members went on the record supporting a $10 million dollar (plus) funding level for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and several others, including Council-members Cheh and Wells, refused to take a position, stating that until the new budget was created, they couldn’t know the right number. Charles Allen, Chief of Staff for Ward Six Council-member (and arts supporter) Tommy Wells asked advocates to clarify why the ask was for $10 million, instead of $11 million. Government funding is critically important to local artists and arts organizations, but how much arts funding is the right amount of arts funding?

Two recent news stories highlight a common misunderstanding about U.S. government arts spending. Journalist Carl Franzen’s Talking Points Memo interview with online fundraising website co-founder Yancey Strickler stimulated conversation last week because of Strickler’s assertion that his site, Kickstarter.com, may distribute more money to the arts this coming year than the National Endowment for the Arts. Franzen quotes Strickler saying, “maybe it shouldn’t be that way… maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”

The U.S. arts system is designed to be powered by the private sector, not the government, and Strickler’s website, which crowd-sources small donors, is an example of the rise of online game-influenced fundraising, not weak state support. The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2009 publication How is NEA Money Distributed affirms, “In contrast to the European models, the U.S. system of arts support is complex, decentralized, diverse, and dynamic… [In 2004] only about 13 percent of arts support in the U.S. came from the government… of which less than 1 percent came from the National Endowment for the Arts.” NEA funding is, by design, less than one percent of the total arts funding ecosystem.

One core arts support in the U.S. model is the non-profit tax deduction, created within the War Revenue Act of 1917. The most important part of the Act, when it was written, was a set of massive income tax increases. For example, individuals earning $100,000 of taxable income in 1917 saw their tax rate jump 22% (to 31%), while those reporting $1,000,000 in income saw a 50% hike, to 65%. According to an Internal Revenue Service history, the deduction “was conceived as a way to encourage charitable contributions at a time when income tax rates were rising in order to fund World War I.” When the wartime tax rates were rescinded the non-profit deduction stuck, and in 1936 corporations were additionally granted the deduction.

A January 25, 2012 New York Times story on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax returns asserted that Mitt’s taxes display, “the array of perfectly ordinary ways in which the United States tax code confers advantages on the rich.” Even some Conservatives were concerned about his overall tax rate of 15%, with an example article titled, “Do Romney Tax Returns Reveal Problems in America’s Tax Code?” The non-profit tax deduction is just one of the deductions the Romney’s used to reduce their tax burden, but it was a significant one.

A few months ago President Obama riled up non-profit supporters with a proposal to limit the charitable tax deduction for families earning over $250,000 a year. A Washington Post article reported that Obama’s proposal would, “limit those individuals to writing off 28 percent of their itemized deductions, down from 35 percent…. wealthier donors would save $2,800 in taxes on a $10,000 charitable contribution, instead of the $3,500 allowed under current law…. While such a change could cut donations to all kinds of charities — from food banks to homeless shelters to health clinics — arts groups are feeling especially vulnerable these days.” Of course anything that might reduce donations makes non-profits uneasy.

Government funding is a pittance within the overall arts economy, but especially in today’s economy, it’s a very important and powerful pittance. What is the right amount of government arts funding at the Federal, State, and Local level? There is no absolute answer, but on DC’s Arts Advocacy Day, March 14, 2012, the Local answer is: $10 million dollars. Government arts support in D.C. has been cut 69.88% from FY 09 to FY 12, and with a total DC budget last year over $11 billion dollars, as a percentage, funding for the arts was less than one half of .1 percent (0.034%.) A community petition to increase DC arts support to $10 million for FY 13 is live right now, and currently has over four hundred signatories.

Image from The Washington Post’s blog Capitol Voices; This blog post originally published on the Huffington Post here.