Pay Day

Remember when we were all into "we demand an economic stimulus package for the arts!"?

How's that going, I wonder?

The New York Times reports that the civil servants at the National Endowment for the Arts are evaluating more than 2000 applications submitted by cultural organizations seeking a portion of the $50 million in stimulus funds allotted to the arts by President Barack Obama.

The NEA has already passed out 40% of the money through grants awarded to State Arts Agencies and Regional Arts Organizations like The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA.)

Meanwhile, over at Reason Online, contributor Greg Beato says American artists "sold themselves out at the ridiculously low price of $50 million" furthermore, he asks, "Wouldn’t it have been more provocative, inspiring, and educational if they’d simply said, “No, thanks”? "

At the Nation, Jeff Chang notes that "Artists played a largely unheralded role in Obama's victory" and then poses the obvious question: "So why haven't community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?"

Which reminds me, remember how we were all like "Please, Mr. President, appoint an "arts czar!"?

Apparently, he did...twice.

Who's Fooling Who?

Do you remember Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Campaign Platform in Support of the Arts (pdf)? It seems like only yesterday that the candidates promised "to use the bully pulpit...to promote the importance of arts and arts education in America."

Then came the great stimulus package battles and President Barack Obama gave a big speech explaining his plan to save everything but he didn't mention arts at all, which hurt.

Then Education Secretary Arne Duncan visited a school in Brooklyn and he too said nothing about arts education at all.

More recently, a Chicago Tribune article says the Obamas attendance at art events like a recent performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater may be enough to boost the profile of the arts in general:

If outings to arts venues become a habit with the first family, "it would be a huge boon to the arts community in Washington and for the United States and the world," said David Andrew Snider, president of the League of Washington Theatres. "There's a widespread feeling that he ... gets the importance of the arts."

Hyperballad: Billie Holiday "Foolin' Myself"

The Building

Crain's New York Business reports that local nonprofits are "scrambling" to get a piece of the federal stimulus funds that are scheduled to start pouring into the state, any minute now.

According to Senior Reporter Miriam Kreinin Soucca, the priority is money for construction projects that are "shovel ready." She mentions a few examples, such as one about a theater that is trying to get a new sidewalk out front and this about a worthy non-profit in Brooklyn that needs a new fence to go with their $25 million dollar multipurpose room:

Pamela Green, executive director of the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, an African-American historical society, submitted a $5 million request to the New York Department of Cultural Affairs and to several of the city's elected officials

The city has already provided Weeksville with much of the $25 million it needs for a 19,000-square-foot performance and education space that the center plans to break ground on in June.

Stimulus money would enable Weeksville to add a parking lot and a fence, but Ms. Green is uncertain about her odds.

“We don't know who else is on the list, and we don't know who we are competing against,” she says. “And we also have no idea what the requirements were.”

Hypertextual:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley