Architecture & Desire panel Nov. 5th, 7pm

panel talk held at Women and Their Work

Austin Art Community Call to Action

It’s time for the Austin Art community to show up. The candidates running for mayor and city council will be at the Paramount on Wednesday, April 1 at 7pm to tell us their platform for the arts in Austin. The art community needs to represent, or the powers that be will think the arts can be put on the back burner and no one will care.

Robert Faires of the Austin Chronicle makes a great point:

“… collectively the creative sector in Austin – music, film, the arts, digital media, et al. – generates $2.2 billion in economic activity every year and employs 44,000 people. That sector is not only responsible for a lot of the city’s international rep (Austin City Limits, Slacker, Stevie Ray, Willie, South by Southwest, to name a few), but it’s grown steadily over the past 30 years, even through the real estate and dot-com busts. Hey, if you’re looking for economic stability …

But when money gets tight, if anything gets cut faster than library hours, it’s arts and culture. And part of the reason is we don’t show up. Let’s not make that mistake this time. A packed Paramount would send a pretty powerful message to City Hall. I think I saw it on a trailer at the SXSW Film Festival: Creativity is all. All is creativity.”

So, show up Austin!!

I’ll never forget the story I heard about the lack of the helmet law in TX. When congress was going to vote on whether or not to make riding a bike or motorcycle illegal without a helmet, hundreds of motorcycle riders circled the capital, so much so that the congressional chamber shook. The result? The law didn’t pass and still to this day you can risk your life by riding helmetless. Now, we don’t have motorcycles, but we do have the numbers if people will just show up. Let’s demand the respect and visibility we deserve!

Obama’s inspiration

Obama’s campaign and now presidency has inspired countless people to start volunteering in their community, become active in local politics or just have hope in the nation in which we live. He’s also inspired painters. From there we get badpaintingsofbarackobama.com, a delightfully good humored selection of some of the art our president has inspired. This is one of my faves. The rest are just as good (or bad).

Selling Culture as an Economic Force

That’s the headline from yesterday’s Times article which recounts how arts-friendly members of the House and Senate struggled to secure arts funding in the new economic-stimulus bill when things looked bleakest: Though the original House version of the bill included $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Senate version approved no arts dollars whatsoever, and as of February 6th, the Senate had even voted for an amendment specifically denying any stimulus money for museums, arts centers and theaters. But in a fortunate turn of events, supporters like Representative Louise M. Slaughter and Nancy Pelosi were able to convince a House-Senate conference committee that the arts do, in fact, provide jobs and stimulate the economy. Arts groups backed them up with figures asserting that the arts contribute 6 million jobs, $30 billion in tax revenue and $166 billion in annual economic impact.

A Little Bit of Hope for the Arts

Let’s be real, y’all, this economy is scary for everyone. And as many artists (and museums, galleries, curators, and critics) unfortunately already know, it can be almost impossible to make a living working in an art-related field even in the best of financial times. Present economy aside, arts funding has already been hit hard in recent years–states have cut their arts budgets by $100 million in the last two years alone. With dwindling art-field opportunities and a devastating turn of events in the economy, what happens to artists?

Fortunately, there’s some hope: Obama seems to understand the importance of art, artists, and art as a profession. He enters his presidency as the most arts-friendly candidate we’ve seen in our lifetime, having already given lip service to ideas like dispatching “art corps” to schools (an idea W&TW definitely believes in) and tax benefits and affordable health care for artists. You can download his entire arts platform here. Only time will tell if he’s actually able to implement these ideas with so much on his plate, but with tons of arts leaders lobbying for him to increase the presence of the arts in his cabinet (did you sign the Secretary of the Arts petition yet? Do it!) let’s hope he can be duly persuaded to make the arts a priority.

Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts, which has seen its funding slashed by 30 percent in the past 15 years, is slated for a pick-me-up via the American Recovery and Reinvestment bill, which includes a $50 million NEA supplement to be distributed directly to non-profit arts organizations. The bill has been approved by the House Appropriations committee and could make it to the President’s desk by mid-February if it passes in the House and Senate. Fingers crossed.

So we cautiously hope that funding for the arts isn’t going to totally die–in fact, the wretched economy might even be prove to be a good catalyst for examining and redressing the shabby treatment the arts have received in the U.S. in recent years.

And hey, as our country sinks further into the Great Depression II, at the very least we might get some super sweet public art out of it, Works Progress Administration-style! Let’s brush up on our mural painting skills everybody.