Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Americans for the Arts working with Obama team on policy

Not just a place at the table, but an office in the halls of power.

Robert Lynch envisions this for the arts. For months, he has worked with Barack Obama’s transition team to pinpoint the ways in which arts and culture can help and be helped in the new president’s plan to rescue the economy.

He thinks change is coming.

 “I feel like we’ll be listened to, and we’re not going away,” said Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, a research and advocacy organization. “I’m very pleased with the access we’re getting. It gives me optimism.”  

Not groundbreaking, but “groundsaving” is how Lynch described the recommendations that he and his organization have made to the Obama team – a set of practical tactics that would stabilize and strengthen the arts and cultural sector while drawing on artists’ expertise to improve education and community life around the nation.

The nine recommendations aim to: provide community teaching and mentoring jobs for artists, as well as arts-job training, affordable health care and unemployment insurance; increase development grants for neighborhood cultural projects, art districts and cultural facilities; boost funding for federal cultural agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts that support local arts agencies and their grants and services for local artists; and encourage state transportation departments to work with state arts agencies on providing more artist commissions for creative design, public artworks and historic preservation-projects in transportation infrastructure.

The point of increasing government funding for arts and culture is not to make the sector more dependent on federal money, Lynch said, but to give it an important tool: the lever of official approval. Being deemed worthy of a grant by the government helps artists and cultural groups persuade audiences and private donors to support them, too.  

That’s not a new idea, but the last recommendation comes close. It calls for the creation of a senior-level post in the Obama administration for an arts official, someone who would coordinate arts and cultural policies and guide arts-related initiatives stemming from federal agencies that deal with such issues as tourism, education, economic development, cultural exchange, intellectual property and broadband access.

To have for the first time a senior policy person in the White House “who can connect the dots … and truly represent the breadth and strength of the arts that is already there,” would be pretty close to groundbreaking, Lynch said.

Though he’s most concerned right now with restoring arts and culture to better health, Lynch does have an eye on the arts frontier. He sees new and creative ways for nonprofits to sustain themselves by being more entrepreneurial and blending their nonprofit mission with for-profit activities, as the Metropolitan Opera has by video-recording its performances to screen for paying audiences in local movie theaters.

He also sees an “explosion” of artworks that will take advantage of new technologies, and the development of new art forms based in folk culture and crafts that will increase the public’s consumption of art.

“I think that’s going to be what really helps the arts through this economic downturn,” Lynch said.

But a sympathetic president can’t hurt. Said Lynch of the transition team, “I’ve really been impressed with their receptiveness.”