Quotes of the Day
As far back as the 13th century, Italian city-states guarded their cultural artifacts as carefully as they did their borders. Some 800 years later, in the unified nation that claims Michelangelo and Titian as part of its heritage, that legacy still has power. From masterpieces hanging in museums to precious works held in private collections — whose owners cannot so much as move a painting without official approval — almost all of Italy's treasures are jealously protected by the state. Culture, says Salvatore Settis, an Italian professor of art history and classical archaeology, "holds a historic memory that belongs to the citizens."
This same deep sense of obligation is shared by governments across Europe. But fiscal pressures are forcing countries to rethink and restructure the way they look after their artistic pasts — and nurture the present and future. It's not that public funding is falling; in the U.K. and France, for example, money for the arts has risen slightly. But governments across Europe are pressuring arts bodies to become more self-sufficient — even to embrace once-taboo methods like privatization and corporate sponsorship — and to recognize that commercial viability is as critical to survival as artistic merit. "Culture is business," says Werner Heinrichs, dean at the State University for Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart. "Nobody should pretend that these two things are not linked."
That lesson is being learned at the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden in Berlin. The city of Berlin faces debts of more than €45 billion, so the opera house and other premier cultural venues are feeling the pinch. Like all German arts organizations, the Staatsoper relies heavily on state funds. This year, it will receive about €44 million in subsidies out of a total budget of €66 million. Less than 1% of the opera's money comes from private donations, with the rest coming from ticket sales. But last month Berlin Cultural Senator Thomas Flierl announced cost-cutting plans to reduce staff and jointly administer the city's three opera houses — the Staatsoper plus the Deutsche Oper and Komische Oper.
Flierl's rescue plan is viewed with suspicion by the management of the opera houses. The Staatsoper, which last year had a financial surplus of €7.2 million, will be obliged to transfer its savings to the cash-strapped Komische Oper. Many fear that the plan may save money only at the cost of quality and diversity. "I hope we don't have three weak operas," says Georg Vierthaler, managing director of the Staatsoper. "Berlin needs one strong opera that has the power to compete with London and Vienna." But first Berlin's three opera houses will have to learn how to compete among themselves.
As far as sponsorship goes, the relationship between culture and corporations is most developed in the U.K. In 1999, the most recent year for which figures are available, sponsorship from business accounted for about 11% of all arts funding; in Germany, where public investment in the arts is seven times higher than in the U.K., the figure stands at about 4%. But even in those nations where the arts and business worlds have been viewed as mutually exclusive, private funding is increasingly important. In France, it is one of the pillars of Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon's new policy for the arts.
Such partnerships are not the only way to ensure that the arts learn to help themselves. European governments are nudging institutions to balance their budgets, outsourcing the management of museums to private concerns, and closing unprofitable theaters — all of which has caused widespread anxiety in artistic communities. How justified are such concerns? To some, the problem with blending commerce and culture is that the bottom line could take precedence over other considerations, like creative development. Others feel such arguments are purely reflexive. "It's intellectual snobbery," says Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, a London-based body that develops partnerships between business and the arts. To him, corporate ideology brings the arts two blessings. The first: financial accountability, which he sees as a road to longevity. The second? "The private sector is far less onerous in its stipulations," he insists, dismissing the idea that corporate sponsors seek to influence the creative direction of the artists or galleries they sponsor.
Can the marriage of art and business succeed? To find out, TIME looked at three countries on the frontier where artistic vision meets financial pressure.
LONDON
Clear voices, raised in song, rang through St. Paul's Church in London's Covent Garden late last month. The music was "a singing strike" by choristers from the English National Opera (ENO), which faces €1.75 million in debt and whose management has proposed that its core group of 60 singers be reduced by one-third. In response, the choristers pulled out of a scheduled performance of Berlioz's The Capture of Troy, and instead came to St. Paul's Church to perform Verdi's Requiem. Before the performance David Dyer, a tenor, told the packed church that the proposed changes amounted to "cultural vandalism."
In the U.K., where public funding for the arts tends to be lower than in other large European nations, ENO faces an old and difficult challenge: marrying creative freedom with commercial viability. "It's the terrible tension between wanting to spend money and running your organization well," says David McNeill, a spokesman for Arts Council England (ACE), a public-funding organization. Since ENO's chairman, Martin Smith, has an investment banking background, critics are finding it easy to insist that he is driven by financial considerations above all else. Such an attitude, says actress Fiona-Jane Weston, who attended the protest at St. Paul's Church, is about "knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing" — Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic.
But maybe Smith and the ENO board have a point. After all, this is not the first time the company has run into financial trouble. ENO received about €20 million this fiscal year from ace, which accounts for 53% of its funding. Box-office receipts account for 28% and corporate and private sponsorship another 10%. ENO is also modernizing its home base, the London Coliseum, at an expected cost of €59 million. In 1997, in addition to regular funding, ace gave ENO a "stabilization" grant of €13 million to wipe out its debts. In 2002, ENO applied to ace to go back into stabilization, and asked for more money.
In return, ace wants proof that the opera company is addressing its long-term problems. ENO has already gone some way toward making itself more commercially viable. Last July, then general director Nicholas Payne — whose outlook, although highly creative, was not considered financially driven — resigned. Smith's unpopularity after that was compounded when ENO appointed the unproven Sean Doran to replace Payne, and when details of the ENO board's rescue plan leaked out. Among other things, it suggests cutting up to 100 jobs from the staff of 520 and employing some staff on a freelance basis — although critics say that if the chorus is not together full time, standards will slip. ace will give its response to the plan later this month.
"Opera is the most expensive art form," McNeill says, "and ENO has to compete in an escalating marketplace." Smith is holding firm. He sees the proposed modernization of ENO's finances — including doing away with rigid, expensive staff contracts — as an inevitable part of the process. And the singing strike? "We're talking 20 [layoffs] here," he told the U.K.'s Sunday Telegraph. "In the banking world, 50,000 people have lost their jobs in the past two years."
ITALY
"Italy's main resource is its artistic vision," says Antonio Paolucci, an art historian and former Culture Minister. "Art, history, fashion, gastronomy, craftsmanship, design — from pizza to Botticelli." But now a great deal of that heritage — Pompeii, the Colosseum, even the Uffizi Gallery — could in principle be sold to slash public debt.
Because of Italy's oppressive public debt, which stood at just over €1.34 trillion at the end of 2002, a law passed by the Italian Parliament last June clears the way for the Economy Minister to authorize the liquidation of some of Italy's cultural patrimony. Two companies — Patrimonio S.p.A. and Infrastrutture S.p.A. — can sell or lease historical monuments, art treasures or natural resources such as islands, beaches and forests belonging to the state. When the property is of "particular cultural interest," the Economy Minister needs an okay from the Culture Minister to sell. After nation-wide demonstrations by arts employees and environmentalists in December over the vague wording and muddy procedures of the new law, Culture Minister Giuliano Urbani appointed the impressively titled Scientific Committee for the Protection of the Cultural Heritage, which includes Paolucci, to suggest criteria for deciding what property is sellable. Paolucci insists that the last word must come from the Culture Ministry. "It is their interest to preserve our cultural heritage," he says. "The interest of the Economy Ministry is to make money."
According to Salvatore Settis, former director of the Getty Research Institute of Art History in Los Angeles and a member of the Scientific Committee for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, "Italy is unique in that museums are a continuum of the city. The same artists you see in the Uffizi, you'll find in a little church outside Florence or in palazzi in nearby towns." Deciding what is expendable becomes very dicey when the cultural heritage is so rich — and so much a part of national identity. The 17th century Villa Feroni a Bellavista, for example, a Baroque masterpiece just 30 minutes from Florence, is now abandoned. If a buyer came along with a commitment to restore the villa and make it into a convention center, accountants at the Economy Ministry would readily agree. Settis would not: "There are hundreds of privately owned historical villas abandoned, but the government does not force the owners to sell."
Settis suggests compiling a complete inventory of cultural property owned by the state, no easy task in a country as rich in heritage as Italy. Then the list should be divided into three categories: items of no cultural interest, which could be sold; items of clear cultural interest, which could not be sold; and items that fall into a gray area, for which criteria must be devised to determine what can be put on the market. "We have to get away from the pressure of finding something that can be sold," Settis says. "The real urgency is to correct a very dangerous law."
FRANCE
In France, the tradition of state support for the arts is as old as the French Revolution itself. Conservatives and socialists "defend cultural investment with the same energy and the same conviction," says Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon. The reason is pragmatic: in today's economic climate, cultural venues like the Comédie Française, the Pompidou Center and scores of smaller theaters and arts centers around the country could not exist without government support. "We consider their existence essential," Aillagon says. But governments are under intense pressure, so even though the 2003 culture budget provides a 5% increase in spending for cultural institutions and national monuments, Aillagon hopes to tap private money too.
Private funding for the arts is in its infancy in France, largely because of a lack of tax incentives. The French currently spend only 0.1% of GNP on philanthropy, as opposed to 2.1% in the U.S., and the country counts just 600 private cultural foundations, compared to 2,000 in Germany, 3,000 in the U.K. and 12,000 in the U.S. Aillagon wants to change that. "The state must not be afraid to start up partnerships with the private sector," he says. To make those partnerships easier, the Culture Minister has launched initiatives, to be presented to Parliament this month, that would allow tax deductions of 60% for donations made "in the public interest" and raise the ceiling on deductions from 10% to 20% of taxable income. Other incentives would include deductions from inheritance taxes and for gifts to corporate foundations, along with simplified procedures for establishing foundations and for deciding what qualifies as "public interest." The new measures would apply not only to culture, but also to hospitals, sports, youth projects and other public interest sectors. Aillagon hopes the measures will provide a "new élan to allow France to catch up" with the private-funding crowd in other countries.
Already, more limited rules in effect since January 2002 permit corporate donors to deduct up to 90% of the amount donated to the state for the purchase of a "national treasure." The first gift to the state under those rules has just gone on show at the Louvre: nine large decorative panels by famed 18th century animal painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. The price was more than €3 million, paid jointly by PGA Holding, a leading automobile distributor, and private donors Nicole and Pierre Guénant. And the restoration of the Hall of Mirrors at the Château de Versailles is being underwritten by construction and technology firm Vinci, whose president, Antoine Zacharias, has just been awarded a Grand Benefactor medal — a newly created honor that adds a quintessentially French flourish to philanthropy.
- JENNIE JAMES | London
- With less state funding, European arts groups are singing for their supper