Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Marketplace and Subsidy


Near the conclusion of the post-screening event for the feature version of Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense Portland Jazz Festival director and founder Bill Royston repeated the following phrase like some kind of mantra for the survival of events like his and the future of public arts in general: "marketplace or subsidy."

Royston said the festival receives a small state subsidy, but could not survive without marketplace funding. When Qwest pulled out as sponsor in late 2008, the festival was shuttered until Alaska Airlines came to rescue. I have sometimes expressed some of my concerns, frustrations even, about PDX Jazz, but Royston has made some great contributions to this community with the festival. And if for last year's amazing afternoon with Bobby Hutcherson and Lou Donaldson alone, he deserves great ovation.

I've been thinking a lot about a Recent New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman about European Museums moving towards private funding. The traditional European attitude towards art preservation of the arts is something that the US has a hard time comprehending, just as they do the concept of how many European countries deal with healthcare and other social services.

I love art museums when they are populated by the few, but always feel a bit funny that too much of that could lead to their demise. I will always remember Pam and I finally making it to the final week of the Clement Greenburg collection's first showing at the Portland Art Museum on September 13 2001 when there was still a lack of normalcy in the activities of the world and pretty much no patrons besides ourselves. But in recent weeks I have been dropping into the museum more frequently and have found that you don't need a world crisis to time a quiet visit among the collections.

I appreciate Kimmelman's description of this phenomena:

Here in Berlin I often escape for an hour or two to the Gemäldegalerie, this city’s museum of old master paintings, one of the best in the world. But because it’s off the beaten tourist path, and because this is Germany and not France, it is nearly always empty. In room after room of Giotto and Raphael, Titian and Rembrandt, Dürer and Holbein I find myself alone, save for the sandal-clad guards spending quiet days of monkish solitude, sharing what I have come over the years to think of as my private Filippo Lippi, my personal Vermeer, my own Chardins and Watteaus.

It is a glorious gift, and I am grateful to a public financing system that in this particular case is not yet in thrall to, or is proudly resisting, the marketing strategies that have turned the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London into the equivalents of Wal-Marts on Black Friday...

It is a huge issue and neither subsidy or marketplace sponsorship are the answer. Curators and directors will need to continue to find the right balance. And most importantly, we the public, need to help support wherever we can as well as costs get ever tighter for those trying to make our communities and worlds just a little bit richer.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:57 PM
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