by Harold McMillan

More ramble, but with some detailed articulation of where that stuff from last month comes from (if you didn't read us last month, it's OK....we left off here).

The pundits line up on all sides of the race - vs - culture - vs - artistic - merit issue. To some in the Austin arts scene, it's ridiculous to suggest that there is a reason to talk about race (as it concerns the arts) at all. To some others in the scene, there is little else in the arts scene more worthy of immediate and in-depth discussion. Of course, there are more folks who are somewhere in the middle of those extremes, but some others don't/won't even comfortably involve themselves in the conversation. They, apparently, are above all that. Really, shouldn't that conversation be on-going, in-depth, and very frank?

I guess the bigger question for me is, "Can we even talk about funding, culture and race in Austin (the US, the World) and walk away from the conversation without either feeling guilty, victimized, self-righteous, attacked, ignored, angry, beaten or marginalized?" At this point, for most of us I'd wager the answer is no. But is that bad or just the way it is? And if that is just the way it is, do we just accept that as normal and struggle on?

Yes, we struggle on. But the struggle is what we should accept. In this case, and most others, accepting something as normal also means giving up, lowering expectations. Failing to work on a vision of how things could be better today is the same thing as accepting lowered expectations for what should be considered normal tomorrow. And, as cynical as I might have sounded last month, I actually have a great deal of faith in the organizations, and respect for the individuals who comprise the Austin arts community.

What I think we lack most of all is a community-wide feeling of unity. Some of us just don't trust the other players in this game. Some of us, today and historically, just do not behave in ways that inspire trust, unity, and respect from/with our peers in the public arts community. And more often than not, that mistrust has to do with issues such as competition for public funding, race vs culture, the majors vs the minors, ART and CULTURE vs art and culture, bigger and better facilities and exclusive access vs few facilities and little access to them.

I don't think we have to depend on a Marxist analysis of the situation to get a clue of where we stand here. Granted, relationships between the various arts organizations, individual artists, and our local Peer Panel/Arts Commission/City Council funding system are actually better now than they were during the glory days of the Arts Wars of the recent past. We now need to move on to the next level of understanding. That will only happen when there is a shared and inclusive vision of an active and diverse Austin arts community.

My ramble on this subject last month drew a mixed bag of response, ranging from "right on, bro," to "get the facts straight, Harold." Yes, I am sharing my thoughts on these issues because I have a vested interest. Yes, I think my insight on the health of the arts scene is valid. But no, I am not just trying to rock the boat and start arguments. I hope folks in the arts scene are reading this little mag and being motivated to consider the issues, to consider that some issues are more important to some segments of the community than to others. But, in the process, I must admit that sometimes I do end up sounding like I'm inviting confrontation. That is not necessarily my goal here.

After I received a couple of calls and a letter, the metaphor that came to mind was something close to a twisted invitation to a party. I began to feel as if my last column was an invitation for folks to continue or join in this conversation about how to make the Austin arts scene more functionally multicultural. The kicker is, perhaps my tone was more like an invitation to join the conversation so I (and those who agree with my point of view) could beat up on those who do not agree with my assessment of the scene. Well, I want to invite conversation, not a fight about the issues. Been there, done that.

One of the folks who responded to last month's ramble was concerned that I did not mention the work their organization has done to address the "diversity" issue. This person happened to represent one of the well-funded major organizations. In my column I encouraged the majors to do more to address the City's mission of diversity and inclusion in their programming, staffing, advertising, and out-reach. In his letter, he let me know just what his organization was doing to get there. And to their credit (the Lyric Opera), they are indeed making positive strides to address these issues at all levels of their organization.

One of the points I want to stress, and perhaps did not make clear last month, is that all of us are challenged to make good on our promise to serve the cultural diversity of Austin. The major organizations, the ethnic-specific organizations, and the individual artists all have the challenge of producing programming that reaches out into Austin's diverse communities. Finding ways to do that effectively, without simply doing it to approximate political correctness, is not as easy as it may seem (nor as easy as my March column made it sound). Besides some folks' simple aversion to the concept of multiculturalism (you know, the threat to the Western Cultural Cannon), the particular demographics and geography of Austin pose the greatest challenges for doing inclusive cultural work here in Austin.

Let's face it, we are out here in the provinces. We are not a first stop market for your favorite European touring concert master, your favorite jazz legend, the hottest South American pop star, or that Russian dancer you've always wanted to see. When the Louvre mounts that major retrospective tour of Degas' work, it probably won't check for scheduling here -- at least not yet. We are not Houston, we are not on one of the coasts, we do not have the cultural unity and depth of New Orleans.

We do have a city that is a destination for youth-oriented pop music, for "Texas Music," for blues (jazz on occasion), for avant-garde performance art and theater, for independent and studio movie production, and for writers and poets from around the world (at least during the International Poetry Festival). I think we can all agree that it's OK for us not to be another Houston, nor to be located on the East Coast. We are who and where we are, can't change that. What is now needed, I think, is a real assessment of what supporting "multicultural programming" really looks like in Austin, specific to the various communities who actually are here.

I think the biggest problem that most of us have had with this "multicultural" concept is agreeing on definitions. We seem to keep going back to the paranoia of having to discuss race vs culture vs artistic merit. Don't get me wrong, race and artistic merit are indeed right up there among the top issues that need to be in the discussion. Where I think many of us fail to get the larger point is that sticky issue of "culture." Many folks who read my column last month and commented, missed the importance of the need to grapple with our definitions of culture and race. Many of the cultural communities represented here in Austin truly have little or nothing to do with race. The cultural communities of, for example, traditional Texas country music, European classical music, and college radio grunge are indeed different. The kind of multicultural view of the arts that we support acknowledges the validity of all of these.

Last month I spent some amount of time criticizing Austin's major arts organizations on their lack of inclusion of non-whites in their programming, staffing, on their boards of directors, their out-reach, etc. The truth of the matter is, even the smallest organizations are faced with the same situations. Even the organizations that do "ethnic specific" programming have to deal with getting their target audiences to come to their productions.

So, yes, we all have the challenge of attracting a diverse group of folks to come to our productions, to sit on our boards, to volunteer to work and raise money for us. The "majors," however few, are called the majors because their staffing, funding, and facility needs demand the lion's share of local public art funds. And since this is the case, should not their efforts to address issues of diversity also be on a major scale, part of what they do normally (as the largest takers of the public arts moneys), and not simply efforts to appease a need to be politically correct?