by Harold McMillan

Austinites do not pay for public art funding in Austin. There is no "arts tax" built into our tax bills.

Funding for public arts in Austin comes from a tax levied on hotel occupancy. Tourists and conventioners pay the City's share of funding for the Symphony, the Ballet and DiverseArts.

This system is fairly common in most cities in America.

If you are a first-time novice playwrite/director who seeks city funding for your new play production on Hispanic lesbians in Central Texas, you compete in the same funding panel with Zach Scott for city funds.

If you have a new initiative to offer jazz history classes to West Lake high-schoolers or to East Austin sixth-graders, you apply to the same fundng panel as the Austin Symphony and the Lyric Opera.

Although tradition, political/financial clout, artistic merit and need dictate the city's responsibility to annually fund the Paramount, Zach Scott, Austin Museum of Art, the Lyric Opera, Symphony, and the Ballet, each year they have to go through the formality of presenting proposals for funding (along with first-time applicants) in the same process with groups/individuals who might only want to seek funding for one season of productions.

Now, what if one season there is an activist block on the music panel who think that European classical music has enjoyed too much of a priori privilege in this process in the past? The panel votes to deny all city funding for the Lyric Opera and the Symphony.

And what if on the theater panel, there is a block of voters who have a mission to deny all applicants who do not either do European Classical repertory or mainstream kinds of productions because they are bent on promoting an African American militant nationalist agenda?

Now, when it gets down to lobbying the final arbitor, the Austin City Council, for city funding for these projects, which do you think will have the most influence in swaying the Council's budget decision?

It's pretty clear to me which side will win this battle. So, why even bother putting the Hispanic first-time lesbian applicants, the African American militants, and the CineMaker Coop's request for $3000 in the same panel with groups that are actually "politically protected" city institutions who request and receive $100,000 annually?

Don't even bring into this argument the Children's Museum, Texas Folklife Resources, or Women and Their Work. Are they more like the "major" institutions or the first-timers? What do we do with Epsitropy Arts and the Creative Opportunity Orchestra?

These are examples of some of the questions. I don't pretend to have all of the answers here. What I know is that frank discussion, re-evaluation and change -- yes, change -- are needed in this process. The time for defending the status quo has long since passed.

We all agree that those groups and individuals who present nonprofit arts to the Austin community need support. Now is a good time to re-examine just how that process works. No blame, no bad guys are necessary here. It's just time to do the right thing. The right thing is to let go of some tradition and ego investment and reassess how the system works. Or doesn't.

The militant Black nationalists, the Hispanic lesbians and the Symphony really do have more in common than you might think. They all want a supportive and nurturing community for the arts in Austin. Really!

At the front of this issue Elizabeth Stanard offers a glimpse of the latest edition of Austin's annual arts funding lotto. We attempted to present her piece in such a way that it was not another opportunity for me/DiverseArts to climb up on the soap box and spew Haroldisms. I have my ideas about all of that. I am not shy about presenting my thoughts and happen to know that much of what I think is shared by many folks out there in the the nonprofit arts community. I also know that not everyone sees eye-to-eye on all of the issues surrounding how we go about funding public art in Austin.

After many conversations, interviews, reads and re-reads of City of Austin policy statements and comparisons with models from other cities, it became crystal clear to our writers that our coverage of this season's hoopla would only scratch the surface of the issues involved in funding the arts in Austin. Yes, we did notice that while we were working on our monthly edition, the Austn Chronicle (weekly) and the American Statesman (daily) have published pieces on the current controversy. Elizabeth, who is our new managing editor and not a veteran of previous art wars, initialy wanted to back off of our focus. "We've been scooped," she warned.

I asked her to continue with the work. We are not, and don't aspire to be, the Austin Chronicle or Statesman. More than that, what I know about this situation is that discussion of how the arts are funded n Austin is a topic that has currency for a lot of folks year in, year out. What I also know is that the current situation is far from being resolved. Even if Danceworks is reinstated. Even if the Mixed Arts Panel fiasco is rectified. Even if the guidelines are re-written to satisfy the groups with the most political/lobbying clout. The major issues will not find long-lasting resolve given the current model for funding the arts in Austin.

One of the lessons for me in all of this is the reaffirmation of DiverseArts' unique postion in the arts community of Austin. We are, at one and the same time, an annual participant in the funding lottery and the only publisher of a publication that deals exclusively with Austin's arts scene. That grants us some perspecitive that other media outlets lack. That gives us a level of comradery with arts groups that the Statesman lacks. It probably also gives us a level of self-interest suspicion that the Chronicle and Statesman are not plagued with.

For the record, our self-interest here is informed by our want to aid in having the various voices in the argument heard. What is also true is our knowledge that the current system for arts funding in Austin is flawed and needs work. To be absolutely clear, I did not say that the current system is terrible. It isn't. It is flawed and needs work. It is better than what exists in a lot of cities. The problem here, and I suspect in other cities too, is that the system for funding the arts in Austin makes adversaries of individuals and groups who really should be on the same side of the fight.

Come on, to assert -- as some of my colleagues have done recently -- that the Arts Commission is not concerned with artistic quality is arrogant and absurd. Likewise, for the Arts Commission to continue to assert their faithful representation of the arts community when the members of the art community repeatedly tell them that we want a change is wrong headed and hypocritical. If the contituency says it ain't working for them -- and they are really the ones who work, live and die in the arts trenches -- maybe it's time to actually listen to the constituency.