Seattle just after the 1962 World’s Fair seemed bent upon creating major arts institutions. It had five major arts companies, all with national aspirations spurred by the Fair. Two were long-lived cultural institutions, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Symphony. Others sprang from the Fair: Seattle Opera (which spawned Pacific Northwest Ballet), and the Seattle Repertory Theatre (which encouraged ACT Theatre).
In an earlier dispensation, PONCHO, the annual fundraiser now defunct, raised lots of arts-bucks at a glamorous party and auction. Prominent families (the Wrights, the Skinners, the Banaroyas) played important roles of the majors’ boards. The National Endowment for the Arts, Seattle, and King County funding prioritized these majors. So also, back then, did leading companies such as Boeing and Safeco and Burlington Northern and Boeing, as well as ArtsFund (Corporate Council for the Arts).
Fast forward to today, when a new pecking order prevails: access, education, and smaller arts, as opposed to funding big budgets for the majors with big ambitions. Recently a new countywide funding program called Doors Open, funded by a new county sales tax of a tenth of a cent, got enacted. The new windfall tax raised the countywide funding for the arts from the usual $10-15 million a year to a handsome $70 million.
The thinking of today is that these majors have access to major donors and draw elite audiences, so their needs are politically suspect and outdated. Instead the new money is spread thinly across 720 organizations. The age of ambition has passed for the Seattle majors, now struggling to survive and aspire in these post-pandemic times.
Indicative of the new focus are these annual figures from the new county-wide funding source: Symphony $561,000 per year for three years (small part of its $28 million budget), Opera $512,000, Ballet $516,000, SAM $521,000, Seattle Rep $377,000, Zoo $588,000, Aquarium $530,000. Meanwhile, at the small-arts end of the scale, Black Diamond Railroad Depot earned an annual award of $12,000, and the Vashon Nature Center scored $37,000. Education, access, and geographic and ethnic dispersal are the new priorities, as well as funding science and heritage institutions and capital projects in arts deserts. An era of excellence and national aspiration at the provincial level has evolved into an era of equity and broader access in the arts.
Over time, the Doors Open bonanza, 25 years of laborious negotiations in the making, reflected these shifting priorities. Originally, the idea was to import a concept from Denver, the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District. That Denver program raises money from seven metro counties, meaning a very large tax base raising $400 million a year, which is spread over 300 organizations.
A top tier of cultural organizations, such as the Denver Art Museum, Zoo, the botanical gardens, and the Colorado Symphony got the lion’s share of the no-strings funds. For this tier, awards were based on a simple formula (budget size and attendance), without having to apply for a grant. Lesser organizations must apply for their money, with an emphasis on lower ticket prices and arts-access programs. This Denver feature favoring the majors was quickly dismissed in egalitarian Seattle, which tilted to small groups and multicultural, underserved institutions.
The Seattle version of the Denver plan had to pass through the Legislature, which applied its priorities of arts-education (in part because public schools cut their programs) and broader access for underserved areas like the outer suburbs. Gradually the proposal shed the idea of multiple counties (partly because of suspicions of Seattle dominance). The funding plan then had to pass muster with the King County Council, which predictably insisted on geographic equity, egalitarian values, and many more beneficiaries. The original drivers of the Seattle version of public funding for the arts, mostly the Art Museum and the Zoo, thought they would gain millions of dollars a year, as happened in Denver. Dream on!
Many factors played a role in this shift in priorities. The reduction of foundation and corporate funding drove the arts into the hands of the politicians, with their broader-access agenda. Arts groups and their funders embraced “woke” agendas. Hiring problems for key leaders. The pandemic and streaming broke the habit of live, in-person performances with season ticketholders. High costs of living for cultural institutions’ staff in Seattle were just one factor in driving up costs for arts groups struggling to counter the pandemic.
Additionally, Seattle and the state of Washington are famously stingy with tax dollars for the arts, lest other beneficiaries (particularly social-service nonprofits) howl. The age of streaming (like the Met Opera’s live HD transmissions to theaters) dashed the aspirations of smaller cities to aspire to the big leagues or to serve as tryout venues for productions headed to Broadway. Arts coverage in the media, as well as arts education in the schools, have sharply diminished.
Moreover, the outsized ambitions of mid-sized cities like Seattle increasingly seem unrealistic, particularly given the trends described above, and the fact that major institutions are now perilously short of cash. As a result, we are likely to see more arts mergers (such as Cornish College of the Arts with Seattle University and Seattle Shakespeare Company with ACT), as well as scale-backs such as the Opera’s closed scene shop and the demise of Book-It and Seattle Baroque Orchestra. Big splashy productions such as the Opera’s Ring Cycle or the Goodwill Arts Festival have faded away. One straw in the wind for mid-sized cities: a $600 million new Vancouver Art Gallery by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron has just been scrapped.
Despite our World’s Fair aspirations, a new model has displaced those ambitions for Seattle’s major arts organizations. This small-is-beautiful model is reminiscent of Portland (where “thinking small is the big idea”). It involves pursuing selective excellence in national niches like Portland’s acclaimed Cappella Romana, performing music of Eastern Orthodox traditions. Nearby, this model is being tried out in Bellevue, which incubates many small organizations with educational components and rooted in ethnic culture of tech workers and their children.
And, to be sure, artistic excellence is not congruent with budget size, and one local example, The National Nordic Museum in Ballard, has risen in national esteem with an annual revenue budget of $6 million.
I once asked a major arts leader to define success for his arts organization. “Being reviewed regularly by The New York Times,” he replied narrowly. Those were the days, and they have reached their pull-date.
