Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Arts in need of a new argument

Good crowd tonight. It’s Thursday, and 50, 60 or more pack into the recently expanded Trifecta Gallery for the opening of the “Minumental” exhibit — more than 100 small, generally low-cost works. It can be tough to see the art through the milling art lovers — lotta stylish eyewear here, and scarves worn for the effect, not the weather. The work is a fairly standard mix of the good, the cute, the too-clever, the trying-too-hard. Most of it’s fun, though. The mayor was just here to cut a ribbon, there are door prizes and small candies, and the whole place is redolent of friendly schmooze.

Sounds like a salad day for the arts, but this is Las Vegas in 2010. Overheard:

“It’s beyond my price point.”

“I’m too broke right now.”

I glance at the price sheet: Plenty of pieces are in the mid-two figures.

This is, in some very obvious ways, a perilous time for the arts and culture in Nevada. The recession chews on, biting deeply at every level, from suddenly unaffordable small works to large-scale institutional budgets.

For example, Peter Barton, acting administrator of the state Museums and History Department, told me that if proposed cuts of 10 percent become a reality (incoming Gov. Brian Sandoval unveils his budget Jan. 24), four museums will be closed, including Overton’s Lost City Museum.

Later, I spent a long phone call with the Nevada Arts Council’s director, Susan Boskoff. She pointed out that the 10 percent cut each department was told to prepare follow steep previous cuts. In the council’s case, the cumulative effect would be a reduction of more than 50 percent in two years. Let’s pause to ponder that: 50 percent.

I couldn’t miss the barely restrained emotion in Boskoff’s voice as she talked about the impact of those whacks — fewer grants for organizations and artists; some categories of grants eliminated entirely; less money per grant; fewer resources in particular for rural programs.

“Just devastating,” she said.

The same struggles are going on at the personal level. Culture enthusiast David Curtis has reluctantly scaled back his engagement with the arts. “This year I’m focusing on survival, food, clothing, shelter, Internet access, day care — that sort of thing,” he said. Others hold the line. “I’d say it hasn’t changed much about the way I spend,” said Molly O’Donnell, who blogs about local arts at artsvegas.com.

“I live pretty frugally and always have. I think for those like me to whom art and arts-related activities are a must, you go.”

If these have been mixed times for the arts — with the closing of the Las Vegas Art Museum in 2009 as a nadir, balanced by the bright promise of the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the Neon Museum — they also represent a chance to rethink, or perhaps reappreciate, the arts.

“It seems to me that the community is circling its wagons around the Contemporary Arts Center, Emergency Arts and events like First Friday,” another culture fan, Anne Kellogg, said.

The reverse side of that reappraisal, of course, is the idea, sure to be aired when the Legislature begins wresting with the state’s monumental deficit, that the arts are a nonessential item at belt-tightening time. A luxury for the fancy-eyewear crowd.

There are a lot of possible responses, from the evanescent (the arts have a lot to say about who we are) to the more practical (the often-cited evidence that kids engaged in the arts do better scholastically).

But because this is Las Vegas in 2010, let’s try a different argument.

“We’ve not been very good at saying, ‘Hey, what do you think a nonprofit is? It’s a business,” Boskoff said. Arts groups meet a payroll, buy and sell goods, pay taxes. Working artists are entrepreneurs. Nevada Arts Council grants help organizations bring matching funds into the state.

“We don’t want to pull back from the intrinsic value of the arts,” Boskoff told me. “In the end, history remembers a civilization for its culture. But right now, we also need to emphasize the vitality of the arts in economic terms.”

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy