The state budget crunch hit the arts hard this year, especially in Baltimore, where four of the state's largest arts institutions are located.
Officials at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum and Center Stage are struggling with a triple whammy of double-digit declines in endowment income, falling ticket sales and a 36 percent cut in funding for the state arts council, which supports arts groups across Maryland.
Gov. Martin O'Malley is allocating only about $10.5 million to the Maryland State Arts Council for fiscal 2010, down from his initial target of $16.5 million. The loss of $6 million in state support will mean a lot of pain for struggling arts organizations, but it's pennies compared to the state's general fund budget of $14.4 billion.
Still, in tough economic times, the arts have to vie against other needs that appear more pressing.
Should government cut programs for disabled adults, health care for poor children or unemployment benefits to people who have lost their jobs in order to support actors, dancers and musicians?
What about salaries for teachers, police and firefighters, or road and bridge repairs? Most people think these things are equally if not more important than what theaters, museums and symphony orchestras do.
Yet when America was in the throes of the Great Depression, and the country was reeling from a financial crisis even worse than the one we're facing today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the first federal program to support the nation's arts and artists.
The Public Works of Art Project, founded in 1934, provided employment for thousands of artists whose works are the subject of a fascinating exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. The project grew out of President Roosevelt's strong belief that art was essential to sustaining the country's spirit through extraordinarily difficult times and that the visual record of the era created by the nation's artists would far outlast the legacy of his economic policies.
Mr. Roosevelt knew he would be criticized for "wasteful" spending on "frills" such as the public murals, portraits, rural landscapes and images of city life produced in the thousands by the PWAP artists. But he never wavered in his commitment to the program: "Artists have to eat, too," he insisted.
Americans, he believed, deserved to see images of themselves struggling against the obstacles they faced, so that later they could take pride in having overcome them.
