A Call For Systemic Change In NY’s Cultural Structures

Gonzalo Casals and Mauricio Delfin are cofounders and codirectors of the Culture & Arts Policy Institute, a New York–based nonprofit organization that addresses critical systemic challenges by emphasizing data-driven research, strategic capacity building, and a commitment to transparency, accountability, and participation.

The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the arts and culture sectors worldwide. Its impact in cities like New York revealed deep-seated vulnerabilities, pushing many to rethink how to better manage and organize the sector in the years to come. The global health crisis and its protracted effects, coupled with a series of severe economic crises, demonstrated how the United States’ decentralized governance model for culture through private-public partnerships faltered and, unfortunately, continues to do so.

Anyone paying attention to recent testimonies of artists, cultural workers, and leaders of arts organizations in New York City Council hearings to discuss the budget for arts and culture knows that, in New York, culture is in crisis. This dire context requires a systemic overhaul of the governance model that structures our sector today. This systemic overhaul, however, must mean more than a superficial recognition of complexity. Instead, it should focus on how the parts must work together to transform the whole. Another call to “work together” may sound trite, but it describes concretely the biggest obstacle to substantive transformation and improvement.

A Slow but Pervasive Disinvestment

The time line of the last 30 years in the arts and culture sector already showed contextual challenges and upheavals that call for increased awareness and urgent action. Beyond the negative consequences of the ’90s-era Culture Wars on federal and state funding, the already precarious sector had to endure the financial crisis following 9/11 (2001), the Great Recession (2007–09), and a slow but steady constriction of contributions by individual donors giving fewer gifts to fewer organizations. These events left lasting scars on the sector even before the pandemic.

More than four years later, the protracted consequences of the pandemic on the arts and culture sector and society remain. In its early days, the pandemic acted as a magnifying glass by revealing growing inequalities in our society and how the lack of affordable healthcare, housing, education, and living wages significantly impacted most Americans, including artists and cultural workers. The hope was that this revelation would lead to a coordinated effort to solve the culture sector’s unpreparedness and evident vulnerabilities. That did not happen. Instead, the sector continues to face an accelerated rate of disinvestment in a context marked by economic downturns and a governance model that limits civic engagement and hampers collaboration.

This fragmentation of state and civic forces limits the ability of the sector to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, face multidimensional challenges, and work together to define and pursue what prosperity means today for artists, cultural workers, and arts organizations. The sector’s fragility and harmful levels of uncertainty affect all those people and communities involved. Additionally, available data from a 2017 study by the cultural research–focused Helicon Collaborative reveal that inequity follows a distinct pattern of distribution in which smaller organizations that serve BIPOC communities are the most affected, struggling to survive with annual budgets less than $250,000.

Without robust and strategic investment and alignment in support and funding, the arts and culture sector’s potential to thrive and enrich society will remain constrained. If this situation continues, New York’s self-perception as “the world’s culture capital” full of strength, equity, and abundance will be a mirage. If government and civic society continue to normalize this permanent struggle of arts organizations, focusing instead on recognizing the sector’s “resilience,” they risk impoverishing cultural life and reducing cultural opportunities as artists move to other more livable cities, and small- and medium-size arts organizations close their operations for good.

Toward a New Model of Cultural Governance

The only way out of a decades-long disinvestment is to stop trying to outlive our challenges individually and come together to address the systemic issues affecting the field. Coalescing entails forging a shared understanding and a common vision to guide the sector’s efforts concertedly and effectively. This means going beyond recognizing and celebrating the value of the arts and culture and attending to the conditions that make artists, cultural workers, and arts organizations vulnerable and underfunded. We need to cocreate a roadmap to transform a weakened landscape into a vibrant force that impacts the well-being of individuals and their communities.

The goal is not just to overcome the challenges of the past but to enable New York’s arts and culture sector to become a more cohesive and visionary force capable of navigating the complexities of the current cultural climate and achieving shared artistic and societal objectives. This is a call to strategic maturity, a call to recognize that overcoming the sector’s challenges requires careful planning, coordination, and a shared sense of purpose and direction. We need to go beyond a conversation that centers almost exclusively on the amount of public funding the city provides to a limited number of arts organizations to one that examines the effectiveness of funding and policy priorities in promoting cultural equity with measurable results.

We can all agree that culture and the arts make New York unique, driving economic growth and the social well-being of our communities. We don’t need to prove that arts and culture make us human, offering solace in times of division, isolation, and chaos. But if we genuinely believe in their value, we should be able to invest time and resources in collaborative efforts. We can create an equitable and thriving arts ecosystem by bringing together all constituencies to foster a new open, transparent, representative, and just cultural governance model.

Let’s be clear: when we speak of “cultural governance,” we refer to a systemic approach to managing and sustaining the arts and culture sector. The term encompasses the frameworks, policies, and processes stakeholders use to manage, operate, and regulate cultural organizations. When we say “stakeholders,” we are including government bodies, private funders, artists, cultural organizations, and society in general.

A cultural governance perspective pays attention to several vital aspects crucial for the sector’s success: creating and implementing cultural policies that guide the direction and priorities of the cultural industries (Policy Development); distributing financial and other resources to support cultural activities and institutions (Resource Allocation); establishing and enforcing rules and standards to ensure accountability, transparency, and equity in the cultural sector (Regulation and Oversight); involving various stakeholders in decision-making processes to reflect diverse perspectives and needs (Stakeholder Engagement); protecting and promoting the cultural rights of individuals and communities, including the right to access and participate in cultural life (Cultural Rights); setting long-term goals and strategies to ensure the sustainability and growth of the cultural sector (Strategic Planning); and representing the interests of the cultural industry in broader political and societal contexts (Advocacy and Representation).

How Do We Get There?

These aspects of cultural governance are essential for fostering a vibrant cultural landscape that enriches society, supports economic growth, and ensures that the arts remain a resilient and integral part of our communities. They bring up essential questions: What does a framework for equitable resource distribution look like? How do we intersect the various approaches for applying equity frameworks—such as race/ethnicity, geographic peripheries, access to resources, disciplines, and missions—to create a more just model for supporting the sector?

The bottom line is that we should answer these essential questions through dialogue, exchange, and collaboration. No single actor has the answer. Answers will emerge only if we start by recognizing our fragility as a sector and seize the opportunity to become a robust and sustainable ecology through cocreation and authentic engagement. Collaboration does not happen naturally; it is a process that requires civic participation, proactive transparency, and real accountability. Several studies have shown that open government principles increase trust and improve service delivery and sustainability. Opening and accessing government data with a social purpose is an important means to recognize and cocreate opportunities for change.

We must remember that the Covid-19 pandemic revealed our vulnerabilities as a sector, but it also materialized examples of solidarity, altruism, and spontaneous cooperation. Let’s embrace the values that emerged during such times—solidarity, mutual aid, resilience, and the reaffirmation of social bonds. From that fateful time, we learned that artists, cultural workers, and institutions mobilize and show up for one another and society in moments of crisis. This is one of them.  

A version of this article appears in the 2024 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.