Art Scatter

When the economy gets bad, Recession bad, the common understanding is that the arts suffer even worse. And the Wall Street, sub-prime loan crash looks like it may kick the rest of the economy into R-word land, once and for all. So, arts groups are headed for the hills, where they will attempt to hunker down and hold out to the last mime, right? Well, no, not according to David Segal and Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, who surveyed arts groups in New York, mostly, but also Washington to see what the mood was.

Segal and Trescott, perhaps expecting to find panic, ran into a pocket of relative calm. Maybe it’s that corporate giving to the arts is so low in the U.S. — the article says 3 percent of all contributed income — or maybe it’s just blind optimism, but the executive directors refused to buckle. The key quote came at the end:

It’s an article of faith among theater honchos that when the going gets depressing, the depressed go to the theater.

My own theory is that Planet Arts, as the article colorfully calls it, is used to operating near the edge all the time and has confidence in its coping skills. The garden out back. The chickens. The Dumpster diving. Or maybe, as the article suggests, it simply takes a while for economic problems to reach the far-flung planet. Portland isn’t Wall Street, and we have missed much of the direct sub-prime misery that has afflicted California and Florida. But we are not in a bubble here, and the indirect effects are now hitting us (checked your stock portfolio lately? Art Scatter refuses to investigate the one share of Bear Stearns our granny left us).

So, what happens here on our little piece of Planet Arts? I’m not sure. I’ve heard rumblings of majors in trouble for some time now. How resilient will they be if we are facing a one- or two-year Recession? And if the majors ramp up their requests for money from individuals and foundations, will the mid-sized and smaller groups start to feel the pain, too? That’s an honest question… I know lots of Scatter readers work for or are near to arts groups in town. What do you think? What have you heard? Where are we headed? Use the comments section OR if you need more anonymity than that, email us at artscatterpdx@gmail.com.