THE ARTS : Harold Williams: Cultural Alarmist

I n 1981, after Harold Williams left the Administration of President Jimmy Carter, where he had served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, he found himself on a list of three finalists to head the J. Paul Getty Trust. The trust, whose most visible entity is the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, had only recently discovered that it had inherited Getty’s entire $2.6-billion estate.

Williams once headed Hunt-Wesson Foods, Inc. He was dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Management from 1970 to 1977, and had held several other corporate positions. Eventually, Williams was selected by the Getty board. He enjoys visibility and influence on the American cultural scene usually reserved for someone with a lifetime career in the arts. He is 63 and, as a white male with a corporate history, might seem an anomaly in deliberations over cultural policy when multiculturalism is a preoccupation.

But when Williams talks about the place of the arts in American society, he speaks a language any corporate chief executive officer can understand. It is his message that is striking--bringing a degree of alarm about the difficulties facing major cultural institutions.

His warning is primarily about art museums--because, he says, that is the form of cultural institution he knows best. He maintains they are in a crucible created by the balance sheet. Revenues are constrained by a variety of forces familiar to nearly all private organizations. Blockbusters, exhibitions which curators once saw as a key way to increase attendance and revenues, have often been costly dinosaurs.

Funding sources are in retreat. Corporations that contribute to the arts are doing so less, acting from ever greater commercial motivations and becoming more timid about what they do support. Arts education has fallen into disrepute as business leaders and politicians--mistakenly, Williams says--attempt to turn public education into technical training dominated by mathematics and science.

Williams talked a few days ago about his perceptions of what is happening. He speaks quietly, but his message, unmistakably, is alarmist.

Question: Everywhere in the museum field, people are talking about a recession that may not end. How bad are things likely to remain? Why is all of this happening?

Answer: While the cost structure--in other words, the expenses of running museums--can be expected to grow at a much more rapid rate than in the past, revenue sources have been in many cases pretty well tapped. There are a number of reasons for it. There’s only so much you can charge in the way of admission. The likelihood of being able to generate larger audiences is not that great. And you can’t afford the blockbusters the same way you once could.

Memberships are not growing that rapidly. And perhaps even more importantly, when you look to sources of funding, the economic pressures on corporations, as well as individuals and state and local governments, is so enormous. All the conflicting demands for welfare, medical, prisons--you name it--are so enormous that ability to continue the present level of (arts) funding--let alone increase it--is very much in doubt. You might say these are in part related to the recession, but in part they’re much more fundamental issues.

Q: What happens now? For instance, can we look forward to outright bankruptcies--closures of museums?

A: I think in some instances, the answer’s likely to be yes. It’ll vary by museum. At what point do people stop contributing to a museum because they think it’s going under . . . or (because) it’s not likely to be a vital, dynamic institution to attract people, to attract money, to attract support?

Q: What will separate strong from vulnerable museums in the next decade?

A: Well, I think those with a lesser degree of reliance on government funding will do better. Those that do a more effective job of relating and building on their public constituencies will do better.

There are some museums that are pretty lethargic. In fairness to many museums, management, in very large part, has grown up through the substantive side--through art history and so forth. Management, per se, has not been, in many instances, a very powerful voice. Still, management is a means towards an end, not an end in itself.

Q: You hear a lot of talk in cultural circles about putting corporate management techniques into play in museums. Does that necessarily mean that determination of a museum’s success is changed from artistic standards to more consumer-driven, almost ratings-oriented, criteria? Is that good or bad?

A: Part of what we have to be concerned about is that a lot of the “blockbusters” have really been driven by the effort to produce numbers of visitors, and sales in the book store and in the museum store, rather than by the importance of the exhibition as an intellectual and aesthetic experience. That’s a real danger. And there’s a danger that (temptation) will grow to become more and more commercialized.

Museums are tempted by it. Boards of trustees add to the temptation. And the tension will undoubtedly grow between survival and maintaining and preserving the purpose of the institution. Depending on the condition of the place, there can be a very real tension there.

A basic problem is the lack of an adequately strong and broad-based constituency who care about the arts, and will go to bat for the arts--in whatever arena, whether it’s the corporate world or the public sector. And so the ability to compete for funds is very limited--even if you leave aside for the moment some of the ideological and political battles around the arts--whether it’s (Robert) Mapplethorpe, or whatever. The constituency isn’t there, to advocate and protect.

Q: Why do you think that is?

A: I think a piece of it starts at a very fundamental level, and that is the way we position arts and the education of children in this country. The arts are not positioned as an essential, substantive educational-cultural dimension of our society. They are positioned largely as a frill.

Q: Did the arts ever have the status that you think they should?

A: No, I don’t think it ever has. In more affluent times, it had a greater degree of support, but it never has had the kind of fundamental presence (as reading and mathematics). When budgets start being cut and you cut out the arts so that the only manifestation of music is the band that plays at the football games, it positions the arts in relative importance in the scheme of things.

Q: Is there a way to break the cycle? You have said we probably have lost at least one and probably two generations of audiences, already, just because of reductions in arts education.

A: That’s right.

Q: How can you overcome something like that? Is there anything that we can do now that would mitigate this effect? And if not, then what? Are we looking at true doom for aspects of our cultural heritage?

A: Not necessarily. It’s an enormous deficit to overcome. We find when we get young people to come to the (Getty) museum, that when they have an interesting and informative experience there, in many instances, they bring their parents back. And often their parents had never been there before, so children become the tour guides and the educators. That’s a source of some hope. We also have been looking at ways to try to improve the quality of what’s produced on television and in film.

But beyond that, to whatever extent we’ve lost those generations, I think the message is, “Let’s not keep losing them,” that these things do have, hopefully, their cycles, and we can move in a constructive direction from here-- if there’s a recognition of the importance and the will to do it. But that in itself is a big question.

When you look at how the business community manifests its concern about education and articulates what ought to happen to prepare students for the workplace, the arts are notoriously absent. And that’s a real cause of concern.

Q: You’re from a business background. Why is this such a hard message to communicate to corporations?

A: I think basically for two kinds of reasons. One is that, understandably, when you’re concerned about the ability of the people coming into the workplace to read and calculate, you don’t necessarily also worry about aesthetics. The second part is, again, the consequence that the case hasn’t been made convincingly enough, and pervasively enough, for why art is an essential part of a civilized society. And what difference does it make to this country if we don’t have it? And what difference it makes to our future if we don’t have that appreciation.

The essence of my message has been that the sciences can give us atomic energy and DNA and all those wonderful things. But it’s the arts and the humanities that give the perspective on how to use it, and what our responsibilities are. And it’s the arts, as much as any place else, that give us a perspective of history and understanding of how societies are built, and what these values are.

There is, on the part of many (corporate executives), an appreciation for the arts. Many of these people are themselves contributors--spectators, if you will, or viewers of art. But their concern and their alarm is not as great as it is for reading and math. And, in some cases, I’ve wondered about the articulated appreciation for the arts, how deeply it’s held, or how passionately it’s held.

Q: There has been a dispute over whether the political furor over the arts in general--and the National Endowment for the Arts in particular--over the last two years has made would-be private funders gun-shy about giving money to institutions that suddenly are in the eyes of some people no longer the white-hat civic organization, but that place down the street that’s showing those dirty pictures.

But there are also some people who say that’s nonsense. That the political situation’s effect has been overstated, and that what’s really going on is more fundamental economics. What’s been the actual role of this political difficulty, and has it masked economic problems or other things that would have occurred anyway?

A: I don’t know. My qualitative sense is that (the political situation) does make a difference--that it may well have discouraged some funders. I think if I were in the corporate world, and in a position . . . to consider sponsoring exhibitions--and be publicly identified--I suspect I’d be more cautious than I would have been before.

Q: And how would you exercise that caution? Would you challenge curators over selection of work? Or would it be more subtle?

A: I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it would come down to that. But I think it might well be more a matter of what’s the nature of the exhibition, and what’s the sponsoring museum, and what is their kind of reputation? It might well be for some a moral discussion. Is there anything in it that we might be embarrassed by? That wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Q: Now doesn’t that of necessity mean there is danger, especially, for support of daring, cutting-edge, provocative political art?

A: I think that’s true. Time will tell. One point that I think bears including is that even though we’re talking about museums, the factors we’re considering here--not necessarily the political factors we’ve just been talking about--but the economic issues and their consequences are probably as relevant to other art forms. They’re all struggling.

Q: What is your advice to the people who run museums in terms of what they should do to seek and maintain a broad audience without surrendering their principles?

A: You’ve got to find a way to do it without sacrificing your integrity. And then get closer to your community to understand what they’re about. It is more a matter of doing things that you consider to be appropriate that would also be of interest to that community, maybe controversial, but of interest to them in a positive and constructive way.

Even at the Getty Museum, we’re not there to satisfy ourselves. We’re there to serve the public. And, even though we’re not directly dependent on external funding, we are a public institution, and our responsibility is no less than any other museum’s. And we struggle with the question of how (to) take an institution whose collection is essentially (one of) Western civilization and make it meaningful to the majority of this community who don’t perceive themselves as products of Western civilization. We’re still struggling with that issue. It’s a very real one, and one we have a responsibility to address.