San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Money and the arts




From the San Antonio Express News 1/24/99

By Mike Greenberg



San Antonio is torn between pride and poor-mouthing.

The financial troubles that nearly capsized the San Antonio Symphony last year were but one manifestation of a larger question that has the local arts community wondering about its health as we move toward the 21st century.

How much art can (and should) the people of San Antonio support with admission fees, contributions and city funds?

A city of San Antonio's size and importance, some say, ought to be doing better by the arts. Businesses and individuals aren't giving enough.

No, others say, San Antonio is a poor city, with a high poverty rate and a small corporate base. We're doing as well as can be expected - maybe better.

What's the truth? Is San Antonio an underachiever or overachiever in arts support, relative to cities of comparable population and income?

To seek an answer, we examined arts support in other metropolitan areas that are close to San Antonio in population. Some, such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Norfolk, Va., are also similar to San Antonio in per-capita income. Others, such as Columbus, Ohio, and Charlotte, N.C., are significantly more prosperous.

For each city, we obtained budget figures for its major performing arts institutions - symphony orchestras, resident professional theaters and opera and dance companies with annual budgets greater than (or, in a few cases, slightly less than) $1 million.

(We limited our study to these kinds of companies because they are directly comparable and nearly universal. Museums and cultural centers pose greater problems for comparison purposes.)

We considered several indicators of a community's capacity to support these institutions with ticket purchases or donations - per-capita income, total personal income, concentration of income in high-earning households, the number of Fortune 500 companies in a community and the profits of those companies.

What we found, in a nutshell, is this: The only valid conclusion to be drawn from comparing numerical indicators of capacity is that no valid conclusion can be drawn from comparing numerical indicators of capacity.

Some of San Antonio's "peer" cities do far more than the numbers suggest they can afford; others do far less. Each city has unique circumstances, apart from economic measures, to explain its level of support.

To set the stage locally, San Antonio has only one major institution in the performing arts - the symphony, with a budget last season of $6.8 million and a target of about $6 million for the current season.

The average budget for the seven orchestras in this peer group is about $6.3 million, so San Antonio runs with the pack so far as symphony orchestras are concerned.

But San Antonio has no dance, opera or theater company with a budget approaching $1 million. Magik Children's Theater, with a budget of about $650,000, is San Antonio's closest approximation to a major institution in theater.

With the exception of New Orleans, the weakest city in this group, all the other peer cities have all four types of performing groups, with theater, dance and opera company budgets well above or very near $1 million.

Each city, however, has its own way of supporting the arts.

The biggest anomaly in the group is Salt Lake City. To judge by the indicators, the metropolis of Utah ought to be at the bottom of the heap.

If you don't count the presenting side of Casa Mantildeana's budget in Fort Worth, Salt Lake City outperforms its peers by a wide margin. It's the only city in this peer group whose orchestra musicians are on a full-time, 52-week contract.

"There's a tradition here of devotion to the arts which is phenomenal," said Donald Andrews, president and CEO of the Utah Symphony.

"I've never lived in a city that had such penetration for the arts. It's partly because of the Mormon tradition of honoring the arts."

Nonetheless, life has not always been rosy for Andrews' orchestra. For about 12 years, he said, the Utah Symphony had suffered annual deficits ranging from $300,000 to $2.5 million. In 1996, the orchestra canceled six weeks of its summer season.

But a few months later, the voters of Salt Lake County overwhelmingly approved "ZAP," a 1/10 percent sales tax - one penny on a $10 purchase - to support the zoo, the arts and parks. The ZAP, modeled on a similar program in much-larger Denver, raises about $15 million a year. Half of that goes to the arts.

"It's vital to our stability at the moment," Andrews said of the ZAP funding. "We had a fair number of struggles before this passed. We were always living from moment to moment.

"The symphony got $1.4 million (from ZAP) in 1997-98. That has allowed us to gain stability and avoid deficits. We're ending up with a $300,000 surplus. But we could not do that without ZAP. Without that funding we would have to cut something."

Instead, the orchestra is expanding its outreach efforts with free events and concerts in the parks.

The apparent underperformance of Charlotte, N.C., is deceptive.

The low total figure partly reflects a temporary political setback: In 1997, Mecklenburg County cut off all arts funding, which had been running at about $2.5 million a year, because of "immoral" art - the last straw was the Charlotte Repertory Theater's production of "Six Degrees of Separation."

That event stirred the arts community to action, and the November election brought a pro-arts majority back to the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners. City government support, about $2 million, was not interrupted.

The Charlotte Symphony's low budget also reflects temporary conditions that are reversing.

"We had a real crisis three years ago," said public relations director Joan Lasky. "We renegotiated the musicians contract, cut a half-milllion dollars, cut the (season) weeks back by four. We went to an all-favorites classical season - really staid stuff."

But the last two seasons have closed in the black, and ticket sales are up 27 percent.

Lasky attributes the improvement in part to a reaction against ding of the arts.

"The good citizens of Charlotte finally stood up and said it's time we subscribe to the symphony."

The Charlotte Symphony aside, the city's arts economy is strong - strong enough to support two major professional theaters, the $1.1 million Charlotte Rep and the $1.5 million Children's Theater of Charlotte.

Charlotte's arts groups get a large percentage of their money from a unified arts appeal, modeled closely on the United Way.

The 50-year-old Arts and Science Council of Charlotte-Mecklenburg raised $6.6 million this year. In addition, the council disburses $2.1 million in city funding, much smaller amounts of state and federal money and, except for last year, the county contribution.

Although corporate giving is high in Charlotte, the home of two of the country's largest banks, the annual appeal for employee payroll deductions is the key to the Arts and Science Council's success.

This year's campaign raised $2.2 million from corporations and $4.4 million from individuals - and 98 percent of the latter figure came from workplace appeals, according to Scott Belford, public relations director for the council.

The unified appeal is especially beneficial to small arts organizations, which are able to reach far more potential contributors than they could do on their own, Belford said.

Council grants can represent very large portions of art groups' budgets. The Charlotte Symphony this year received more than $1.6 million, 32 percent of its budget, from the council.

The Columbus Symphony's current situation - high debt, labor-management strife, vacancies in key marketing and development positions - is nearly identical to the San Antonio Symphony's, despite the Ohio city's higher income numbers.

The big picture for the arts in Columbus is happier, however. The reason for the city's generally healthy arts economy is not easy to pin down. The money doesn't come primarily from the usual suspects - large corporate gifts and old-money families.

Indeed, says Opera Columbus general director William F. Russell, "The idea of giving money to the arts is a relatively new idea here. Ohio State University is the aggie school. Columbus always had been thought of as a hick cow town. Cincinnati has Procter & Gamble and very old money. We never had any old money here.

"Money comes from ever-increasing small gifts. We've been able to parlay corporate (giving) pretty well, but the largest corporate gift is $70,000 for the opera company," Russell said. He does not regard that figure as particularly large.

In Columbus and elsewhere, individual institutions have grown by looking beyond their immediate neighborhoods for support.

Ballet Met in Columbus and Ballet West in Salt Lake City have extensive touring programs - both companies have been to San Antonio. The Utah Symphony also performs extensively throughout a large region.

Fort Worth is the home of the Fort Worth-Dallas Ballet, which draws support from a region with more than 4.5 million people and $123 billion of personal income, nearly four times the total income of the Fort Worth metropolitan area alone.

Virginia Opera's large $6.3 million budget does not depend solely on the Norfolk area, which is nearly identical to San Antonio in population and income. That company that also takes its productions to Richmond and to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Entrepreneurship contributes to the bottom line of some companies. Norfolk's theater company, Virginia Stages, created "The Secret Garden," which later went to Broadway.

In Fort Worth, Casa Mantildeana Theater's local productions are supported by profits from its sponsorship of commercial Broadway touring shows, which account for the bulk of its large $8.5 million budget.

(Several non-profit performing arts centers around the country also present these touring shows to support facilities used by local performing groups. In San Antonio, as in many other cities, the touring shows are presented by a for-profit business, Arts Center Enterprises.)

New Orleans is a basket case, relatively speaking. The Crescent City has only one strong performing arts institution of major size, New Orleans Opera, with a $2.1 million budget.

The New Orleans Symphony folded in 1991, and the musicians formed a new self-managed orchestra, the Louisiana Philharmonic, which now has a scant $3.4 million budget. The city's largest dance company has a $300,000 budget.

One San Antonio arts administrator, who declined to be named, sees New Orleans as the city in this peer group that is most like San Antonio, culturally: Festivals and ethnically rooted grass-roots cultural expression may take the place of symphony orchestras and theater companies.

Other data suggest that a heavy reliance on tourism is not healthy for the arts in medium-sized cities.

Las Vegas, Nev., and Orlando, Fla., major visitor destinations that are similar to San Antonio in population, have been unable to sustain much in the way of non-profit performing arts. San Diego, Calif., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., both of which are much larger and wealthier markets than San Antonio, have had great difficulty supporting their symphony orchestras.

Beethoven and Shakespeare, it seems, can't easily compete with Mickey Mouse, Wayne Newton or a great beach.



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