I Paid $35 and All I Got Was Some Lousy Art

...and you can't see it.

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, the “nudge” from the city of Portland arrived in the email…

…and demanded payment of $35 by April 18th. Not to worry: there’s an escape-hatch for people earning less than the federal government’s official poverty level (a fiction, but that’s a different story, which we’ll get to one of these days). Although the city doesn’t bother letting you know what the magic number might be, it’s $14,580 for one person. There may be fentanyl-dealers living in tents making more than that.

In the bad old days, when folks hadn’t awakened to our new moral certainties, this sort of levy used to be called a “poll tax.” In 1381, the first such tax triggered Wat Tyler’s Peasant Revolt; the mere suggestion that British prime minister Maggie Thatcher was thinking about such a tax brought down her government a few centuries later. We’re much-improved now, since non-payment of the Portland poll tax will only result in your being hounded by a collection agency and a fine of $20 as opposed to Mr. Tyler’s drawing-and-quartering.

And besides, that poverty cut-off thingy got the city off the hook with the state constitution’s ban on a poll tax, or so said the state’s Supreme Court. As for me, I say it’s spinach and to hell with it.

Whatever: it is a truism that the tax is a nuisance, widely hated, and scads of citizens won’t pay it, although the city has never released numbers on non-compliance.

The schools—who created this arts crisis by doing away with their arts programs—get the first cream-off of money, which in 2020 (the city is a little slow in posting numbers) amounted to net revenues of $9,096,444, of which $6,813,854 trickled down to the schools.

These numbers should be read with caution, since the Arts Tax has gone through several convulsions in the years since and there are more hands dipping into the pie, which we’ll get to later.

Whatever the amount, here’s the real point of the program, shorn of the touchy-feely stuff on the city’s website…

Employ highly qualified person(s) to work with the School Districts in the provision of high-quality arts education; 

Provide professional development opportunities for certified Arts Teachers in the School Districts

After the certified folks get hired as dues-paying members of the teachers’ unions, the city gets a cream-off of “11-21% for coordination and administrative costs to the Office of Management and Finance.” (Again, no numbers given, but at the high end it’s well over $2-million.) This for taking money out of one account and transferring it to around a half-dozen others. Go figure.

Then, after the city gets its beak wet, something else happens, per city code 5.73.030...

Up to 95 percent of the remaining funds shall be distributed to RACC for grants to support non-profit Portland arts organizations that demonstrate artistic excellence, provide service to the community, show administrative and fiscal competence and provide a wide range of high-quality arts programs to the public.

Seems simple enough, although we live in Progressiveland, where there is always yet another sentence…

…with particular emphasis on programs directed to communities who are underserved by local arts providers.

And we all know what that means, don’t we?

In our acronym-crazy government, RACC stands for Regional Arts & Culture Council. And we are about to meet a rather strange bird…or maybe it’s a sludge-like liquid, seeping into the nooks and crannies of government, then solidifying into something immovable, dense, and utterly opaque.

The RACC was formed back in the pre-decay days of 2012 (it had Sam Adams’s fingerprints on it along with the sainted commissioner Nick Fish), but by 2017 it had been scooped up in the city elites’ romance with “equity,” whatever that means. As Oregon Public Broadcasting noted, in what was a declaration of culture-war…

…the bedrock of the city's arts administration is a middle-class, largely white institution…

The big no-no! And OPB, warned that although…

RACC’s board of directors has become noticeably more diverse in recent years. Nearly half — 43 percent — of board members identify as people of color.

The staff is a different story. Thirty-four people work at RACC, and three quarters are Caucasian, including all four top managers.

And so heads rolled.

In 2019, the progressives finally cornered RACC; it was time to pay for past sins. As Alex Zielinski reported in the progressive’s Pravda, aka the Mercury…

…over the past decade, a whopping 57 percent of RACC’s total grant dollars have been distributed among the city’s five largest arts nonprofits: Portland Art Museum, the Oregon Symphony, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Portland Opera, and Portland Center Stage. The newly approved grant framework, however, flips that tradition on its head.

Short version: they were too white.

And so, back to Zielinski…

Starting in 2020, RACC will… factor in an organization’s commitment to underrepresented communities as reflected through its programming, outreach, staff, and general mission.

Which, of course (with an eye to our current city council) begs the question: when will politically connected minorities be properly “represented.” And, shouldn’t quotas cut both ways? Write if you get that figured out.

But that was the end of the white majority arts gravy train. In the last list of 2022 awards published by RACC, none of the Big Five factored in the grants. Which puts the efforts of the Portland Art Museum to be properly woke, which we wrote about here, into sad perspective.

In the midst of the city’s Riot Summer, as antifa and their adolescent allies were busy trashing downtown and wrecking the city’s easygoing reputation, a number of statues were toppled. RACC’s board of directors, according to the Tribune…

…made the formal recommendation on Sept. 29 against resurrecting the sculptures of three former American presidents, and also nixed replacing pieces depicting a pioneer family and historic newspaper publisher.

(The publisher in question was memory-holed by the Oregonian’s editor, Therese Bottomly, when she took a knee and declared the paper’s past irredeemably racist.)

RACC also announced a new policy that it’s OK to destroy public art if…

…the "subject or impact of an artwork is significantly at odds with values of antiracism, equity, inclusion."

A “robust” discussion by RACC’s board of the issue was closed to the public; a spokesman said the statue solution was easy: sell ‘em or melt ‘em down.

In 2021 the city renegotiated its contract with RACC and pried its paws off the money-for-schools part of its business. This resulted in a whole new tranche of arts-bureaucrats; you’ll be pleased to know that we now have Mr. Jeff Hawthorne as our city’s arts program manager (he was hired from the dysfunctional RACC, but then that’s the way things work around here.) Mr. Hawthorne also has Mr. Stephan Herrera to help with policy and city council liaison. They presumably have staffers and secretaries to help with all the liaison stuff, but no one ever tells you what any of these people are paid.

On top of this, the city announced, ominously…

In the fall of 2022, the City and a coalition of local government agencies launched "Our Creative Future," a comprehensive cultural planning process to develop a new vision for arts and culture in the Portland metro region.

“New vision” being right up there with “reimagine,” rest assured that this will put more bureaucrats to work at great expense.

The whole mess falls under the wing of our former hapless homelessness czar, Commissioner Dan Ryan, who had RACC and other headaches dumped into his lap in Mayor Wheeler’s massive shake-up of bureau assignments in January. Ryan seems a bit…well, remote from RACC and all that art-stuff. In fact, if you consult the commissioner’s “accomplishments” self-promotion on his official city website, under “Culture and Community” you’ll find that Ryan established the city’s first AIDS Day Proclamation and that he “proudly serves” as the city’s first HIV-positive elected official and that he (boiler-plate coming)…

….works to expand arts access, empower culturally-specific organizations, and lift up queer voices.

RACC is unmentioned.

Back in 2019 the RACC, after an 18-month search, hired an expat from San Francisco, Madison Cario, who took a long look at Portland politics and departed for frigid Minnesota two years later. If the RACC website is accurate, the organization still has no actual day-to-day manager.

Instead, it has a board…

…that is made of the usual suspects, with the proper POC/sexual/ethnic balance which is an art in itself. And, with the possible exception of a couple of the members, none have any direct experience with what might, at a stretch, be called art.

One hopes they know it when they see it.

Instead, this is a collection of…well, try these experience descriptors from the official web site…

Director of Marketing…proven success leading and growing nonprofit organizations…business strategist…leadership development consultant…trainer for the Center for Diversity and Inclusion…advocate for intentional and purposeful equity…building specialized client management teams…

The board secretary (there is no chairperson), Matt Wattson, toiled for a decade at Nike and now runs his own shop, Wattson Creative, with a portfolio that “ features some of the world’s top-tier firms, organizations, athletic teams, and cultural icons.” On the RACC’s brag-page, Wattson’s interests seem to have nothing to with “art” in the usual sense…

Matt can be found cheering and/or yelling at the Oregon State Beavers, hiking Northwest trails, restoring his 1923 home, or improving upon his well-established sneaker collection.

Then there’s everyone’s favorite cocktail-hour good causes entertainer, Thomas Lauderdale, whose blurb says…

Instead of running for political office, Lauderdale founded Pink Martini in 1994 to play political fundraisers for progressive causes…

You get the idea.

Which brings us back to the folks at the RACC. And that hardened sludge.

First off: RACC isn’t actually a “government” entity—although its staff and beneficiaries are being paid by the odious $35-per-head tax. Nope: they’re “non-profit contractors.” And like a lot of private-type businesses, they don’t like outsiders poking around.

I wrote to the folks at RACC—and there are a lot of ‘em…

…and asked a few routine questions. Specifically, how were the applications for the winning 134 grants judged? Could I get a look at the applications to get a sense of what was tickling the RACC’s fancy?

I also wondered if there are any “rubrics” that guide the “peer reviewers” scrutinizing those applications; and what might be the set of metrics that would determine if RACC had spent that money wisely? Is any artist asked to give the dough back if they, say, have a nasty case of writer’s block? Who got turned down, and why?

Given the fact that the Portland arts scene is rather, well…thin on the ground (a few rock bands excepted), how many “peers” are actually available and how are they selected? How does RACC find members of that community willing to be actually critical, given that today’s grantee might be tomorrow’s peer?

The great unsaid was: does any artist slightly to the right of, say, Rene Gonzalez, stand a chance?

After some initial skirmishing, I got this from Carol Tatch, chief of external operations...

“The completed applications for RACC grant and public arts programs are not available to the public (and yes, we do keep them). If you have specific questions, such as those regarding the demographics of our applicants and recipients, please let me know. We are able to provide such data and we do this as a matter of course for our contract reporting requirements.”

She added, helpfully…

…you can access the grants award listing via our website to see grant project titles (at the time of the application), the discipline represented, where the project is taking place, and how much was awarded. Our applications are reviewed by a cohort of community members, not by RACC. You cannot have access to the community reviewer files regarding the assessment of the grants ("rationale") as that is a closed process.

Data on race, but nothing else.

See how that works?

It must be said that RACC’s closed shop does publish a list of award recipients here, but you will not be surprised that there are no links to any of the happy artists, nor is there anything about the award-winning art beyond anodyne titles. There are no pictures of paintings or sculpture, no clips of music, no chapters of books, no poems, no needlepoint projects…nuthin’.

And so, over two eye-glazing days, I Duck-Ducked all 134 recipients. (This is not as easy as it sounds.)

Some are so obscure that they are invisible to search engines. Others aren’t.

We’ll meet them in Part II…