The Pew Foundation's quandary

DAN ROTTENBERG

In 1995 Philadelphia's largest private foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, commissioned an external study that concluded, in so many words, that the Pew's munificent grants to local arts and culture organizations were causing more harm than good. By shoveling unrestricted cash grants toward dozens of arts groups year after year, the evaluators contended, the Pew had inadvertently spawned a community of grant junkies, hopelessly dependent on the Pew's support and incapable of ever getting their fiscal acts together.

In short order the Pew announced a new program of arts grants which, instead of propping up fragile organizations, would reward "institutions that demonstrate exemplary standards of practice in how they manage resources, develop programs and govern themselves." This would be measured by an "Index of Organizational Health" consisting of nine criteria, none of which involved artistic merit. Most significantly, only organizations operating in the black would be eligible for these grants.

Some artists protested that art by its very nature is risky, that many risks don't pay off, and that (as one local arts executive puts it) "It's hard to be creative if someone's telling you, "We won't support you unless it's risk-free." Others fretted that the Pew's new formula would propel bean-counters in green eyeshades to the head of arts organizations.
But because the Pew is Philadelphia's largest arts funder by far (it gave $14.4 million to local arts and culture in 2002 and has often dispensed much more ), "nobody dared complain," says one local arts executive. Instead, most arts administrators contented themselves with rolling their eyes and imagining how Mozart would have fared if he had to compete for a Pew grant against a savvy (albeit musically mediocre) bureaucratic tactician like Salieri.

In effect the Pew has been engaged lately in a quixotic philosophical experiment: Can analytical left-brain principles be constructively applied to intuitive right-brain creativity? Marian Godfrey, the Pew's cultural director since 1989, insists the answer is yes. "An organization that's in good shape, that knows who it is, is best positioned to take artistic risks," she says. "It's hard to take artistic risks if you're in a crisis mode." Yet anyone who has worked on a movie set, a theater troupe or a monthly magazine might well argue the opposite: that only a crisis brings out truly great performances.

The results of Pew's strategy, of course, defy measurement. The Pew's broad array of arts funding programs may well have helped foster Philadelphia's emergence as a hotbed of theater and dance since the mid-1980s. On the other hand, the Pew was a follower rather than a leader in Philadelphia's most significant artistic gamble of the past decade, if not the past century: the construction of the Kimmel Center. In the Pew's narrow conception, the artistic need for a symphonic hall was trumped by what Pew president Rebecca Rimel called "several financial aspects of its projected operations."

Similarly, Philadelphia's pre-eminent arts organization, the Philadelphia Orchestra, failed to qualify for Pew funding in 1996 and 1997 because the Orchestra had reported deficits. No matter that the Orchestra holds itself to much higher artistic standards than most of the Pew's grantees, or that the Orchestra's problems (changing musical tastes, a visual-oriented society, cutbacks in school music programs, changing radio formats, reduced newspaper coverage) were endemic to most U.S. symphony orchestras. The Pew refused to deviate from its bottom-line guidelines. As Harry Truman once complained about bankers, "They only give you money when you don't need it."

Or consider the Pew's effect on the Opera Company of Philadelphia. Under Margaret Everitt's adventurous direction in the 1980s, this company was respected artistically but a basket case financially. Prodded by the Pew to fix its balance sheet, the Opera Company's board replaced Everitt with Robert Driver, a marketing wunderkind with a reluctance to rock artistic boats. In due course the company expanded its audience and cleaned up its debts, but its product turned cautious and bland. Although the OCP today is regarded within the opera world as second-rate at best, last summer it was awarded a Pew grant of $1,215,000 over three years.

A passionate philanthropist might perceive instinctively that great art deserves support even if it loses money. And some arts patrons can be just as passionate as artists themselves. The late patent medicine magnate Albert Barnes was the most passionate of art collectors, stubbornly suffering ridicule to invest in Impressionist paintings that he loved. Only passion can explain why a self-made multimillionaire like the management consultant Milton Rock reportedly bailed out the Pennsylvania Ballet's deficits year after year in the '90s. There was even passion in the refusal of the late J. Howard Pew, co-founder of the Pew Trusts, to discuss his donations: "I'm not telling anybody anything. It's my money, isn't it?"

But the Pew's founding donors— the four surviving children of Sun Oil founder Joseph N. Pew Sr.— have been dead for more than a generation. Precisely because it isn't their money, today's Pew executives usually seek refuge behind the sort of objective guidelines and review panels that are the antithesis of creative passion.

At their best, large foundations like Pew provide the extensive professional staffs needed to grapple with major social issues. But unlike governments, businesses or even not-for-profit arts organizations, foundations answer to no voters, stockholders or customers. What's more, years of flattery by fawning grant-seekers and suppliers often convince foundation executives that they're smarter than the institutions they support.

At this writing, for example, the Pew has offered to help fund the Barnes Foundation's proposed move from Merion to Center City while simultaneously angling to control the project. Although another local public charity, the Philadelphia Foundation, has 85 years' experience in managing funds for community ventures, the Pew last year called itself the "logical choice" to administer the $150 million Barnes mission. Yet aside from its money and manpower, there's no compelling reason why the Pew's self-perpetuating board is more qualified than any other self-perpetuating board to inherit Albert Barnes's legacy.

Pew President Rimel, a former emergency-room nurse, has made a conscious effort to shake the Pew out of any elitist inclinations. But at a $3.9 billion foundation where people make six-figure salaries, that's like teaching an elephant to tap-dance. Since 1999 the Pew has diverted 40 per cent of its culture budget toward a think-tank study plus similar efforts aimed at developing a "national cultural policy." Although the arts in America are currently on something of a roll, with more than 10% of U.S. households donating $11 billion a year to culture and more than 18 million Americans volunteering their time to the arts, the Pew's Marian Godfrey claims to see a growing "disconnect" between the arts and society at large, which must be solved by "an organized political channel."

Last year the Pew was granted "public foundation" status, the better to focus its energies on lobbying government and media. And as in 1995, arts leaders are again protesting that these energies (at least as they relate to the arts) are misdirected. In a letter to the New York Times, former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving attacked the Pew for trying to institutionalize a community that, he argued, thrives precisely on its chaotic, fragmented nature. In his experience, Hoving wrote, "Every time a committee of an elitist foundation, 'think tank,' or government 'suits' began to cook up some sort of cultural 'organizing framework,' it was a waste of time and money."

Of course, Hoving himself is a former arts administrator with his own axes to grind. As the late Sears Roebuck patriarch Julius Rosenwald summed up the problem nearly a century ago: "It is easier to make a million dollars than to give it away wisely."