interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
Andrea Fraser on Art, Money, Politics, and Power.
by Andrea Fraser
October 24, 2018
This interview with Andrea Fraser, a performance artist and professor at UCLA, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Andrea: 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics started as a publication component of a year-long program of events about my work organized by the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco. But it was originally supposed to be a completely different book. It was originally supposed to be a book about something else that I've been engaged in for the last 10 years, which is called Group Relations or the Tavistock Method, a method of experiential learning about groups and leadership and authority, which developed out of psychoanalysis and systems theory.
But then the election happened, and that didn't make any sense to me suddenly. Then I became involved in an action here in LA, about the presence of Steven Mnuchin on the Board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, a museum that has my work in its collection. I had been aware that Steven Mnuchin was on the Board and around the time he became Trump's Campaign Finance Chair. There had been some protests about his presence on the board, both inside and outside of the museum, but these had no effect.
Shortly after the election, I collaborated with a curator named Eric Golo Stone on writing an open letter to MOCA, which we circulated and got a few dozen prominent artists and historians to sign.
frank: You didn't release it anyways?
We didn't release it. The museum knew that we planned to release the letter to the press on a certain day. We got the call the first thing that morning. Part of the discussion was: He's off the board. His name is off the website. Please do not circulate the letter.
Right.
In a sense, I feel like we missed an opportunity with our success.
So that was part of the context for the book. When I became involved in that letter, I thought, "Well, I should find out who the other board members are supporting. What's the context here?" I started looking up the other board members of MOCA and was appalled to find quite a number of contributors to the Trump campaign on the board. Then I started looking up other museums, and that's when the idea for the book developed.
CCA Wattis had approached Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner about co-publishing a book project with me, and we had discsued the idea for a book about group relations. It was a little odd because they're better known for publishing artists books and that would have been more like an academic book. Thea Westreich was one of the first and perhaps, I would say for a period, most influential art consultants when that line of work developed in the '80s. But they also publish artists books, often very limited edition artists books that are focused on visuals.
I was already wondering whether it made sense to do a more academic book with them. Then, when I had the idea for 2016, I thought, "Oh, my God, are they gonna go along with this?"
The peole on these boards are like their former clients. They just recently retired. I sent them an email about the idea with an exit hatch: I know this isn't what you signed up for. I would totally understand if it wasn't something that you were interested in. The response was, "This is great. We got to do it." They were totally enthusiastic, and from the very beginning I thought, "Wow!"
What I didn't realize is that not only are they politically progressive, but actually Ethan Wagner, before he joined Thea Westreich's art consulting business, was a political consultant.
Interesting.
Then I realized, "Oh, this is perfect. They're the most perfect people to do this book," because they have this expertise in both of these fields. They know that world of collectors and patrons and museum boards. They also know the world of campaign finance. Then I talked about it at an event in New York. Someone from Art Newspaper wrote up the project. Roger Conover at MIT Press saw the write up and emailed me. That's how MIT Press came on as the third publisher.
I took that question as an opportunity to give you the whole background.
[Laughter] No, that's perfect. Is the information you were seeking all public?
Yeah.
Was it easy to find?
There were stages. The first stage was putting together the list of museums, and I needed criteria for that. One of the criterion was that they had to meet a certain budget threshold. For that, I went to Guidestar.org, which is a nonprofit organization that maintains a website with the 990 tax forms of almost every nonprofit organization in the United States. They have other information that they distill from that. That was my first source when I was putting together the list of museums and identifying their total operating budgets, indicating the financial scale of the organizations, which is an important reference for me in the book and for any further analysis of the data in the book.
Then the next step was putting together the list of board members. Now, there might be different sources for that. I could have found that in the 990s as well, but I just basically went to the museums' websites, which I also assumed would be the most up-to-date. There were a couple of cases where the boards were not listed on the museum websites, when we went to 990s, or annual reports, or contacted the institutions directly.
The instances when we had to contact the institutions directly, were mostly instances where the institutions were public, rather than private-nonprofit, or university museums, where the boards have a different status. Some of these organizations are also supported by foundations or private-nonprofits that exist independently of their governing entities or boards but were created to support the museum. In some cases we include board members of those kinds of organizations as well.
The third and biggest chunk of research in the book was in the political contributions themselves. There are a number of organizations with websites that track and publish political contribution data, including the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which maintains a website called OpenSecrets.org, as well as a few forprofits that serve an industry of political operatives.
In the end we just used the FEC website. Although then I went back to OpenSecrets.com to determine the partisan affiliation of many of the recipients and the Political Action Committees, which is much harder to get out of the FEC website. OpenSecrets.org collects data on almost all of the registered political action committees and super-PACS, including information about where their money goes and where it comes from. We were able to use that to identify the partisan lean of various PACs, which then influence how we identify the partisan lean of the board members who are giving to those PACs.
I'm surprised this doesn't exist as its own dataset already. It's a massive amount of work though.
Yeah, it is. I had a team. The designer that I worked with, Geoff Kaplan, who is amazing, put together a team that included a programmer who got the data from the FEC website and put it into spreadsheets and another designer-programmer who developed a program to export the spreadsheets directly to the design software.
Most of the book was never a manuscript. It went directly from spreadsheets to design. The fact-checking and copy-editing happened in the spreadsheet stage.
Was the goal to collect all of this so that it existed publicly, for transparency sake? Or was it action-oriented?
It was. Early on I envisioned an appendix for the book with template letters to board members, saying, "Dear so-and-so, as an artist in the collection," or, "As a member of the community," or something like that. And in these letters develop an argument, tailored to the nature of the contributions being made by the board member, about the conflict of interest between their political support and the missions of the organizations they serve.
Did you get pushback on that?
No, I didn't. I didn't do it because in the process of developing the book, the emphasis shifted away from the partisan inspiration for the book in finding people like Steven Mnuchin and other supporters of Trump and white supremacist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist, politicians on the board of cultural institutions that they're responsible to support and protect.
My research for the introduction, more than my research of the political contributions themselves, brought into focus the pay-to-play culture of governance in for-profit institutions, which, I argue, serves to legitimize a pay-to-play culture in public governance.
As it became more about plutocracy, the strategy of influencing the influencers started to feel cynical to me. Artists might have a certain amount of access to the donor class and might be able to use that access to influence the influencers. But if that's where we invest our political energy, aren't we buying into the whole plutocratic system? Aren't we buying into the political influencing machine, to the political inequality that results from economic inequality?
That's why I decided not to do it.
Right.
I didn't want the book to become about that.
What surprised you about the research?
I assumed that there would be more of a correspondence between the political leanings of the board and the political leanings of the state and the district in which the museum was located.
Each museum is listed with its district and with the congressional delegation representing that district. There's a table at the back of the book that lists each museum with the partisan index of the state and district where the museum is located. Each museum is listed with its district and with its congressional delegation representing that district. Then I made a partisan index for the board members of each museum and a partisan index representing the money that we found associated with each board.
I did expect to see more of a correspondence between the boards and the districts, if not the states—most of these museums are in urban centers, which, even in the reddest states, are usually represented by Democrats in congress.
In a way it's not surprising. This is true in New York City, and it's true in LA, and it's true in San Francisco, and it's true in some of the bluest cities and states in the country. And it’s more true of the money than the board members.
Sometimes that has to do with one or two major Republican donors that just swing things way to the right with regard to the money. At the end of the book there are two big pie graphs. One shows the partisan breakdown of all 5,460 board members research, and the breakdown of the partisan breakdown of the money we found, and you see a significant rightward shift.
It shows that right-leaning politics have a close correspondence in many cases to wealth and to financial scale in these institutions.
Do you feel strongly about that money disappearing from the institution? Immediately when I hear this I think of Lincoln Center and the Koch Brothers.
Yeah, there are also Koch spaces at the Metropolitan Museum.
Exactly. You think of the big ones, and what happens in them. I've been to New York City Ballet shows, for example, and it's an incredible experience, made possible by financial contributions like those from the Koch Brothers. Do you think those institutions have a responsibility to reject that money?
I do think so. There's been reporting in The New York Times and a few other outlets recently identifying particular trustees with glaringly obvious conflicts of interests between their political patronage and the mission of the museum they serve.
The most obvious is Rebekah Mercer who is on the board of the Museum of Natural History in New York, which is just obscene. The Mercers are among the biggest funders of science denying, climate-change denying organizations that directly threaten the very mission of the Museum of Natural History, which includes promoting science and conservation. How is that possible? There's also been press about the Sacklers...
Who are the Sacklers?
The Sacklers are major philanthropists of cultural and educational institutions. The Metropolitan has a Sackler Wing and the Brooklyn Museum has a Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Sacklers' money comes from pharmaceuticals and particularly from Oxycontin.
Do you have a proposed solution? Ways in which you think that these institutions should be financed? Is the answer to collect small donations?
That’s one solution. I have done quite a bit of research on the history, not only of arts organizations in the U.S., but also of philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and trusteeship. When you take in the whole picture, it gets harder, unfortunately, to envision change. But when you extend that picture beyond cultural organizations and the nonprofit sector to include civic, professional, and other kinds of community organizations, one does find other models. In the visual arts and in the big cultural and educational institutions, the model is self-selecting and self-perpetuating boards who are usually required to make personal financial contributions, which collapse patronage and governance.
I know of almost no cultural institutions in America that have that structure. I do know of cultural institutions in Europe that have that structure, such as Kunstvereins, or art associations, in Germany, which have histories that go back to the early part of the 19th century. They are supported by their members, who also elect the board and participate in governance.
There are a lot of organizations that have that structure. Museums have not, for the most part, had that structure, although there are museums in the book that started out as art associations.
When I finishied writing the introduction, I just didn't have it in me to write up recommendations. I needed a bit of distance. I do need to get that out somewhere. One, to diversify museum boards, not only racially and ethnically, but also so they represent the full range of stake holders and community members, and not just patrons. Another is to develop more rigorous guidelines to ensure that patrons and board members are not subveriting or threatening the organization’s mission in their other professional and political activities. Another is to organize to advocate for public funding.
More and more museums and more and more cultural nonprofit organizations, generally, nationally, have developed a policy of requiring personal financial contributions from board members.
That's something that a few observers of the nonprofit world have noted and tracked. I've found some data suggesting that it went from less than 50% in the '80s to over 75% today.
That's a big jump.
Yes, it’s a significant jump, and the incidence of board members making contributions is even higher than organizations requiring it, which may indicate that this has become an implicit norm.
Again, this isn't just in museums, but I think museums have among the highest requirements with regard to personal financial contributions. This is largely anecdotal, because most board members have to sign nondisclosure agreements. There's very, very little transparency about this, which is another big issue. In the nonprofit sector we don't have the disclosure laws that are like the last vestiges of campaign financial regulation, the disclosure laws, which is what allowed me to do this book.
Reportedly, it costs $5 million to get on the board of MoMA, and then it's a quarter of a million dollars a year to stay on the board. $10 million for the Met. I'm not sure what it costs to get on some of the other boards that I've looked into, but I have been told that a lot of mid-sized institutions cost about $150,000 a year.
When you go back to the '70s or the '80s, particularly in smaller institutions, one would find a much broader range of people. You'd find more artists. You'd find more professionals, more academics, more people who are coming out of families with long traditions of collecting, who are knowledgable about culture. At a certain point, the financial structure of museums and the ways they started to fundraise became more and more focused just on wealth, with waves of new board members who reflect the boom industries of the day. First it was the leverage buyout guys. Then it was the hedge fund guys, then the private equity guys. Or in some cities, it's all real estate. It's whoever has that kind of money.
How influential is a board on the space itself?
You mean on the programs?
Yes.
That's a big question that comes up. I did a conversation that just came out in the magazine BOMB with Helen Molesworth, who was the Chief Curator at MOCA and was fired very abruptly by the director. I asked her about this, because I've never heard a museum professional admit publicly that the board has any influence on programs. Everybody pretends, and I would say pretends, that there's a firewall there, because the legitimacy of that world depends on it in some sense.
Right.
But what I say is, if museums have to raise money for everything they do, if they can't do a show or buy an artwork unless they can find someone who's willing to give them the money to do it, that's a tremendous amount of influence. It's veto power, essentially. There are very, very few other sources of funding for programs.
Then there are instances that have gotten a little bit more discussion, such as restricted gifts, like the Fisher Collection which is on long-term loan to SFMOMA with the requirement that the museum show a large percentage of it in a large percentage of their space continuously.
They wield a tremendous amount of power then.
A tremendous amount of power. In that case, the collection consists almost entirely of white men who are either German or American and work in painting or sculpture. It represents a very, very narrow slice of art, even in the period that they're focused on, and excludes most of what has been important in art in the last 50 years. And it’s already very dated. It's basically like going to a very high end art gallery at this point.
What about The Broad?
LACMA thought they were going to get Broad’s collection and built a whole building for it. But then he decided to open his own museum. In some ways I would say that LACMA is probably better off without it. We should note that we are sitting in the Broad Art Center at UCLA, which is my place of employment.
Right. I saw the sign.
The Broad is part of a trend of collectors creating their own museums for their own collections. These are sometimes called private museums. But the history of museums in the United States is that a lot of them started like The Board. There is the Whitney, the Guggenheim the Walker. We have lots of museums that were started by individuals focused on a very specific collection and were originally governed by those individuals and their family members, along with their lawyer and accountant, basically. But they evolved into institutions that we think of as serving a broader public and a broader set of cultural agendas. The Broad may develop in that way.
You've riled me.
Yeah. I know. I've spent my life riled. I'm an artist, and I do a lot of work on museums, but I don't really like them that much. There are a few museums I like.
Which are?
Well, I was just at the Berkeley Art Museum recently. That's a good one.
Do you think if one BIG museum were to take your advice, draw this line, change the way they approached funding, others would follow suit?
No, probably not. We could talk about W.A.G.E., which I think has succeeded in those terms. It started something that had a ripple affect and is now being adopted more widely.
I just joined a board of the ICALA, which is not in the book because it didn't meet the financial threshold when I was doing the research. I know they ask other board members for personal financial contributions. They have a couple of spots for community members who are not asked for that contribution and I have one of those spots. A few other museums have those spots: MOCA does, the Hammer, MoMA has a couple. Often they are used to add racial diversity to the board.
Joining that board, I've taken on fiduciary responsibility along with the other board members, and I don't have an alternative to that fundraising model. I can try to start that conversation, but going in and saying, "You should eliminate this financial contribution requirement," when it's a significant percentage of the museum's budget, is not something that feels doable.
Moving toward greater diversity on boards is something that I can be very vocal about. I think that's a start. I’m also on the board of W.A.G.E., which stands for Working Artists in the Great Economy, which was founded by a group of artists about 10 years ago and became a 501(c)(3) about five years ago. I've served on the board since then.
They've created a voluntary certification program for museums and arts organizations that commit to equitable compensation of artists and others who contribute to their programs, including artists' fees and honoraria as well as support for exhibitions. It was something that there was a lot resistance to initially and a lot of arguments about. But we just had our 10th year anniversary and have been very successful. W.A.G.E. has certified, I think, over 50 organizations, although mostly smaller organizations. We're still working on certifying larger organizations, but we know that many larger museums, even though they're not lining up to get certified, are looking at our fee schedule and are starting to compensate artists for the work that they do in those institutions. They are starting to talk about equity in a way that they haven't before.
On a smaller scale, we did succeed in shifting the terms with the institutions we certified. But even with the larger institutions, I think, we've changed the conversation about equity in relations with artists and beyond that, I think we've also created a space for curatorial assistants and interns and even curators in some of these institutions talk about whether they're being supported equitably.
You think about these structures from the top down, and they influence everything that people entering their institutions see and ingest. What we're allowed to look at, in terms of history and culture, what the narrative is, what we're exposed to.
Yeah. What gets legitimized, presented to us and legitimized as, well, as legitimate culture, as public culture. By virtue of their nonprofit status and often also of land grants for sites in parks and other public support, museum represent public culture.
Certainly.
I was just in New York and I went to the Whitney to see the David Wojnarowicz Show. He was an artist that died of AIDS in the early '90s. His work is encreadibly visceral in its politics and in its rage at the genocide that was being tacitly if not explicitly condoned by the politicians of that time. It was a very powerful show. But it was also shockingly cutoff from the broader context of AIDS activism.
Nevertheless, I have been impressed by what the Whitney is representing from the collection since they moved. They are presetning a narrative of American art that I’ve never seen on view anywhere, that includes outsider art and artists who are Communists and labor organizers and involved in the Civil Rights Movement. By the time you get to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, which was always the pinnacle of the classic narrative, you can see it’s politically conservative as well as it's formally “progressive” aspects. Or at least that’s how I saw it.
One of the other important conclusions I reached by doing the book is that we can’t just complain about the donor class, whether we’re talking about political donors or nonprofit donors more broadly.
Absolutely.
Whether we’re politicians or other political professionals, curators or other nonprofit professionals, artists, educators, or scientists, we give the donor class its power. We can argue that we have no other sources of funding, but very few of us are fighting for public funding. It can't just be about criticizing the donor class.
We so readily accept these systems as they are, because they feel historic...
They're institutionalized.
We've been working on a new project that's an update of something "old". Everyone keeps telling us we're insane. And the thing we keep hearing is, "Yeah, but it's been this way forever." And I'm like, "No, it's been this way since 1986."
People have short memories.
If I didn't update my computer since 1986 it wouldn't work. We'd all be using...
Floppy disks.
Rotary phones. What are you talking about, since 1986?! Everything in the world has updated since then.
Yeah. Right.
Well, this is great. Thank you again.