The new special exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” offers visitors an immersive dreamscape of transcendent dresses and psychedelic lighting. Too bad the entry price of $25 ($16 for seniors and students, $10 for children) is out of reach for most people living in Brooklyn, where the median household income barely covers rent for a two-bedroom apartment.
As the United States reopens its borders to international tourism, we’re told New York’s cultural institutions are “waiting with arms open” for an influx of foreign visitors, who are expected to help make up for nearly two years of lost revenue. New York’s arts and culture industry has long been viewed as essential to the city’s broader economic health — not only as a source of employment but, perhaps more significantly, as a lure for wealthy tourists and residents, who are celebrated as the backbone of the city’s revenue base. To that end, for the past four decades, City Hall has poured money into arts and culture, with the Department of Cultural Affairs’ annual expenditures reaching more than $200 million in 2020.
There is big money to be made in New York arts and culture, but, like most other sectors of the U.S. economy, the rewards trickle upward while the material benefits to ordinary New Yorkers are minimal. For most who work in the arts, the industry does not offer prosperity, or even much financial stability. New York’s artists and cultural workers struggle to make ends meet in the face of low wages and skyrocketing housing costs. The recent unionization movement among museum staff has exposed poor labor conditions and the growing gap between executive pay and the meager salaries of guards, gift shop clerks and junior curators.
The pandemic has exacerbated these shameful trends. Even as U.S. cultural institutions received $1.6 billion in forgivable loans through the Payroll Protection Program, they made staggering cuts to their workforces, with the largest institutions collectively laying off 28% of staff. The Whitney Museum, for example, pink-slipped 91 employees despite collecting $5.6 million in loans, all while ending 2020 with an operating surplus of $47 million.
As municipal arts policy has focused on courting affluent cultural consumers, the city’s arts scene has become decidedly less democratic. Productions like “Hamilton” tout their inclusive casting and progressive themes, but when the average ticket fetches several hundred dollars, they can hardly claim the mantle of egalitarianism.
Ever-higher ticket prices are one reason why access to the arts for the city’s mostly working-class and poor residents has declined during the past 40 years. More troubling has been the gutting of arts education in public schools, which is still recovering from the city’s austerity regime of the 1970s. The city’s private schools, meanwhile, are renowned for robust arts curricula. Students at Friends and Dalton learn bookbinding and filmmaking; public high schoolers in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, are lucky to have a single music teacher.
The elitism of New York arts and culture today stands in stark contrast to the middle decades of the 20th century, when the city was a haven for cash-strapped artists and New Yorkers across the income spectrum could make and enjoy a wide range of art. During the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration employed New York painters, playwrights and performers who created art intended to be free and accessible to the urban masses. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established New York City Center in 1943 as “the People’s Theater,” with tickets capped at $2. After World War II, public schoolchildren received comprehensive instruction in visual and performing arts, with dedicated art specialists assigned to each school district.
The city’s fiscal crisis in 1975 put an end to this populist-leaning arts scene. To appease the city’s bankers and federal and state officials, the municipal government inaugurated an era of neoliberal governance that prioritized building up the private sector. Art teachers were slashed from city payrolls. To stimulate private housing development, City Hall changed zoning laws and offered tax incentives for landlords, which pushed up rents for artists’ lofts. At the same time, the city dramatically increased public funding for elite cultural institutions to make New York a desirable place to live for the white-collar professionals flocking to Wall Street.
The arts in New York have become largely the province of moneyed residents and tourists. But the cultural workers fighting for a livable salary conjure an alternative vision for the role of the arts in urban life. Their campaign recalls the women labor organizers of the early 20th century who shouted, “We want bread, and roses, too!” — insisting on their right to both a fair wage and a life outside of the factory where they could pursue the pleasures of art, music and leisure. New Yorkers today deserve bread and roses too.
Miller-Davenport, a historian at the University of Sheffield, is a fellow at NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab.