Earlier this spring, I went to see Mark Morris’s “The Look of Love,” a joyous performance — modern dancers offering themselves in service to the music of Burt Bacharach. It was one of those nights that made you realize what your life in New York could be if you didn’t spend the hours between dinner and midnight resetting passwords to file past-deadline insurance claims while you half-paid attention to something on BritBox. Even in the city that has given us Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, too many of us default to the pursuit of distraction over meaningful pleasure, most of the time.
That night, as it happened, the actress Kathleen Chalfant was seated next to me. I had noticed her a few times before at my local supermarket, but only a rube would approach someone who made her Broadway debut in the original production of “Angels in America” as she was picking up a gallon of laundry detergent. This, however, was not Key Food; it was the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the lights were about to go down and we were two people clearly of a like mind, joined in a shared nostalgia, an understanding of what was beautiful. Talking to her now seemed like protocol; soon we were each singing under our breath to some of the best known compositions in the American songbook, written by a brilliant son of Forest Hills, Queens.
The multiplier effect of culture in New York is huge both in economic and human terms. The city attracts and incubates some of the most talented and interesting people on earth, whose imprint is felt in terms of outsize fame or intimate acts of inspiration. Genius here is always proximate. But arts funding does not consistently rise to meet it. This is clarified with annual regularity in June, when the city’s budget for the coming fiscal year is hashed out, and cultural institutions — even major ones, the recipients of so much charitable giving — are left to feel like the stiffed party in a tense negotiation over child support.
From one vantage, the city’s cultural funding can look robust. Over the past decade, the money allocated to the Department of Cultural Affairs has increased considerably, as City Hall officials will point out. But the figure includes the cost of staffing and maintaining the agency itself. And at any rate, between 2023 and 2024, the overall budget decreased by $7 million to $241 million, as the migrant crisis required cuts across municipal divisions.
This year, City Council is asking for an additional $53 million, above a base line that has not much changed to meet the demands of inflation in many years, specifically to support more than 1,130 cultural organizations. Many of these have struggled in the wake of rising labor costs and the end of federal Covid aid. It is a number representing a fraction of a sliver of the city’s $100 billion budget, $35 million of which would come from City Council funds anyway. The administration is in effect being asked to come up with $18 million, which so far it has not agreed to do. To put that figure in perspective, a line item in the Police Department’s $6 billion budget for 2024 included $39.8 million for the purchase of two light twin-engine helicopters.
Mayor Eric Adams seems to want it both ways: to leverage the city’s cultural appeal to the world while holding back on what is needed to sustain it. Just a few days ago, he announced a spate of free programs and cultural events running through Labor Day. “Every summer, music flows through our streets, plays sprout in our parks and New Yorkers come together to celebrate the joy and energy that makes our city great,” Mr. Adams said. According to the Cultural Interest Group, an amalgam of 34 organizations including BAM, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Studio Museum in Harlem that is seeking to increase the amount of given by the city to the arts, the events are being held by 66 different organizations, more than half of which saw their funding reduced in 2024.
In April, Justin Brannan, a former punk rock musician who is now chairman of the City Council’s finance committee, spoke before the Cultural Institutions Group at a Harmonie Club breakfast about the importance of the arts in his own life. “We talk about New York City and New York City exceptionalism,” he said, “but you can’t talk about the things that make New York City great on Monday and then defund them on Tuesday.”
How the money is allocated is just as important as the number. The Adams administration has been notoriously slow to make payments to nonprofits. “When you are talking about smaller outer-borough nonprofits, they can’t float a million — that’s insane,” Mr. Brannan said. “If you’re the little art school that could in Coney Island? What are you doing? You’re closing.”
Although New York has by nearly all metrics rebounded from Covid, the performing arts are still battling “a supply chain problem,” as one philanthropist put it to me not long ago. The pandemic slowed the work of making art. Both BAM and the Public Theater have had to lay off staff members in the wake of declining fortunes. And there are obvious ripple effects on neighborhood commerce. Leaving the Mark Morris performance in March, I noticed that an Italian restaurant across the street that had relied on pre- and post-performance crowds had closed.
“For BAM, we have seen audiences return,” Coco Killingsworth, a vice president at BAM, told me. “But we’re not able to do as much due to inflation.” Philanthropy has changed since Covid. Many donors have chosen to divert funds to smaller, minority-based organizations. “But you have to support the whole ecosystem,” Ms. Killingsworth said. Donors have not come back with the same force. “We’re looking at challenges coming from multiple directions,” she said.
Every year, museums and dance companies are in essence forced to justify themselves against the political rhetoric that they are in fact highly prized. “Our administration values the important role our cultural institutions play in our community,’’ a spokesperson for City Hall said in an email this week. “With responsible, effective fiscal management, we will continue to support this vital sector.”
Kyoung’s Pacific Beat, a small Brooklyn-based collaborative theater company, might see things differently. After losing state funding toward at the end of 2023, and then losing city money for the spring 2024 season, it was forced to cancel its programming. It was “the only way we could balance a deficit, which surpassed $30,000,” Kyoung H. Park, the founder, said in a letter to the theater community recently. The company, he announced, would close at the end of the month.