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.