When the dust from the collapsed Twin Towers settled in September, the financial sector wasn't all that was devastated. Around the city, attendance levels at theatres, museums and galleries plummeted as tourists cancelled trips to New York and locals stayed at home to watch the news and to avoid crowded areas.
Over the past month, audience numbers have been rising again, but in the middle of a military conflict and with anthrax scares dominating the news, all-important "out-of-towners" have so far failed to materialise for the holiday season. So when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently announced a $50 million bail-out for cultural and performing arts organisations that have been directly affected by the events of September 11th, there was a near-audible sigh of relief from the city's artistic community.
The Mellon Foundation is a $4 billion endowment fund which distributes over $200 million a year to cultural and performing arts organisations, among other groups. In announcing the fund, William G. Bowen, president of the foundation, said that "while $50 million is a considerable sum, it does not begin to address the full range of the needs, and their urgency, that now confronts cultural institutions - museums, libraries and performing arts organizations - that so powerfully help to define New York City's special qualities".
But will the aid be enough to bail out the likes of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which has announced layoffs of 80 staff and a freeze on its SoHo operation? The Guggenheim's expansion plans for lower Manhattan have been put on hold, and last month it announced that it would be laying off almost 20 per cent of its work force in an effort to keep the institution from going too deeply into debt.
It was a huge blow for the museum, which had embarked on an aggressive expansion campaign in recent years, both in New York and in other museums around the world, while taking flak for such recent successful exhibitions focusing on the history of the motorcycle or the clothes of Giorgio Armani. Besides the pruning of personnel, the Guggenheim is also planning to cut back its scheduled roster of exhibitions next year.
Meanwhile, the Whitney Museum of American Art last week announced 14 layoffs out of a staff of 210. Like the Guggenheim, the Whitney has altered its upcoming programming, cancelling an exhibition by sculptor Eva Hesse while trying to attract sponsors for a show by contemporary artist Michal Rovner However, a new exhibition by African-American artist Jacob Lawrence is proving to be a major attraction.
New York's museums and galleries rely on locals for just 50 per cent of their audience, with tourists - both American and foreign - making up the other half.
While Mayor Giuliani has been urging New Yorkers to carry on life as normal and patronise the city's galleries and theatres, extensive advertising campaigns have tried to lure the out-of-towners back to the city. "In the days and weeks after September 11th, there was a lot of caution about going out," says Elaine Charnov, director of public programming at the American Museum of Natural History. The caution was both self-imposed and, for school children, the result of a post-11th safety ordnance. "The schools' chancellor banned inter-borough travel for students," says Charnov of the decline in the sizeable number of mid-week museum patrons, "and although that's recently been lifted, museums won't see the results of it until the New Year." Calls by local politicians for economic stimuli, such as a tax-free sales 10 days leading up to Christmas, have fallen on deaf ears.
The situation is hitting smaller museums, too. Dan Cameron, senior curator at SoHo's New Museum of Contemporary Art, sees the Mellon funds as lifeblood. "We consider this emergency funding to keep our doors open," he says, noting that the current drop in funding at the New Museum is due to the dual factors of the economic downturn and "people's philanthropic efforts being diverted to other areas," such as disaster relief funds. For a small museum such as his, a dip in attendance of even 500 patrons per week can make a big difference.
The Museum of Modern Art just this summer embarked on a hugely ambitious five-year building programme that will double the size of the midtown museum to more than 700,000 square feet. "A lot of philanthropy got redirected after September 11th, as it should have been," MoMA's director Glenn Lowry recently told the Daily News. "How individuals, corporations and foundations are going to reset their philanthropic activities in the new economic environment is the question we're all asking."
But there are no plans to cut any museum programmes or staff, says Lowry, who added that museum shop staff would be the first to go if sales for the coming month prove to be disappointing. Plans to relocate the museum temporarily in Queens during the rebuilding are still going ahead as scheduled. At the Lincoln Centre, home to 11 organisations including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic, audiences have been returning, slowly, to pre-September 11th levels. The Lincoln Centre's redevelopment plans are also on track for commencement next year.
Broadway, too, has been in recovery mode after being badly hit. With grosses down over 60 per cent for the week after the 11th, five shows cut their losses and closed, including Marie Jones's Stones in his Pockets. Following this, emergency relief measures were put in place to keep Broadway's "Great White Way" on life support, as theatrical unions approved a 25 per cent wage cut for cast and crew of several Broadway shows. Off-Broadway, ticket discounts of up to 50 per cent were permitted to nudge New Yorkers themselves into theatres to fill the seats that the all-important tourists used to occupy.
It's worked: the queues wrap around the block again for tickets left by cancellations to The Producers which, with The Lion King, is operating at full capacity once more after the brief September dip in ticket sales. While some shows have had their opening nights postponed, others - including a new Stephen Sondheim musical, Assassins, based on the lives of killers and would-be killers of US presidents - have been shelved indefinitely.
If Broadway is sensitive to the national mood, is the programming at cultural institutions changing? Are artists thinking differently?
Cameron points to one postponement in the New Museum's 2002 line-up due to financial reasons, while MoMA is planning a major exhibition next February of photographs about September 11th. But Liz Thompson, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, an umbrella body for downtown arts organisations which had its office destroyed in the trade centre attacks, isn't so sure. "Artists are artists and they'll go in all directions - there's no particularly defined movement in the depths of the arts world.
"Artists' voices are most important at this point in time," she says. "They'll always speak the truth as they see it."
