It’ll never happen. Whatever good Mayor Rahm Emanuel hoped might come from his hideously verbose Chicago Cultural Plan — a draft of which was released Monday — isn’t going to come to pass for one simple reason.
Yes, you got that right. MONEY.
The simple, blunt truth about everything this cultural plan proposes is that Chicago will need a lot of cold, hard cash from somewhere to implement this plan and make culture more than it already is in this city.
And before we go on, may we suggest the city’s cultural offerings — for those who care about such things and the more who could possibly be made to care about them — are probably here in sufficient quantity already.
But Mayor Emanuel has got to prove he can do things better. And create more than any of his predecessors were able to create.
Still, before anything else can happen, more money has to come from somewhere. Or, as the report indicates in the first set of recommendations, there must be “increased City of Chicago grants for the artists” and “dedicated new revenue streams for arts.”
Those new revenue streams sure aren’t going to come out of the budget for city schools; the money isn’t there for school teachers, let alone culture. And it won’t be there, unless the city goes deep into debt. And we’re just talking about one little aspect of city operations here, folks. Incredible.
Expanding arts education not new idea, just unfundable
Yeah, Chicago is broke. And major efforts to boost culture in this city will inevitably cost money. But putting aside the biggest obstacle to making more culture in the city, let’s examine for a minute other parts of Mayor Emanuel’s hot-off-the-presses cultural plan.
The plan calls for expanding arts education and making it available to more of the city’s underserved school students. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s a lovely suggestion. Only problem is we’ve been hearing this exact suggestion for untold years — only to be told, as arts education was systematically shrinking in the city’s public schools, that there simply wasn’t money available for it.
There’s also a lot of verbiage in the report about expanding culture in the neighborhoods. That’s something we had been led to understand was always the city’s first priority with whatever funding (minimal usually) the city devoted to the arts. So again, nothing new here.
Fresh, but redundant event recommendations
And before we leave this cultural plan to gather dust — as it almost certainly will unless the city stumbles upon a vast fortune — let’s look at a couple of the fresh recommendations made in the plan for establishing and marketing Chicago as a cultural destination.
Right at the top of that list is “large-scale major cultural festival that attracts global attention.” Anyone who has been around Chicago for more than two decades will know this recommendation has a familiar ring as well.
For several years impresario Jane Sahlins (wife of Second City founder Bernie Sahlins) mounted impressive international theater festivals that attracted major attention. But that project ultimately fell apart because of serious management and funding issues.
Yes, it’s tough to sustain major cultural efforts of any sort without that key, core element — MONEY.
But there is one other thing the cultural report neatly sidesteps for now. Who exactly will oversee any grand cultural development project — should the mayor be so foolhardy as to go for it?
Great leaders needed to execute grand plans
As we have said time and time again over the years, leadership is key in any project or business. And this city — with its myriad problems — has suffered more than most from a dearth of great leaders.
If Mayor Emanuel should prove to be — by some miraculous turn of fate — in fact a great leader, the city will require at least one more of his magnitude to pull together all the loose ends of this overwrought cultural plan. We can’t, off the top of our head, think of anyone who might step forward and — somehow, someway — make it all happen culturally.
Rather, we suspect Mayor Emanuel will try to score some points for saying he tried to make this city a greater cultural center, but other pressing issues just got in the way. Pity.
Oh, and one more thing.
What about that big equation that jumps out at us near the top of this cultural plan — “art + creativity = innovation.” Look at it for a second. Something is wrong there. Art IS creativity, people. Why add unnecessary words?
But as we said, this report is nothing if not a triumph of verbosity rapidly headed toward the dust bin.
Contact Lewis Lazare at LewisL3@aol.com
