UK arts administrator says cutting art funding is bad for business

Cutting funding for arts education is not only bad for schools, it’s bad for business as well, says University of Kentucky Assistant Professor Rachel Shane, an expert in the arts and business.

“The arts are an incredibly important economic engine to any community. And it’s not just about the direct employment that the arts have,” Shane said in a recent interview. “Without the arts, without culture in a community, it makes the city a less desirable place to live.”

And that, Shane said, means new industries are less likely to locate in a place where potential employees wouldn’t want to live.

Shane, 43, is trained in theater but has a background in business and just this year she was named editor-in-chief of the Journal for Arts Management, Law and Society. And she has served on the board of directors of the national Association of Arts Administration Educators since 2011.

As UK’s program director of arts administration, she worries about Gov. Matt Bevin’s proposal to cut 9 percent from the state budget over the next two years.

“I’m not sure it’s that Gov. Bevin doesn’t value the arts, his own undergrad degree is in a language,” Shane said. “You can’t cut your way to economic growth. Rather than cutting things that have the potential to bring more to a community, a state, a country, you have to invest more.”

Kentucky employs nearly 110,000 people in the creative sector, she said, which is an important economic engine in any community.

Bevin has said he wants to see more emphasis in higher education on math and science, and less on the arts because that is better for business, she said.

“I think it’s very interdisciplinary (arts and math), it’s not you have to have one and not the other in order to be a fully complete society, you have to have both because it’s a give and take. We learn from each other,” Shane said.

Shane, who spent over a decade working in regional theatre companies, said arts and sciences go hand-in-hand.

“Learning to think creatively is important because it helps you approach those problems that don’t have the answers in the back of the book, and that’s what the real world problems are,” she said.

Likewise, Shane said, art organizations have to know how to market, fund raise and run stay financially solvent.

“We use business tools in the arts and business uses the creative innovative thinking strategies that we implore in the arts,” said Shane, who has came to UK almost six years ago after running the arts administration program at the Savannah Arts College and Design.

Shane is also concerned about Bevin’s plans to cut funding for the Tourism, Arts and Heritage Cabinet. The Kentucky Arts Council, which distributes funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and allocates funds to artists and groups around the state, is part of that cabinet.

Kentucky is a big tourist location when it comes to the horse industry, but is more than just that, Shane said.

The cabinet “has an incredibly large role in the ability to attract people to the Commonwealth.”

The Kentucky Arts Council has had its budget cut nearly 40 percent in the last decade and cannot sustain much more, she said.

“We can’t cut everything in hopes that will solve our budget problems, we have to actually generate more revenue. So it’s much bigger than just cutting to a balanced budget,” Shane said.

“If you have a government that says the arts are unimportant to the very foundation of who we are as human beings and the economy, than that is a complete misunderstanding of the role of the arts in the community,” she added.

This story was originally published February 28, 2016 at 12:33 PM with the headline "UK arts administrator says cutting art funding is bad for business."