Pew to put millions into creating national cultural policy

The Pew Charitable Trusts, the $4.7 billion foundation that put its weight behind causes such as global warming, civic journalism and campaign finance reform when they were first emerging, has a new crusade: shaping a national cultural policy.

Over the next five years, the Pew plans to devote about 40 percent of its culture budget, about $50 million, to an attempt to get policy-makers to focus on issues such as arts financing, intellectual property rights, zoning in historic areas and an arts curriculum for public schools.

The new effort will involve academic research, opinion polls and more media coverage, among other things.

"The next presidential election should be the last one in which the parties are without a cultural policy plank in their platforms," said Stephen K. Urice, the Pew official who will direct the initiative.

"But first they need to have smart academics, think tanks and data focusing on this, and that's where we're headed."

"We're talking about developing an infrastructure for understanding the role of culture in America," he added.

Some of the scholarly work the Pew intends to sponsor would try to establish the long-held but unproven belief in the arts world that cultural programs are valuable intrinsically and not simply as leisure activities, as many Americans see them, or as economic engines, a more recent view.

The Pew also plans to create an information center within a year, perhaps in Washington, D.C., to collect and publish data, conduct polls and organize conferences. It also plans to start a communications effort to support more media coverage of the arts, particularly on television. And it intends to work with orchestras, theaters, museums and other arts institutions to develop new ways to measure their value to society.

"This is really about strengthening the arts organizations of this country," said Marion A. Godfrey, the director of the Pew's culture programs, which include the new initiative.

A few other foundations and universities also have started thinking about cultural policy, though on a smaller scale, and many in the arts world think it is time to grapple with other festering issues, such as federal funding for the arts and humanities. Urice said it was "overstating the case just a bit to say that this is like the period following the publication of 'Silent Spring,'" the 1962 book by Rachel Carson that galvanized the environmental movement.

Arts and culture, which make up between 3 percent and 6 percent of the gross domestic product and which, including everything from dance group tours to movie distribution, are the nation's second-largest export after technology, also suffer from official indifference.

With few exceptions, the policy-makers who venture into virtually every other corner of American life all but ignore culture. So do federal bureaucrats. Although the government knows, for example, that Americans spend $5.1 billion on television repair, make 504 billion local phone calls, eat on average 4.4 pounds of canned fish a year, and have 12,400 compatriots who produce leather goods at an average wage of $10.98 an hour, it has no idea how many people attend dance performances, what violinists earn or how many art museums or community theaters exist across the nation.

As the program's first grant, the Pew has commissioned an 18-month study by the Rand Corp. that will map the locales, types and budgets, among other things, of the 18,000 non-profit cultural institutions that file annually with the Internal Revenue Service. Later, the Pew hopes to expand this databank to include many more cultural outlets, from unincorporated storefront community arts centers to giant entertainment corporations.