press room

For Immediate Release

Washington, D.C.: 

Following recent events involving the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s
exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Americans for the Arts President and CEO Robert L. Lynch issued the following statement:

“On behalf of the thousands of local arts councils throughout this
country, which collectively administer more than $1 billion in local public funding for the arts, Americans for the Arts urges Mayor Giuliani to restore  city funds to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. While Mayor Giuliani has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to government funding of the arts and arts education in New York, his refusal to continue funding to the Brooklyn Museum is quite alarming."

"As with any public financing issues, policies and procedures are set in place to protect the interests of the public…in this case to fund the maintenance and operations of a world-renowned, city-owned museum facility.  We as a society cannot allow our basic democratic principles, embodied in a system of policies, to break down into a system of personalities. In this situation, many solid procedures were in place to safeguard public money.  It is not appropriate for a single public official to circumvent these procedures. Furthermore, it is important that public officials clearly distinguish between the use of public funds to grant general support for the arts and the use of funds to contract cultural institutions to deliver the city’s specific viewpoint."

"America’s communities need to create a fertile environment for artists and cultural institutions to experiment and express themselves freely. Nearly every nonprofit cultural institution’s budget benefits in some way from public funding. We cannot allow public support of the arts to be used as a backdoor entry to control the content of artistic expression. By the same token, cultural institutions receiving public funds have an implied responsibility and opportunity to actively engage community groups and leaders in an educational process about the art they choose to present, especially challenging art.”