I’m basically feral, so there’s a lot about how Nashville runs that I don’t understand. But like most creative people, I’m trying to understand what’s going on with Metro Arts and Metro Legal and who has wronged whom, when and why. I’m concerned that Metro Finance director Kevin Crumbo is talking about withholding funds from Metro Arts because there might be a deficit when a former Metro employee is out here explaining how it doesn’t seem possible that Metro Finance could foresee a pending deficit because of how backwards and antiquated our bookkeeping system is. I’m also concerned that the optics of this fight are well-connected white people feuding with people of color, and I’m certainly cringing openly at a white woman being the one telling the media she’s unhappy that Metro Arts Director Daniel Singh is taking sick leave. 

But there’s one part I’m very confused about, and I haven’t seen it addressed in any local media. Why in the world does any part of the arts budget go to places that have rich patrons? (Patrons in the sense of rich people who give them money, not who regularly hang out there.) I’m not rich, and I don’t understand rich people, but if I had given, let’s say, $30 to set up the Betsy Phillips Bucket of Mud that sits right downtown (or in one of our wealthiest suburbs) where everyone can see it, and that bucket was ever out of mud? I would fill that bucket with mud.

Good Lord, I’m just thinking about how, if the Betsy Phillips Bucket of Mud were ever out of mud, I would never, ever live it down among my own family members. Phillipses would come from all over the nation to take selfies with the empty bucket and post to social media about my failures as a mud supporter. I’d have the shame of my young nieces and nephews stepping up to put their own mud in the bucket, because I failed to do so. I would never hear the end of it. As long as I had money for gas and a yard full of dirt, that bucket would have mud in it. What I would not do is take $1 a year from the city for the mud bucket, because I have the money to maintain my mud bucket on my own and it is shameful — SHAMEFUL — to take money when you don’t need it from a place (I guess in this analogy, Metro Dirt) when there are people who do need it, because their buckets are cracked or they got gentrified out of their old neighborhoods and they don’t have access to good mud anymore or whatever.

Do you think Bill Frist ever takes a selfie in front of the Frist Art Museum and posts it to the family group chat captioned, “Great to see our family name now closely tied to government handouts and screwing over working artists — good job, Tommy”? Probably not. I’m sure the Frists are more dignified than the Phillipses, but my God. Something with the Frist name on it needing city money? How does that family show its face in public?

Worse, though, has to be Metro Nashville Arts commissioner Will Cheek voting against cutting funding to these huge organizations with ties to family money. Will Cheek is one of the best attorneys in the state. He’s also a well-respected do-gooder. And he’s a Cheekwood Cheek. That’s a family home — his family — that has been turned into the museum and gardens. So how in the world, when he’s sitting on the Metro Arts Commission and he sees that Cheekwood is asking for money from Metro, does he not open up his checkbook right then and take care of the problem? Hell, even if he doesn’t want to single-handedly do it, he certainly could raise that money with a couple of phone calls. 

I mean, I respect the hell out of Cheek. I don’t think he’s doing this out of greed or malice. I think this just has to be a way that rich people’s brains work that I don’t get. Why, when it’s your family name on the thing and you have money, are you letting that institution ask for money from Metro? How does this not make you look bad? It’s like Steve Jobs trying to get out of paying child support. You made this thing. If it can’t make its own way in the world, you step in and help. And if you don’t? Know that the rest of us kind of think you’re a monster. 

Maybe it would be useful to require that anybody taking money from Metro Arts has to post next to where people pay admissions how much money they get from Metro Arts and what it pays for and how that benefits Nashville. Like a receipt for taxpayers’ money. Because I’d be a lot less confused if, say, the Frist museum were getting money from the city for facilities management because we are, technically, the Frist’s landlord, and we should be doing our part to keep the building up. But otherwise, I guess I’d like to know why a place that charges admission and is named after a rich family in town can’t pay its own way. Or count on the family who’s benefiting from having their name so prominently displayed to step in.

Why do I, a regular person with no family fortune, have to pay to get into these places and have to pay again as a taxpayer through Metro Arts, for the vanity projects of rich people? And how, if it is important to be seen as a great philanthropist and patron of the arts, are these rich people not humiliated by the fact that these institutions have to go hat in hand to the city?

Tags

Like what you read?


Click here to become a member of the Scene !