Follow the Money: Funding, Class, and Community in Early ‘80s Downtown New York City Performance

Deep in New York State Council on the Arts grant application files from the 1980s are emphatic letters to the council from select ‘downtown’ artists, pleading for the continued funding of their management firm, Performing Artservices Inc. Playwright Richard Foreman exclaims that a cut to the firm’s funding would be a “TOTAL DISASTER,” for the company provides “EXCLUSIVE and vital services” including fiscal management, fund raising, grant writing, contract negotiation, and publicity for him, and other artists like Trisha Brown, Philip Glass, and Stewart Sherman. However, it was precisely the exclusivity of Performing Artservices that threatened their funding, with council reviewers noting the firm’s “appearance of a private club,” because of its roster’s noted lack of diversity and little turn-over. This paper traces downtown performing artists’ relationships to funding sources—both public and private—and the emergence of the cluster management firm, like Performing Artservices. To be sure, these firms provided important and necessary assistance to talented artists, playing a significant role in their widespread, international successes. However, it can also be reasoned that they created what I label an “elite performance class” of fiscally-adept artists that made it increasingly difficult for younger, emerging artists, to receive support for their work. These grant files ultimately reveal the significant role funding and arts administration played in the shifting character of performance art in the early 1980s, from the elite class to what I call a “market-community”: a new service-based economic model generated by an enterprising younger generation in downtown nightclubs.