Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Mary Schmidt Campbell was sworn in by a beaming Mayor David Dinkins at a City Hall lovefest on February 20. Campbell spoke first about censorship, complimenting Dinkins on his response to "the infamous Helms amendment" when he was Manhattan borough president. She eloquently evoked the power of art to "dismantle walls" and the power of the artist as a potential "conscience of a country." A day after the swearing-in I asked Campbell - the only commissioner holdover from the Koch administration - what plans she'd formulated during the past eight months to combat the increasing influence of right-wing, antiart extremism.

She pointed out that then-mayor Koch had vetoed any strong city response to Jesse Helms last summer because of the mayoral campaign in progress. But since the election, she noted, "we [at DCA] have been placed on the agenda of the city's Washington delegation for the first time. That's a substantial change." Campbell promised details soon; the urgency of Dinkins's instructions to the city's congressional delegation and lobbyists will be an index of the mayor's commitment to the arts community and the DCA commissioner he persuaded Koch to appoint two years ago.

What else has Campbell done? She met with the heads of the borough art councils on February 22 to discuss a general strategy to gain public support for the arts and art education. She is coordinating a public relations campaign that might include op-ed pieces jointly written by Campbell and New York State Council on the Arts chairwoman Kitty Carlisle Hart. The symbolic value of playwright Václav Havel's overnight transformation from political prisoner to artist-president of Czechoslovakia intrigues Campbell; she was the prime mover behind the telegenic February 22 breakfast for Havel at Gracie Mansion with the Dinkinses, Joe Papp, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Wendy Wasserstein, et al.

It's probably still too early (but only slightly) to evaluate Campbell's performance as a champion of artists' rights. Here are a few additional modest proposals for what the city and DCA can do: Dinkins, Campbell, and Hart should enlist Governor Mario Cuomo to instruct, entreat, or coerce the state's congressional delegation in Washington to vociferously lobby against Helms, Rohrbacher, and their ilk. The City Council should immediately go on record as opposed to censorship, as its infinitely more arts-attentive counterpart in Los Angeles did last year. When the huge delegation from the Congressional Arts Caucus hits town late this month for its annual Broadway-and-Sardi's junket, Dinkins and Campbell should educate this temporarily captive audience about censorship, the economic benefits of the arts, and the funding crunch in arts communities across the country.

Roberta Sklar, the astute former DCA director of public affairs who helped manage last November's brouhaha at Artists Space, proposed a few additional initiatives to put the arts on the offensive contra Helms. She suggested that Campbell set up a technical assistance fund to help arts organizations cope with future crises like the NEA-Artists Space flap. (Total expenses for the controversial Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing show ran Artists Space $100,000 more than the normal $25,000 budgeted for such exhibitions; unsolicited contributions thus far total only $81,000.)

Sklar believes that Campbell must become an aggressive and far more vocal arts advocate. (If the commissioner were more outspoken, hence better known, she might be an effective mediator in future arts emergencies.) A skillful organizer, Campbell could accomplish this by setting up a national coalition of cultural affairs honchos to lobby Congress. Such a group might take a strong stand in favor of both the NEA's now contested peer-panel-based grant process and its regranting procedure - that is, the awarding of federal money to state and local art agencies to redistribute in order to ensure local funding control. And, as Campbell reminds us by evoking events in Eastern Europe, democracy should begin here at home: A peer-review, grant-selection process is long overdue at bureaucrat-clogged DCA.

It's probably no accident that Sklar referred only to federal, rather than to state government. Governor Cuomo, who has frequently called artists "treasures of the state," is guilty of a rhetoric gap as big as the hemorrhaging state budget deficit. You thought the gov was an arts supporter, right? Well, he recently submitted his eighth budget and this one calls for reducing the New York State Council on the Art's funding by approximately $5.3 million - or a whopping 10 per cent! (Four of his previous budgets called for decreases, two for increases, and, in August 1988, he actually impounded $2.9 million already allocated to NYSCA.)

Granted that the state's budget process is a shell game: The Democrats in the Republican-dominated state senate are forced to ante up for social services, while the Republicans traditionally advocate for roads, bridges, and the arts. But this time Cuomo's proposed funding for the arts is so draconian that there's no chance NYSCA funding will be returned even to its already static, current level. Cuomo seems entirely unwilling to either advocate for the arts by turning his famous Jesuitical intellect on Helms or to financially assist the arts. With friends like these...

FOLLOW UP: Where's Mary? April 23, 1991, p. 90

No one promised that the transition from the Board of Estimate to the City Council-driven budget process was going to be easy. Witness the March 7 restoration of $1.7 million to the current Department of Cultural Affairs budget aimed--according to City Council Finance Committee chair Herbert Berman--at helping "ease the pain" of the looming fiscal crunch. Its effect? Decidedly mixed.

The restoration of badly needed funding is the good news. The bad news is that the money went only to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Metropolitan Museum, and the 29 other big institutions comprising the Cultural Institutions Group for which the city is landlord. The other 400 to 450 cultural organizations that receive money from the Department of Cultural Affairs--16 percent of DCA's budget versus 81 percent for the cultural institutions--were left out in the increasingly bitter fiscal cold.

How bad is it for the smallish groups with budgets in the half-million-dollar range? Kate Busch, executive director of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, told me that four of the alliance's 120 member nonprofits--the New Theatre of Brooklyn, Chelsea Stage, Riverwest, and Theatre in Action--have already gone under this year. Jenny Dixon, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, noted the recent demise of the path-breaking Collective for Living Cinema. "The nonprofits simply aren't seen as research and development for the arts industry. The allocation of money is entirely political," she said. "But it isn't even the money. Where's the leadership?"

Dixon's comments were echoed by more than a dozen nonprofit organization heads I spoke with. What's shocking about the DCA restoration is not Councilmember Berman's ill-informed contention that an across-the-board restoration would have spread the money too thin to guarantee any real impact, but that DCA commissioner Mary Schmidt Campbell had no input into the agreement. On March 8, she testified before a council hearing that she was not consulted about the previous night's funding restoration for the cultural institutions. Bear in mind that the commissioner--a Dinkins-protégé--was left out of negotiations that included not just the council's finance committee, but also staffers from the mayor's offices of intergovernmental affairs, and budget and management.