If a facility for fundraising is all that it takes to be an effective Department for Cultural Affairs commissioner, then Schuyler Chapin is the right man for the job. The well-connected art administrator's arrival at the agency coincides with the Giuliani administration's plan to simultaneously decrease and increase DCA funding through budget cuts and outside fundraising. Undaunted at the prospect of this novel approach, the new commissioner recently told me, "I've always been brought in at financially distressed moments...My experience is the key to this appointment." That experience includes stints as dean of Columbia University's School of the Arts, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and vice-president at Lincoln Center. For each of these institutions, he raised millions of dollars.

The mayor's proposed budget includes both carrots and sticks. The stick is a 5 per cent axing ($4.2 million) of the agency's $86.6 million current budget; the carrot is a 1995 restoration of the axed funds sweetened with a $5 million bonus predicated on a Chapin-codirected team raising $10 million in private money and wheedling $5 million from the state. On the job for less than two weeks when we spoke, Chapin understandably felt that it was premature to discuss the cuts he'll have to make. But he was ready to defend Guiliani's Wheel of Fortune-style allocation for DCA by citing the similarity of challenge grants awarded by the NEA and NYSCA.

In fact, they are quite different. NEA and NYSCA grants usually fund institutions, not cities. Neither arts agency can legally make a direct, unrestricted grant to any locality and the likelihood that Governor Cuomo will direct $5 million to the city flies in the face of his art-loathing history: NYSCA's current budget is less than half its 1990-91 $54 million high, and state legislators such as Roy Goodman hope to bump up the gov's current proposed budget increase from a symbolic $1.5 million to a substantive $6 million to $10 million. It's also inevitable that upstate mayors will question the fairness of supporting New York arts while ignoring Buffalo's or Rochester's. If the state doesn't buy into city hall's ill-conceived plan, it's likely to collapse under its own weight.

Grandly titled the "New York City Cultural Challenge Program," the new fundraising scheme actually puts into practice Deputy Mayor John Dyson's intemperate remarks about increasing city money to public institutions that attract tourists at the expense of smaller arts groups. (Chapin oddly suggested to me that Dyson's comments were "misinterpreted" by the press, despite the chorus of jeers that greeted them from both city pols and heads of city arts institutions like the Metropolitan Museum.) Unfortunately, the new NYCCCP committee, chaired by New-York Historical Society cochair Wilbur Ross Jr. and New York International Festival of Arts chair Martin Segal, is the Peter Principle writ large. Ross's N-YHS museum has yet to reopen despite an infusion of $12.6 million in city and state funds; Segal's festival is widely regarded as a bloated anachronism.

As I write this, the NYCCCP bigwigs and New York Times editorialists - Times chair Arthur Ochs Sulzberger is also chair of the Metropolitan Museum trustees - are asking city residents to support a largely unconceptualized program. Its key concepts - new money, access, and eligibility - have yet to be defined. The "access" mandated for projects proposed by large institutions may merely mean getting more tourists instead of new audiences through the door. "New money" suggests an NYCCCP belief in untapped funding sources, a view disputed by the far-from-radical Business Committee for the Arts's recent study of arts organizations showing a 5 per cent decrease in corporate arts giving in fiscal year 1993. "It may be doable," BCA president Judy Jedlicka observed of the NYCCCP plan, "but it's not going to be easy."

It gets worse: unregulated heads of arts-institution boards - the NYCCCP peers themselves - have devised "policy suggestions" (Wilbur Ross's term) about economic development and access criteria for the tax-funded grants, giving new meaning to the notion of conflict of interest. As for "eligibility," no institution or group has been deemed ineligible, meaning that large private museums - like the Whitney and Guggenheim - will get substantial amounts of city and state tax money to which they've never before had access. The losers? The small, medium, and community groups. Again.

NYCCCP cochairs tossed the arts small-fry a paternalistic bone by saying they will help teach them how to raise money and might even mount a benefit on their behalf. (Bear in mind that no fewer than 400 arts groups - excluding the 31 city-owned members of the Cultural Institutions Group, such as the Brooklyn Museum - presently get city money.) But isn't it absurd to expect small arts groups to raise bigger bucks in a suddenly more competitive climate when they already do a superb job of private-sector fundraising? Consider that only 6 per cent of the collective budgets of non-CIGers comes from government funding. To throw a successful benefit, for example, demands either access to the wealthy and/or hands-on labor and donated services in nearly unimaginable quantities. As Charlayne Haynes, the New Museum of Contemporary Art's public-relations director, notes, "Every year, the New Museum must use all its staff and deplete already limited resources for one major [fundraising] event. What arts magic will produce new resources for us to raise more money...?"

Ultimately, the challenge-grant gambit is likely to backfire. City hall will interpret the $10 million that NYCCCP may generate as evidence that the arts can take care of themselves. Where's the incentive to restore permanently the 5 per cent cut from the agency's budget? When it comes to funding the arts, we're back to Bush's 1000 points of light. In terms of equity, we're nowhere at all.

To his credit, Chapin has emphasized that he favors diversity and sees large and small arts organizations as part of a single cultural ecosystem. It's the smartest message he can put out, especially in light of hizzoner's Reagan-esque obsession with "reinventing" - a/k/a downsizing - city government. In fact, the dirtiest secret of the moment is that there hasn't been a better time to eliminate the DCA. Don't think it can't happen here: The Dinkins administration conducted such a study in 1990. However, it demonstrated that farming out DCA's responsibilities to other agencies would save little more than the commissioner's salary. Opposition to such a move today might be largely rhetorical. Why should the CIGs be unhappy to become budget-line items, like the library? Common sense dictates that the borough president would be delighted to disburse the remaining arts funds, increasing their shriveled power and maintaining the politicized way arts dollars are distributed in New York.