Peter Donnelly and the Seattle way of arts

Historians of modern Seattle during its great city-building era, 1965-2000, will likely include on the list of key architects such figures as Jim Ellis, who spurred the civic revival; Sen. Warren Magnuson, who funded much of it, especially the University of Washington; and Peter Donnelly, who oversaw the cultural flourishing. Donnelly died unexpectedly at age 70 last Saturday. What are we to make of his legacy, and what will the arts be like A.D. (After Donnelly)?

Donnelly was the great central orchestrator of this artistic leap forward, and it was a nationally notable surge, the envy of many mid-sized American cities. In his role as head of the Corporate Council for the Arts (currently called ArtsFund), Donnelly kept the corporate givers interested, fascinated them with backstage gossip, and assured them of an orderly (and ambitious) plan well stitched into corporate interests such as tourism and the projection of the Seattle "brand."

More than $1 billion of new buildings for the arts was accomplished in the 1990s, vaulting many organizations into lengthy seasons and large budgets. Donnelly also helped coach artistic administrators and entrepreneurs, keeping an eye on fever charts and artfully suggesting a person who should take a job (or cure a sick board) at a struggling organization. Above all, he conveyed a sense that there was a guiding philosophy for Seattle's audition for the big time.

When Donnelly retired in 2005 from ArtsFund, the central clearing house for corporate support for the arts, there was a decision among the business community, probably conscious, to dispense with a central arts czar, a single person keeping order in the arts playground, a position Donnelly somewhat accidentally grew into. Donnelly would be a difficult legend to follow. But more than that, Seattle arts seemed to have outgrown the need for so much adult supervision and belatedly have become ready to try a more entrepreneurial and competitive mode of nurturing the arts. That's been the Portland way all along — preferring creative ferment of storefront theater to Seattle's grander, safer programming in big-budget palaces.

It's a good and open question whether the city waited too long to shift gears from its "Get big fast" mode. The positive way to look at this is to say Donnelly and his generation provided the foundation for a more generative and edgier arts scene. Another way is to say we have built a gilded cage.

At any rate, the Seattle way for the arts was to create and grow a full-bore representative in all five major arts (visual arts, theater, opera, symphony, and ballet). Few cities short of major national capitals have all that. (San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toronto come to mind.) Most have two distinguished institutions (Symphony and museum, as in Boston and Cleveland, the likely leaders) and then a lot of smaller, sometimes highly creative, lesser art forms. That's a formula for selective excellence, not breadth. In Boston, for instance, the budgets for the Symphony and Museum of Fine Arts are well more than double the Seattle counterparts, while the budget for the Opera is about one-tenth Seattle Opera's.

Seattle's formula is for breadth, with none really achieving the very highest level. (Seattle Opera comes close, though it takes relatively few repertory risks.) The Seattle World's Fair, suddenly creating all those facilities to fill up, is the main cause for this I'll-have-one-of-each formula. Another is Seattle's insecurity, and its lust for "major-league" status. We did the same thing in sports, with the embarrassing end result of lots of losing teams and even one lost one team. Instructively, the one sport we neglected (aside from hockey) is soccer, and it may be the biggest hit of all.

In the great boom of the 1990s, when the city might have shifted to a more Darwinian mode, allowing an organization or two (opera, ballet?) to spurt ahead, Seattle chose instead to keep "having it all." Donnelly, as the master Medici, did not want to pick winners, possibly because his knowledge of the arts was deep in one area, theater. And so we built a new SAM, a new home for the Symphony, and one for Ballet and Opera; the Rep already got its new home (though one with an undersized lobby and an oversized auditorium).

To a degree, this was a bubble, an act of levitation. All the new Microsoft millionaires building mansions on the lake shores beguiled arts organizations (and their consultants) into thinking they would be fools not to have a capital campaign, tapping that wealth, right away. (The covert purpose of capital campaigns is to create powerhouse boards and fundraising departments.) These ambitious organizations soon found, however, that the new economy folks, aside from visual arts, are not very interested in the fine arts; and their presence on establishment-dominated boards could produce a kind of culture shock.