Keith Haring, "Ignorance = Fear, Silence = Death," 1989. (Photo: Estate of Keith Haring)

Earlier this year, the Brooklyn Museum, citing financial issues, nixed its plans to show "Art in the Streets," the controversial graffiti and street art exhibition that was shown recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. However, it now appears that at least one artist from that show will still get a major survey in Brooklyn: Keith Haring.

The Brooklyn Museum announced today that, next April, it will present an exhibition called "Keith Haring: 1978-1982," focusing on the artist's early work, which he made from about the age of 20 through his mid 20s. Haring died of AIDS in 1990.

The show was organized by, and has previously been shown at, the Kunsthalle Wien and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Last year, the Gladstone Gallery became the representative of Haring's estate.

Do you have 15 minutes to spare? We recommend the wonderfully lively documentary about the artist embedded below. Its opening lines:

"The early 1980s: a time of prosperity and new hope for the America dream. But it was poverty emerging in the streets. The need for social change was being expressed by young people who were making their mark on the walls of the city. No one knew more about making a mark than the graffiti artists of New York."

The Brooklyn Museum’s entry pavilion, a 2004 addition.

On a muggy Thursday morning in late June, the Brooklyn Museum held a press preview for the exhibition “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior,” which features statues of vibrant, twisting figures frozen in combat.

The museum’s Asian Art curator, Joan Cummins, had just finished explaining to The Observer the exhibition’s organizing principal—the various avatars used by Vishnu the 10 or so times he came to earth, usually to save it—when the museum’s instantly likable director, Arnold Lehman, rounded a corner. A squat, jowly man with bright eyes, he began to promote “Hide/Seek,” an exhibition traveling to the museum from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The Observer asked if David Wojnarowicz’s artwork A Fire in My Belly, removed from the D.C. exhibition after right-wing flak, would be on display. “Oh yes,” said the man whose 1999 “Sensation” exhibition was called “sick stuff” by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, eyes dancing. “We wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of reconstituting the show to just pick and choose,” he said.

One show that won’t be coming to the museum is “Art in the Streets,” organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles director Jeffrey Deitch and currently on view at that museum; a day before the “Vishnu” preview, the Brooklyn Museum announced it had nixed “Art in the Streets” for financial reasons. A week before, citing financial strife, the museum ended its year-long experiment with late hours on Fridays. The museum appears to be in trouble. Will Mr. Lehman, like Vishnu in one of his many guises, be able to save it?

The Brooklyn Museum has never been flush with cash, and the recent financial crisis hit it hard. Thirteen people who sat on the board of trustees in 2007-08 are no longer there. Alongside the scale-backs of recent weeks, the museum announced three new board members—bringing the current total to 25—as well as a new chair in John Tamagni, formerly the board’s treasurer.

There was tumult before the financial meltdown, in the form of a heavily critiqued staff reorganization that saw seven curators leave in 2006, but the board is the best lens through which to understand how the museum found itself taking over a quarter of its $26 million operating budget from the city, as it did last year—the Met, by contrast, received just over 10 percent of its operating budget from city funds—and how Mr. Lehman has done his best to pull the museum out of dire circumstances.

Fund-raising has almost never come easy to the museum. Until 2001, there was no minimum standard donation to be on the board and it generally attracted members who had an interest in some aspect of its robust 1.5 million-piece collection (South American art, say, or Egyptian art).

There was no concerted attempt, according to a former curator of many years, to cultivate donors. When, in the mid-1980s, the museum received an offer of a significant monetary donation to turn the space holding its costume collection into storage for an area of art that interested the potential donor, then-director Robert T. Buck rejected it. The costume collection would later be ferreted out to the Met to make space for the museum’s feminist art wing, just next to the Vishnu exhibit (which, in disclosure, The Observer sponsored), and the donor would go on to make significant donations to the city’s other cultural institutions.

The competition for donations is no small factor in the Brooklyn Museum’s struggle—prolific donors like Karen B. Cohen and Wynn Kramarsky seemed to have been quite active in their giving to the museum until around 2000, when their names stopped appearing on additions to the collection.

Mr. Lehman, who canceled an interview with The Observer for this article, citing time constraints, came to the Brooklyn Museum in 1997 after 18 years as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he tripled memberships. Despite his reputation as a fixer, he fought accusations of cynicism and crassness from the beginning of his tenure in Brooklyn, thanks largely to “Sensation,” an exhibition of Young British Artists from the collection of British advertising magnate Charles Saatchi that included an image of the Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili embellished with elephant dung. Mayor Giuliani attacked the Ofili, but the show also came in for criticism for its funding, from Saatchi himself and Christie’s. According to Martin Baumrind, a former trustee, the exhibit actually made the director physically ill from all the criticism he received.

It’s an ironic turn for the museum to now be criticized for withdrawing from a graffiti show, as it has been on blogs since “Art in the Streets” was canceled. It usually takes its beatings, under Mr. Lehman, for hosting other shows with just such populist streaks. From his very first act as director, marching in the West Indian American Day Parade that passes the building, audience building has been Mr. Lehman’s chief goal—bringing in the institution’s rousing Target-sponsored First Saturdays and shows like 2000’s “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage.”

Seth S. Faison, a former insurance executive who served on the board off and on from 1972 until the recent exodus, said that, from the beginning, he found Mr. Lehman’s goal of attendance boosting to be admirable.

“We should be welcoming everybody in Brooklyn and having things that everyone in New York City will want to see,” Mr. Faison said. “That’s how you get a museum to be alive. If it’s just catering to Manhattan WASPs and WASPs in Brooklyn, we don’t deserve to be alive.”

And if this goal hasn’t quite been achieved—the attendance for 2009 was 340,000, a 23 percent drop from the previous year according to The New York Times—Mr. Lehman has stayed true to his interests in pursuing pop culture themes and contemporary art. The former director of the Miami Art Center, he still goes down for the contemporary art fair Art Basel Miami Beach most years and is clearly enthralled in a YouTube video of his talk with British duo Gilbert and George in 2008. A Yoram Wolberger statue of an oversize toy soldier, similar to a Wolberger Indian that was on display at the museum from 2009 to 2010, greets visitors as they walk into his home.

Mr. Lehman’s strategy is not just sound in recruiting more attendees, said Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and former director of New York’s Whitney Museum, but should serve him well as he continues to recruit a new wave of trustees.

“You just need one hedge fund person who says this is my pet cause, and God knows there are a lot of those people floating around with a lot of ability and desire to make that happen, and that’s really the only magic that a lot of places have,” Mr. Anderson said. “One hedge fund manager with a strong sense of loyalty and commitment to the Brooklyn Museum could have the same impact that Peter Lewis had on the Guggenheim or Eli Broad had on the LA MoCA.”

And if some former trustees have perceived Mr. Lehman’s enthusiasm for contemporary as neglect for the museum’s permanent collection, it’s not exactly unconventional. “There are very few major museums in the country that have historical collections that aren’t at least dipping their toes into the contemporary world,” Mr. Anderson said.

Standard though it may be, Mr. Lehman’s zeal for contemporary led to friction with those trustees who had been at the museum for years, if not generations, and suddenly felt left behind. Some opposed the de-accessioning of the costume collection, generally perceived as a smart move for the overcrowded museum, or were irked at small things like the fact that certain collection galleries were not properly climatized until 2010, which hindered selections for exhibit loans and prevented the full range of collections from being displayed. And not everyone goes in for those rabble-rousing Saturdays.

In speaking with The Observer, many who’d quit the museum’s board, or staff, didn’t single out Mr. Lehman for blame—their decisions just came down to individual circumstances. But some trustees, faced with new initiatives, simply chose flight over fight.

“It wasn’t a schism in the board with new trustees asserting themselves,” said 22-year trustee Michael de Havenon, who left in 2006. “The long-standing trustees who disagreed with the director’s agenda, which generally involved populist and contemporary exhibitions, tended to resign rather than fight the issue.”

Mr. Baumrind, a realtor who joined the board 15 years ago, quit last year, reportedly over the museum’s partnership with the Bravo network for the reality show Work of Art—the show’s winner, Abdi Farah, was given an exhibition at the museum—but told The Observer that the show was really just the final straw.

“It had to do with what the trustees were interested in,” Mr. Baumrind said of his departure. “My wife and I have been great collectors of prints and paintings by Ohara Koson since 1973, and it was always my hope that the core of our collection would find a home in the Brooklyn Museum. But I find the interest lacking.”

Referring to the BMA’s high-profile 2008 exhibition of Japanese pop superstar artist Takashi Murakami, which came complete with a Louis Vuitton store, Mr. Baumrind added, “Perhaps if I’d collected Murakami instead, we’d have a better fit.”

The transition remains fraught with uncertainty as Mr. Lehman moves forward with new sources of funding and new partnerships. One of the new trustees is a law professor with a background as a corporate lawyer, another is Williamsburg-based artist Fred Tomaselli, whose retrospective exhibition appeared at the museum last year, and yet another is general counsel for Forest City Ratner Companies. (The museum is close with Bruce Ratner and was criticized for honoring him at a 2008 gala that featured a performance by Kanye West.)

One thing is certain: all eyes are on Mr. Lehman, whose tenacity will be tested by his ability to save what appears to be an ailing institution. Mr. Baumrind recalled that when he joined the board, Mr. Lehman told him that he intended to retire at 65, a birthday Mr. Lehman celebrated last year.

“When I asked him about it a couple of years ago, he said, ‘How can I retire? I love being around the young people!’ and I think that’s probably in fact how he does feel,” Mr. Baumrind said. “Arnold is many things, but he is consistent.”

dduray@observer.com

The Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum announced three new trustees today, including what the Museum said was the first artist in recent times to serve on the board. The new trustees are New York Law School Professor Tamara C. Belinfanti, Forest City Ratner Executive Vice President David L. Berliner, and Brooklyn arist Fred Tomaselli, whose work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum.

The three trustees will be grappling with some financial difficulties--a recent planned show of graffiti art, which was to have courted the sort of controversy the Museum has historically enjoyed (they do have Judy Chicago in the permanent collection!) was scuttled, reportedly due either to financial cutbacks or the potential loss of city money the museum could not afford to lose.

What can help the trustees rebuild? This calls for another season of the Brooklyn Museum-set reality show Work of Art!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Via press release:

"This is an exhibition about which we were tremendously enthusiastic, and which would follow appropriately in the path of our Basquiat and graffiti exhibitions in 2005 and 2006, respectively. It is with regret, therefore, that the cancellation became necessary due to the current financial climate. As with most arts organizations throughout the country, we have had to make several difficult choices since the beginning of the economic downturn three years ago," states Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman.

Sensing a conspiracy, Artnet Tweeted: "Brooklyn Museum cancels planned 2012 showing of 'Art in the Streets,' supposedly due to finances, not anti-graffiti politics." Respectfully disagree there, Artnet! The Brooklyn Museum's cash flow woes have been well documented of late. They cited similar reasons in announcing their recent decision to end late hours on Friday nights.

At this point the feed is mainly comprised of information about mummy transportation, and the occasional odd fact about CT scans in general.

“most human hospitals don't have a ct scanner that's as good as the toshiba 64,” the museum said, via Twitter. “@amcny #mummyCT”

The photographic evidence of the day’s journey comes courtesy of Instagram, proving that this truly is the museum of Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Museum has made a rare purchase from a London Gallery, adding to its paintings collection an artwork that was subversive in its time.

The museum has purchased Free Women of Color With Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, by Italian artist Agostino Brunias.

It's a portrait of the mixed-race colonial elite of the West Indies in the late 18th century. Women are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation. Brunias documents these women of color much as Thomas Gainsborough would have painted British high society, as privileged and prosperous.

According to the museum, Brunias was originally commissioned to promote upper-class plantation life, but his works soon became more political. He endorsed a free, anti-slavery society and exposed the artificialities of racial hierarchies in the region.

The painting's price was undisclosed; It will go on view March 11.

It's the second notable New York museum acquisition in a week: As reported previously, the Museum of Modern Art has purchased and put on view the David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly, which was removed from a National Portrait Gallery exhibition last fall. It was removed after pressure from some Congressional Republicans, who had found the work offensive to Christians. Art lovers can decide for themselves The video is on view in its "Contemporary Art from the Collection" exhibition through May 11.

"Icon."

According to the press release for his Nov. 18 conversation with Charlie Rose — to be filmed for Rose's show before a live audience at the Brooklyn Museum — Jay-Z is all of these things. Sure, but obviously he is so much more, too.

The music and entertainment titan is sitting down with the PBS talk show host to discuss his new book, Decoded, which will be released two days prior to the event. The book, Jay-Z's first, will discuss the man's path to superlative glory after an adolescence of poverty and drug-dealing in Bed-Stuy's Marcy Projects — just a quick ride on the B-43 away from the talk's locale. 

An excerpt from Decoded is included in the press release.

When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted to do three important things. The first was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics — not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC — are poetry, if you look at them closely enough. The second was that I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history. And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.

Jay should to take a peek, then, at New York magazine's exploration of rap lyrics — absent of any music — as poetry: Sam Anderson considers Hova's flow one of his favorites.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Our take: This didn't have to happen and shouldn't have. That said, if we had $6000 to spare, we'd go for the diptych Andy Sneezing.
[Observer, The Art Newspaper, NPR]   

2. Thomas Kinkade Gets a DUI
Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed (and hugely successful) "Painter of Light" known for the bucolic, saccharine landscape paintings that adorn dentist office and retirement home walls across the nation, was arrested for driving while intoxicated and spent the night in Monterey County Jail.

Our take: Any day the man's away from his paintbrushes is a public service.  And, as far as embarrassing headlines go, this one's way better than the 2006 report that he once relieved himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure while remarking, "This one's for you, Walt."
[The Sacramento Bee, The Los Angeles Times]

3. Brooklyn Museum Under Fire
A New York Times article on low attendance at the Brooklyn Museum and the arguable failure of its "populist" programming sparked intense web debate this week. Artinfo called for the resignation of Director Arnold Lehman after a 13-year tenure, while Museum Nerd defended the museum, arguing visitor demographics are more important than attendance. Lee Rosenbaum took a thoughtful, in-depth look and Lehman himself responded to the hubbub in a video interview on her Culturegrrl site.

Our take: The Museum had made some questionable choices, and offering the winner of the reality show Work of Art a solo show is just the latest of them.
[New York Times, Artinfo, Museum Nerd, CultureGrrl]

4. Michelangelo's encoded anatomical drawings
Two Johns Hopkins neuroscientists believe Michelangelo hid detailed anatomical sketches in his famous Sistine Chapel frescos as a coded attack on the Catholic Church.

Our take: Someone needs to put a moratorium on The Da Vinci Code at Johns Hopkins Med School.
[Telegraph]

5. Caravaggio's Bones Found
A group of Italian researchers concluded Wednesday that bones exhumed from a Tuscan crypt last year are those of Baroque artist Caravaggio, who died mysteriously in 1610. Although anthropologists confirmed the artist did suffer from syphilis, analysis indicates he most likely died from lead or sun poisoning.

Our take: Let's get this straight. A guy who brawled in bars, killed his tennis opponent, and dodged assassination attempts died from either using too much lead paint or being outside too much?
[Reuters]

6. Damien Hirst Eyes London Museum
Damien Hirst and architect Mike Randall put in a bid to convert the Magazine, a 19th-century Hyde Park munitions store currently used as a dog pound, into a museum for the artist's personal collection. Admission would be free, with one notable exception: Viewers who wish to see Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull For the Love of God will pay a fee. Because he doesn't have enough money already.

Our take: The artist, well-known for both hubris and inventiveness, gets points for innovation. But is he exhibiting For the Love of God because it never sold, or because no institution he doesn't own wants to show it?
[Artinfo]

7. Jeff Koons' "Art Car" Breaks Down
Jeff Koons' garishly striped BMW "Art Car" premiered at the 24-hour Le Mans race on Monday, June 14, only to putter out after five hours. The car lost momentum early in the race due to a punctured tire, and then mysteriously ran out of fuel on the circuit.

Our take: This is so embarrassing for BMW that it might finally put an end to the PR trick of hiring artists to design cars, wine bottles or watches to get a brand publicity. We hope.
[Transom, Times Live]

8. The History of (Net) Art
Hyperallergic chronicled the growth of net art and social media from 2004 to the present in an illuminating three part series (and includes a shout-out to the Observer's coverage of the Facebook phenomenon).

Our take: Who knew artist Michael Mandiberg sold all his possessions on a "performative e-commerce site" a year before eBay bought Paypal?
[Hyperallergic, Observer]

9. Jesus Statue Destroyed by Act of God?
A striking, 62-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ in Monroe, Ohio—nicknamed "Touchdown Jesus" due to the figure's resemblance to a referee designating a touchdown—was struck by lightning on Monday, June 14, igniting both a fire that destroyed the locally loved statue and much Internet buzz.

Our take: According to The Washington Post, the pastor told the residents of a home for at-risk women next door "Jesus took a hit for you tonight," and pledged to rebuild the statue.  If The Lord was just being an art critic, we've got some better targets for him in Chelsea.
[Daily Mail, The Washington Post]

 10. Modigliani Sculpture Sets Record in France
A Modigliani limestone head sold at Christie's in Paris for $53 million, more than ten times the low estimate. The sculpture is the most expensive artwork ever to sell at auction in France.

Our take: Past a certain price, these sums are all pretty inconceivable, but the French still have a ways to go to match the 2006 sale of Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, which went for a whopping $140 mil.
[Bloomberg]

K2

Rubin Museum of Art

Friday Nights until late evening, ongoing

Named, rather modestly, for the second-tallest mountain in the world, the Rubin Museum of Art's weekly transformation from Eastern art museum to club lounge is remarkable because it's actually kind of cool. The design of the museum lends itself to the shift-it has always seemed more Buddha Bar than Buddhist temple-and, pending a new liquor license, two-for-one cocktails from 6 to 7 p.m. should smooth over any rough edges. 

Roof Garden Café and Big Bambú

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fridays and Saturdays, ongoing

If the 28,000 feet of K2 is a bit too daunting, try the Met's comparatively low-to-the-ground roof cafe, open free on Fridays and Saturdays until 9 p.m., with a 50-foot-high bamboo tower by the Starn brothers just begging to be summited. An array of summertimey cocktails-orange garnish! Mint garnish! Sugarcane garnish!- make the thought of a climb more bearable. 

First Fridays

Neue Gallerie

First Friday of each month, until 8 p.m.

Its aroma of Berlin decadence and Vienna chic has always made the Neue, like the Rubin, a little too cool for daytime. Appropriately, they're open late one Friday a month, letting visitors in free to see their collection in the dim twilight that best suits Weimar style. 

First Saturdays

Brooklyn Museum

July 3 and August 7, until 11 p.m.

Once your wurst hangover has worn off, the Brooklyn Museum awaits! Two Saturdays this summer, they have six hours of free events and music stretching from early afternoon until late. Party hard: Money raised from the August party goes to Haiti earthquake relief.

Summergarden and MoMA Nights

Museum of Modern Art

Sunday nights, 8 p.m. 

The MoMA's Summergarden, a garden concert series that starts July 11, has the same scenery as their annual posh Party in the Garden, but costs $1,000 less, and there is substantially less risk of choking to death on an hors d'oeuvre. MoMA Nights is a similar program on Thursdays, which can count as a weekend depending on whether you care about your job.

Cocktails@Cooper-Hewitt

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Fridays, 6 p.m.. starting July 9

Unlike most of the drinks-in-the-garden events offered on Museum Mile, Cooper-Hewitt's has a door charge ($15). This should go a long way toward keeping out the riffraff. There will be light fare and light jazz in the back garden, and visitors will have access to the museum, currently showing its design triennial. 

Thelonious Monk Jr.

Museum of the City of New York

June 25, 7 p.m.

In 1963, Thelonious Monk played Japan for the first time, forming a beachhead in a nation that for 37 years has championed his music over the era's other jazz giants. This month, in conjunction with the Japan Society's "Samurai in New York", Monk's son will take the stage, playing drums alongside Japanese guitarist Yuchiro Oda in a style called Do Enka, a jazz-blues-spoken word mishmash. In Tokyo, this would be a huge draw, but we can see it for just $12. 

Warm Up

P.S.1

Saturdays 2 p.m.-9 p.m, July 3 on

As befits a museum founded in an ever-so-slightly eerie former public school, P.S.1 has always skewed towards a young demographic. But the architectural construction designed to accompany this summer's weekly Warm Up party may have taken that trend too far: Hanging nets and bright bouncy balls? Artist's renderings of the sculpture show it overrun with toddlers. Feel free to dance, but watch where you put your feet. 

wakers@observer.com

If city budget planners have their way, there will be less Shakespeare in the Park, shortened museum hours and thousands of layoffs throughout the city.

It is all part of a potentially damaging-and ill-advised-attack on the New York art scene that could leave arts in the city with $30 million less in funding at a time when private donations are drying up.

The New York Observer today begins a campaign to reverse those cuts, or at least lessen their severity.

The central point: Arts institutions are far more than luxuries, particularly in a bad economy. They provide informal day care for families, entertainment for teens and cheap weekends for budget-strapped families.

Yet as part of a broader round of cuts in response to a city deficit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg last month announced a 31 percent funding cut for the city's arts organizations-which comes on top of a 40 percent state cut to the New York Council on the Arts.

"These cuts are too much and too deep," says Norma Munn, chairwoman of the New York City Arts Coalition. "There will not be recovery for a significant amount of art groups."

In past cutbacks, many arts institutions were able to turn to individual and corporate benefactors to make up the difference. Now that safety net is no longer there.

"This is what I would call a perfect storm," says Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum and chair of the Cultural Institutions Group, which is composed of 33 of the city's major cultural institutions.  "Everybody is facing financial difficulties. Corporate giving is way, way, way down. Individual giving is down. Foundation giving is more turned toward social services. So there's no way to make it up. The waves are coming from all directions."

Collectively, CIG member organizations employ 9,000 New Yorkers from every borough and from every segment of the community.

According to the NYCAC, there are approximately 200,000 jobs generated by cultural institutions in the state-positions that could now be imperiled, further jeopardizing a New York unemployment rate that still hovers around 9.8 percent.

While it's difficult to determine the exact number of layoffs that could stem from the budget cuts, since arts groups employ many part-time and temporary workers, Ms. Munn estimates 1,500 to 1,600 jobs in small and midsize arts groups will be eliminated if the budget is approved.

Mr. Lehman added that when the organization faced a $18 million budget cut in 2009, 417 employees were laid off and 459 were furloughed. Now, with a possible $30 million cut, 695 jobs could be lost and 765 employees furloughed.

"I think sometimes there's not a realization that cultural [organizations] are generating money," says Andrew Hamingson, executive director of the Public Theater, which produces Shakespeare in the Park. "For every one dollar, we generate eight."

Those dollars are returned to the city in the form of restaurant spending, taxicabs, T-shirt sales and  neighborhood vendors. "I think that's why it's extremely shortsighted," Mr. Hamingson said. "It's not just cutting $20 million. Twenty million times eight is what you're risking."

In response to the $29 million in proposed cuts, cultural leaders are pushing for a restoration of $20 million-less than 1 percent of the city's overall budget. Arts leaders aren't arguing that they should be immune from the kind of cuts everyone is facing; they're simply arguing that their cuts shouldn't be so extreme.

Earlier this week, Mr. Lehman testified before the City Council to urge for the $20 million restoration; Ms. Munn, meanwhile, is spearheading an email campaign to leaders in Albany, hoping to stop the state cuts before they happen.

As part of its campaign, The Observer is running public-service advertisements urging a restoration of the cuts, and sponsoring billboard ads, from Fuel Outdoor, that highlight the arts' economic impact in New York.

"In 23 years, I've never seen a state agency taking a 40 percent cut," Ms. Munn said. "I find it astonishing that Governor Paterson seems to think it's O.K."

Many small and midsize art groups simply may not survive the cuts. The number of free cultural programs, performances and events will severely decline.

But the biggest hit of all may be emotional.

"To me, it seems at this point, given the economy, given the stress that people are under, one of the bright spots in our lives are the arts, the cultural parts of our city," Ms. Munn said. "It nourishes our souls and spirits and we need it badly. I think it's emotionally shortsighted. We're cutting out a part of the heart and soul of our city."

Make your opinion heard! Join the fight to save NYC Cultural Funding on Facebook