Strings Attached, Part II: The Fall of Summer Lights
And the Rise of Nashville's Neoliberal experiment.
Preface
In my previous post about the early history of Metro Arts and its relationship to the Nashville Symphony, I explored how this strange funding pool for the arts in Nashville came into being.
Rather than being a thoughtfully designed grant program with clear guidance and oversight on its allocations, the first round of funding was a handshake deal, designed to bail out the Symphony with $250,000 after poor financial planning drove it into bankruptcy court.
In that first year, 1988, an additional $250,000 was allocated by Mayor Bill Boner to arts organizations that could apply for funding through Metro Arts — but this slapdash method of grantmaking caused problems almost instantly.
In this post, I’ll talk about what happened in the first few years of the Metro Arts funding, and how the deal to privatize arts funding with the Symphony and other arts institutions derailed Metro Arts’ actually profitable contribution to the arts community, The Summer Lights Festival.
[In 1988] The task force “determined that the private sector had gone as far as it could in supporting local cultural institutions so they petitioned the city to begin investing.”
-Metro Arts internal document, 2018
The last-minute bailout of The Symphony in 1988 led Metro Arts to deprioritize its previously revenue-generating festival, causing a $200,000 deficit for the department. The chaos led to a delay in grant disbursements and frustration in the broader arts community.
This $200,000 deficit did not lead to the freezing of Metro Arts funding, nor the firing of its Executive Director, but it did lead to the end of Metro’s efforts to fund the arts in a sustainable way.
This profitable festival was gutted and replaced by a grant model that put public money into private institutions with little oversight and a murky return on investment.
Lest we see this story as just the collateral consequences of a shady deal undertaken by a Nashville Mayor whose greatest claim to fame was how long he could have sex, it's a microcosm of a much larger, global story.
To truly understand what's happened with Metro Arts we need a bit of a political philosophy lesson. Quite boring, I know! Most people in politics and places of power have no time for it.
But try to stick with me for a bit. I think the political philosophy talk will help you understand Metro Arts. And in turn, deeply understanding the ordeal with Metro Arts will help you understand political power better than those who currently have it the most.
And if you stick around until the end, I'll even tell you about the time Nashville lost $200,000 by hiring a literal circus clown to organize an arts festival.
Metro Arts: Nashville’s Neoliberal Experiment
There’s a term for what happened. Ceasing to support a successful, government-run activity like the Summer Lights Festival, and instead providing dedicated monies for a few set “art institutions” is called “privatization.”
Privatization is the transference of publicly provided services to private organizations. It didn’t used to be so common.
Where once The Summer Lights Festival provided an artistic outlet for performers and an attraction for residents, starting in 1988, Nashville moved that funding into private institutions like the Nashville Symphony. This wasn’t an isolated incident in Music City, it followed global trends.
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The 1980s saw the rise of a political and economic philosophy called “Neoliberalism” across the Western world. This approach to government and society merged the conservative push for small government with the patronizing liberal mentality of “we know what’s best.”
The “liberal” in Neoliberalism isn't really about being socially liberal, it's not connected to how we view cultural issues like gender or race. The “liberalism” is meant to be about “liberating” the freemarket from oversight of the government.
“The government is always inefficient and worse” the Neoliberal ideology goes, a self-fulfilling prophecy when it works relentlessly to undermine the government’s attempts to do things well — like it did with Metro Art’s Summer Lights Festival.
Neoliberalism’s primary way of showing up in the world is arguing that in virtually every circumstance, the private, unregulated world of corporations and nonprofits could “do it better” than the government.
Anyone whose read this Substack or spoken to me for a minute will know I'm no big defender of the government “doing things well”.
But an important reason why the government, Metro Nashville included, is so bad at things, is the four decades of intentional work that's been done to make Federal, State and Local government worse at what they do — and more reliant on outside groups to take our money to do basic things.
Neoliberalism and privatization first took off under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. The trend grew under Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. It only continues to expand, with consulting firms like McKinsey offering their services to businesses to help snatch funds out of taxpayer hands the world over.
Chiara Cordelli in The Boston Review writes: “If the twentieth century was the age of the bureaucratization of the modern state… the twenty-first century has been the age of its privatization.”
The impact of Neoliberalism and the privatization of global governments is stark, Cordelli writes, bringing:
a renewed feudal order within which political power is increasingly exercised on the basis of privately negotiated obligations, nonpublic purposes, and, ultimately, unilateral determinations.
Cordelli is saying that without the public’s real awareness or consent, the power structure we live under has been fundamentally changed since the 1980s.
Even when we think we have some control in how we spend our taxpayer money, there are private deals and unaccountable decision makers enmeshed throughout our institutions that increasingly control how the government works.
The results of this mass privatization of world’s governments contributes to the many economic and social meta-crises we face today:
The greatest wealth disparity in human history;
exponentially more unaffordable higher education, housing, education, and childcare;
the rise of the prison industrial complex;
a nightmarish healthcare landscape;
and unregulatable industries driving our planet toward the brink of ecological collapse.
But it's hard to tell a story about everything.
So let's keep telling the story about Metro Arts, a rich text that can unfold many of the meta-crises within which we are now trapped. And if we're patient, and remain open-minded, we might even learn how to get out of some of these traps.
When the Lights Went Down in Nashville
I didn’t really explain the origin of the Metro Nashville Arts Commission last time, I just said it was not originally designed to be a funding vehicle for arts organizations.
It started in 1978 under Mayor Richard Fulton when Metro Arts had a pretty bland objective to generally support the participation of the arts. No one would have expected it to cause so much spilled digital ink 46 years later.
One of the first major projects undertaken by the Commission was in 1981 when it co-sponsored an event called “The Summer Lights Festival.” The Nashville Scene described it in 1997 as “Nashville’s music festival, beer bash, high-brow arts concert, street-level dance-a-thon, face-painting fun-o-rama, and food fight.”
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The festival took several years to stabilize, but under Metro Arts Executive Director Anne Brown, it grew into a profitable, revenue-generating extension of the Metro Arts Commission. A Metro Arts’ internal timeline details:
Summer 1984
Summer Lights Foundation, later renamed the Greater Nashville Arts Foundation, was chartered as an income-producing adjunct to the Metro Arts Commission. The Foundation could sponsor Summer Lights and make money from it. That money could then be used to fund activities of the Arts Commission.
By 1987, the Festival was a tremendously successful event, with an attendance of the four-day event around 150,000 people.
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Not only was the 1987 installment a veritable “Good time had by all!” but the festival netted $100,000 that was available to be reinvested into the Nashville arts community. Here was intelligent government investing in the arts at its zenith in Nashville.
The Metro Arts Commission was not filling the coffers of private institutions to help them shore up lagging fundraising numbers. Rather, it was providing a public service, a festival, in such a way that a government has unique advantages over private event companies.
A city government has a tremendous number of built-in resources (e.g.: real estate, maintenance crews, security) that can be leveraged far more affordably than leasing these services or recreating them as an outside company.
This meant that the Summer Lights Festival, under the leadership of Metro Arts Executive Director Anne Brown, was able to kill a flock of birds with one stone — affordably provide employment and exposure to local artists, enrich the public, and make more money for the arts in the process.
The Mayor’s office had been facilitating this in “support in the form of subsidies”, according to the Metro Arts timeline.
All that came to a screeching halt in 1988.
The Symphony Comes Calling
From Winter of 1987 into Summer of ‘88, negotiations between the Nashville Symphony Board and Orchestra ran hot. At some point before July, an agreement was made between Symphony Board Chair Martha Ingram and Mayor Bill Boner to subsidize the Symphony to the tune of $250,000.
As we discussed in the last post, future Mayor and later Governor Phil Bredesen took this deal to the striking Orchestra, and it helped get them to agree to resume performing.
The $250,000 was to be administered through the Metro Arts Commission, the Department that within six years has turned a half-baked idea to do something with “music and food and things” into a revenue-generating tourist attraction with a virtuous cycle of funding flowing back into the arts.
Now, in the run-up to its 7th festival, at the behest of Mayor Bill Boner, Metro Arts would also be handling a grant to the Symphony, and an additional $250,000 to be distributed to unspecified “other” arts organizations who could apply alongside the Symphony’s earmarked money.
This may have come as a surprise to Arts Commission Executive Director Anne Brown who was not prepared for the drastic mission pivot of her department.
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Brown told the Tennessean in November 1988: “We are still dealing with a city that has never made arts funds available before… Basically, the Metro Arts Commission has very little money to operate. We have a staff of three with a budget from Metro of about $160,000,” and $50k of that budget was dedicated to the Summer Lights Festival.
The first year of Metro Arts funding was a shitshow, with headlines in 1988 being ripped from 2024.
Boner had put together a 32-person “cultural arts task force” (the least intimidating task force I’ve ever heard of) to figure out what to do with the remaining $250,000.
As Metro Arts’ timeline of events puts it, the task force “determined that the private sector had gone as far as it could in supporting local cultural institutions so they petitioned the city to begin investing.”
As we discussed last time, private sector donations were drying up after the Black Monday crash of 1987, but prior to this there had been immense corporate profits, but these did not turn into enriched endowments for institutions like the Symphony. Through poor fundraising, and donors less and less needing to avoid taxes by appearing interested in “the fine arts”, they hasn't stockpiled anything for hard times.
A month after making their determinations for who’d get funded, Metro Arts task force still didn’t know how to get those arts organizations their money.
It seems like this task force learned only after they’d promised artists their money that grant funding in Tennessee must go to a 501(c)(3), so they needed to find, after the fact, a grant administrator to give this money away. They set aside $25,000 for these services.
Consulting firms like McKinsey love to tell governments they can save money by privatizing their services (and to charge them money to tell them this). But the fact that it cost the city $25,000 in 1988 to give away $500,000 is revealing. Privatization is usually more expensive than just having the government do the work itself, and it’s taxpayers who pick up the tab.
The most immediate effect of this dramatic pivot of the Metro Arts organization in the summer of 1988 was on the Summer Lights Festival. Without subsidies from the Mayor’s Office this year, with funding and attention going towards privatizing arts funding, the Summer Lights Festival actually lost money in 1988. A lot of money.
In 1987 The Summer Lights Festival, put on by the Metro Arts Commission, generated $100,000 of revenue for the Nashville arts community.
In 1988, distracted and defunded by the reallocation of arts funding to The Symphony and other private institutions, the Summer Lights Festival lost the city $200,000.
It would never recover.
A Clown, a Mime, and Ronald Reagan Walk into a Honky Tonk
The Summer Lights Festival had an ignominious end, left to fend for itself without the support of the Mayor’s Office and the Metro Arts Funds dedicated to propping up large arts organizations.
The Festival, like so many government programs, was underfunded after two Reagan administrations worth of and tax cuts and slashes to federal arts funding, trends that continued under Clinton (even with our former senator as Vice President).
To right itself, the Festival turned to the philosophy of the day, and privatized its production of the Summer Lights Festival by hiring an outside production company. Surely the marketplace of event planners could do what underfunded and unsupported government employees couldn't.
In 1991 an outside firm was brought in to enhance the spectacle of the event and drive up ticket sales. The company was called “The Wonder Company” whose claim to fame was “producing the opening of the Donald J. Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City”.
The Wonder Company, I kid you not, was originally started as a promotional company for its founder’s mime and clown act that he put on with his wife. The Wonder Company’s impresario, Joe Jeff Goldblatt, was a clown/magician/author/motivational speaker who caught the affections of President Reagan.
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Though he had previously been escorted from the White House premises after declaring himself the “Official White House Clown” to pocket tourist money, Goldblatt finagled his way into the Oval Office by donating his company's services to the Reagan White House.
The Washington Post reported that he “wound up producing half a dozen events” for Reagan. They were raucous, bombastic events that felt more like professional wrestling shows than formal state ceremonies.
Joe Jeff was a hit with the gipper, so much so that he allegedly received a personal thank you call from Reagan just before he left office.
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Goldblatt’s personality seems to have been about 60% lightning in the bottle events organizer (who the Washington post debated whether or not he was aided by amphetamines), but a good chunk of the other 40% of him was a razzle-dazzle bullshit artist.
His employees said of him:
"Joe Jeff is really a master of image, a genius of facade…In a town like Washington, that's not a bad thing to be."
"He didn't get through to everybody, but some people were so absolutely mesmerized, it was like they were on some sort of drug."
Joe Jeff brought all the charm and sizzle he provided the Reagan administration and Donald Trump’s dooned casino launch. Some of his big gets for the 1991 festival was the Budweiser Clydesdales…
And sitting Mayor and all-around horndog, Bill Boner and his girlfriend Traci Peele.
The privatized flimflammery did not turn the Festival around. While The Summer Lights Festival never posted deficits the size of Trump’s $1B boondoggle in Atlantic City, it lost another $200,000 with the help of Wonder Company.
It certainly didn’t go as well as the first event he produced for Reagan.
That was a July 4th gala with a Music Man theme “featuring a Harold Hill look-alike conducting the Marine Corps Band.” The Music Man, of course, is about a conman who travels to a town that craves entertainment and he sells them a bill of goods. Planning to skip town before their instruments fail to arrive and pocket their money, he falls in love and decides to stay a while.
Joe Jeff came out ok. Despite running up a $200k deficit for Metro Arts, the Posts tells that he was able to sell “The Wonder Company” shortly thereafter to “Events Resources, a Nashville decorating firm, for an undisclosed sum” and he would live in Nashville for the next three years.
He told the post: "I had a dream of building a business, making it successful and selling it, and that's what I've done.”
Joe Jeff Goldblatt was able to live the American dream, building a company from the ground up, running it good enough to impress powerful men known specifically for their preference for style over substance, and then cash out before anyone could see that the emperor had no clothes.
He was able to do this largely because of the privatized funding his organization received from Metro Arts. And mysteriously, his status was only bolstered by his incompetence in serving the Nashville arts community.
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The Summer Lights Festival, a once profitable engine of artistic reinvestment, was decoupled from the Metro Arts Commission in 1992, and Anne Brown submitted her resignation as Executive Director of Metro Arts.
The Summer Lights Festival ended in a whimper. After being put up for adoption by the Metro Arts Commission, it bounced from producing partner to producing partner until it ended in 1997.
By that time the Scene was reporting:
Maybe some people really will feel a loss if Summer Lights goes away. If someone wants to adopt it, that’s fine. But the city shouldn’t spend any money on it at all. Nashville, frankly, is a lot bigger town now than Summer Lights can handle.
Perhaps The Summer Lights Festival would still be big enough for Nashville if its fuding hadn’t been privatized.