The Pros and Cons of Federal Funding for the Arts

The Heritage Foundation and bourgeois groups similar it accept been trying to impale the National Endowment for the Arts for decades.

Final calendar month, the Trump administration, for the fourth twelvemonth in a row, released a budget blueprint that proposed zeroing out and winding down the NEA and other government fine art support. Heritage basically staffed the current Trump administration , so it'south not a coincidence that his budget priorities are substantially those of the anti-authorities call back tank, which is most as passionate about ending the NEA as it is about undermining the science on climatic change.

Perhaps with everything going on correct now, and with the NEA having squeaked by before, the sense of urgency effectually the upshot has tuckered. You can't just go on writing passionate defenses of it twelvemonth after year. Then too, today'southward NEA itself, as fifty-fifty its critics acknowledge, is not exactly a behemoth of radical interventionist government to get inspired past.Nevertheless, it is worth defending.

The Heritage Foundation is still promoting its 1997 report authored by "distinguished beau" Laurence Jarvik, titled "10 Proficient Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts," as the definitive source on " why there is no need for the federal government to be spending your money on these programs." I t remains a go-to reference in debates today, and its linguistic communication has sunk into the ground water of conservative argument about the NEA—which is, later all, the task of a conservative think tank.

And actually, equally a distillation of anti-NEA talking points, I discover it useful. I think it's important for NEA advocates to really understand the spectrum of arguments ranged against them, and not rely on dated or off-target counter-arguments. And then I thought I would put down, here, replies to each of Heritage'south "Ten Reasons."

Anti-NEA Talking Signal #ane: The Arts Will Have More than Than Enough Support Without the NEA

Answer: Defenders of the NEA often apply the talking signal that its funding accounts for a very, very small amount of the upkeep: something like 0.0004 per centum. Merely foes tin turn this effectually: What is paltry is easy to cutting. Trump's 2021 upkeep proposal says explicitly that the NEA and NEH "brand upward simply a small fraction of the billions spent each year by arts and humanities nonprofit organizations."

But the NEA was never designed to replace private back up. The very second item of National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 states this clearly: "The encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts, while primarily a thing for private and local initiative, are likewise appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government."

After signing a neb renaming the proposed National Cultural Centre the John F. Kennedy Heart for the Performing Arts here at the White House today, president Johnson easily i of the pens he used to senator Edward G. Kennedy. Photograph courtesy Getty Images.

Instead the NEA was designed to help correct for the biases of private support. It was hatched in 1964, the same twelvemonth Dylan pennedThe Times They Are a Changin', and information technology was very much of a piece with the spirit of Johnson's Great Club. That is, the idea was that authorities activity could be used to correct some of the problems that, left to itself, the US's flush club—then in the middle of a historic boom, but simmering with unrest—permit fester.

The emphasis, as y'all can read in its start report of 1964-65, was that the arts ought to exist recognized "as a vital part of our national life, and non a luxury." The initial commission that studied it had come up to the determination that the relentless focus on practical subjects in education had led to widespread discontent with the materialism of U.s.a. society. It thus focused on expanding admission to the arts and funding ideas and artworks accounted vital but not necessarily profitable.

Let's not be naïve most it: much like the Johnson Administration'south eventual support of the Ceremonious Rights Act, the passage of the NEA was too meant every bit a chess move in the Common cold War. Capitalist America was in ideological competition with the Soviet Wedlock for global hegemony, and trying to cut confronting the image of the US on the world stage as a bigoted, rapaciously materialist society served an objective. The act itself made its propaganda value clear: "The world leadership which has come to the United states cannot rest solely upon superior ability, wealth, and technology, but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation's high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit."

Flashing forward, that groundwork impetus for regime art funding helps explain why it was afterward the Common cold War ended in the tardily '80s that the NEA came under withering assail, as The states politicians no longer felt the same ideological need to soften the prototype of commercialism to the world; capitalism had go the only game in town. Since then, conservatives have either demonized or allow the NEA go to seed. In 1990, the NEA's budget was $171 1000000, which after inflation adds up to something like $338 million; for 2020, information technology'south $162 one thousand thousand.

Only the issues that information technology was set up to accost—the construal of fine art as a "luxury" when left just to private patronage, and major gaps in access to creative resources in a wealthy merely very diff lodge—definitely remain. And through its modest grant-giving today, the NEA all the same does what it was designed to practise: attempt to foster access to the arts for people of many different kinds, mainly through supporting non-profit institutions that tin can utilize the lift.

Anti-NEA Talking Point #2: The NEA Is Welfare for Cultural Elitists

Reply: The NEA was founded in the '60s with a rhetoric of promoting "progressive" and "experimental" art, and took oestrus afterwards for discriminating against realists. In the late '80s, it became a flashpoint of public controversy, with "artists" proving easy to demonize as godless deviants.

Merely honestly, all this is a very dated idea of what the NEA does. The NEA is quite self-consciously populist in focus these days. It boasts of promoting such initiatives equally the Artistic Forces program, a partnership with the U.S. Section of Defense and Veterans Affairs that, as its website states, "increases access to community arts activities to promote health, wellness, and quality of life for armed services service members, veterans, and their families and caregivers."

Colonel Michael Southward. Heimall, director of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center; Rusty Noesner, Retired United states of america Navy SEAL; Jane Chu, Chairman of the NEA; Captain Walt Greenhalgh, director of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE); and commander Wendy Pettit, Chief of Clinical Operations, National Intrepid Centre of Excellence (NICoE) hold up masks made by service men and women in the Creative Forces program. Image courtesy National Endowment for the Arts.

Concluding September, the Jacksonville Daily News reported on an Open Studio exhibition for Creative Forces, which gives a sense of the hoity-toity audience it serves. "Information technology's like a rubber space for me; a place I can go and express myself," Ground forces vet Robert "Shrek" Harrell, an artist in the testify, said of the Creative Forces program. "Information technology gives me time to be with myself in my heed, and gives me some peace and a manner to heal."

The NEA also supports Challenge America, a programme specifically designed to give a helping manus to communities that might otherwise non accept access to fine art programming—i.e., it is specifically targeted at non-aristocracy communities.

But as an example, we are talking near a grant for Northward Carolina's Tsali Intendance Middle to support artists from the Eastern Ring of Cherokee Indians to offer art classes to the nursing home's residents (who are also generally tribal members). Or a grant to support an art exhibition and other programming for a Dia de Los Muertos festival in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Or a grant for the Georgia Mountain Storytelling Festival in Blairsville, Georgia, which showcases "traditional and contemporary Appalachian stories."

All of these seem extremely worthy, and difficult to frame every bit welfare for elitists.

I actually don't honey making such arguments, because I remember that at that place ought to be room to fund art that isn't direct justified as community service.

But what I recall is very important to stress is that the NEA is modestly redistributive. Private philanthropy is notoriously unequal, flowing to flashy showpiece institutions and pooling in localities where rich people are concentrated. The fine art market is even more than a direct reflection of the concentration of wealth, and wealth has never been more than concentrated.

"Depression-dollar and mid-level donors have declined past about two percent each twelvemonth for more than fifteen years," 1 report on trends in philanthropy institute recently. The result was "an increased bias toward funding heavily major-donor-directed boutique organizations and projects." And and then you get the mega-projection of the Shed in New York's luxury shopping playground Hudson Yards, with its flashy "Bloomberg Edifice," at the very moment that the comparatively ultra-small-scale but beloved Bushwick nonprofit NURTUREart has to shut downward due to a "confluence of resource challenges and a shifting environment for non-profits."

On this level, the statement for a National Endowment for the Arts is clearer now then it has e'er been. Compared to when the NEA was founded, the United states of america has grown drastically more than spatially diff, with certain large cities and regions sucking up investment and cultural civilities. Even experts who argue that the NEA should be fifty-fifty more narrowly focused on small, non-elite institutions—I'm thinking of Diane Ragsdale—stress that NEA funding tends to be more equally distributed, since that'due south part of its mandate, and also see information technology as a potential musical instrument for correcting for otherwise dire trends in individual giving.

But don't take my word for it. Trump's NEA secretarial assistant, Mary Anne Carter, fabricated the case well last year:

For every county in America that has a high school, National Endowment for the Arts is there, either through our Poetry Out Loud contest or our Musical Theater Songwriting Challenge. The same cannot exist said for private foundations. A review of the art giving of the elevation 1000, aye, grand private foundations shows that those private dollars don't reach 65% of American counties. In contrast, the National Endowment for the Arts is in 779 more counties than private foundations.

779 counties, 25% of America where the National Endowment for the Arts provides funding where the top thou private foundations do not.

A few examples: in Kentucky in that location are 59 counties that receive funding from united states of america that have no private dollars out of 120 counties. In Alabama twoscore, in Due south Carolina x, Alaska eight, and in my habitation state of Tennessee 21 counties with our funding merely no funding from the top thousand private foundations.

Admission to arts funding should not depend on one's proximity to private philanthropy. This is what makes support of the National Endowment for the Arts indispensable.

Anti-NEA Talking Indicate #3: The NEA Discourages Charitable Gifts to the Arts

Reply: This is a bit of a wonky fence, but argument rages over whether government funding of the arts "crowds out" or "crowds in" individual funding. Supporters like to say that the NEA serves every bit a "Adept Housekeeping" seal, encouraging donations from private foundations, corporations, and individuals, an effect that certainly feels true to a lot of modest organizations who use an NEA grant to attract the attention of other potential backers.

When the new endeavour at termination was appear concluding month, an NEA spokesperson told my colleague Eileen Kinsella that its grants "are leveraged past other public and private contributions up to 9:1, significantly increasing the impact of the federal investment." (Indeed, its grants mostly require securing matching funds.)

Opponents such as the Heritage Foundation like to say that regime support merely "crowds out" private funders, who will take their coin somewhere where they think it is more than needed if the government is present. And any "Good Housekeeping" effect, they say, simply shifts patronage that would go to ane organization to another organisation, rather than encouraging additional giving.

I actually find it baffling to attempt to boil this down to a universal constabulary. For instance: private giving went up in the '90s after the cuts to the NEA acquired by the Culture Wars. Does that therefore bear witness, as some economists accept argued, that government arts funding had previously been "crowding out" individual patronage?

I don't recall so, because a) the increment in private funding happened during a huge economical smash that lasted the entire decade, and b) the spectacular public character of the Culture Wars debates that led to the NEA cut framed information technology in the public mind every bit a needy cause worthy of supporting, with copious PR points and good vibes going to the private philanthropists who stepped in as Congress cutting funding. (The way the researchers put this, in their charmingly inscrutable way, is that "publicity" has a "not-linear affect" on the public-private funding calculation.)

When an economic crisis hit in the early 2000s and progressive business organization recentered around the Iraq War, the conversation moved on: "Data from the Conference Board for 2000 to 2010 suggest that corporate funding for the arts dropped past one-half subsequently aggrandizement over this period." And that'south not really considering George W. Bush's NEA stepped back in to crowd it out. The NEA was still downwardly by a third from its heights subsequently inflation at decade'due south end.

A final note: Even if in that location is a fixed pie of private arts funding, and the "signal" of an NEA grant simply shifts those donations around, it does not follow that this cannot exist a useful functioning. Larger, well-endowed institutions are easier able to court donors and to frame themselves as winners. The "Seal of Approval" from the NEA most benefits small institutions who don't otherwise accept major marketing budgets or pre-existing networks of big donors to tap into, providing a style to signal, "Hey, this system is doing good work—might you consider shifting some money from that wealthy, well-established arrangement to a smaller but critically acclaimed i?"

Anti-NEA Talking Point #four: The NEA Lowers the Quality of American Art

Reply: Heritage quotes a management professor on the evils of state arts funding: "It was the unsubsidized writers, painters, and musicians—imprisoned in their homes if they were lucky, in asylums or in gulags if they weren't—who created lasting civilisation."

Aside from being comically over the meridian ("giving $ten,000 grants to small nonprofits is the purple route to totalitarianism!"), this announcement is on-its-face wrong, unless you lot don't count Velázquez or Bernini as "lasting culture." Most of the things you see in museums were subsidized by royal courts or papal authorities in one way or another.

But I value the modern "artist as dissident" effigy too. Does authorities fine art funding necessarily turn artists into mediocre propagandists?

The "New Bargain produced no true masterpieces," Heritage reports, using the WPA arts projects as an obvious instance of bad arts policy. Only "producing masterpieces" isn't the all-time measure for an arts policy designed as unemployment relief in the first place, and arts policy in general doesn't simply support individual artworks but helps artists sustain a career, go training, and experiment. Well-nigh serious scholars today argue that the New Deal arts program laid the basis for a national arts scene in the Us that did not previously exist, producing a new sense of professional identity and purpose for American art that paid dividends afterwards.

Jackson Pollock, Alice Neel, and Charles White all cut their teeth as WPA artists, and went on to great renown in diverse ways. You lot tin can't crush that tape.

A mag embrace, prison cell phone case, and postcard with versions of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother photograph are displayed during a media preview of the exhibition "Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing" at the Oakland Museum of California on Th, May 11, 2017. Photo past MediaNews Grouping/Bay Area News via Getty Images.

As for "masterpieces," I don't know what else to call a work that has entered as deeply into the symbolic vocabulary as Dorothea Lange'sMigrant Female parent, which was created for the Subcontract Services Assistants'due south photography section.

The NEA, back when it even so had individual artist grants (these were a casualty of the Culture Wars fight in the '90s), did a pretty good job supporting artists who were in demand at stages in their career when information technology mattered, and who went on to make important art. Michael Brenson looked at artists who won MacArthur "Genius" Grants only after receiving NEA grants start—which was virtuallyall of them given during the relevant time flow where the two programs overlapped: Ida Applebroog, Vija Celmins, Ann Hamilton, David Hammons, Gary Hill, Robert Irwin, Alfredo Jaar, Kerry James Marshall, Pepon Osorio, Martin Puryear, Cindy Sherman, James Turrell, Pecker Viola, and Fred Wilson.

In many cases, Brenson points out, they received the NEA grant over a decade earlier they officially became historic as "Geniuses," and the boost helped them stick it out on what was and is a tough path. The fact that Kerry James Marshall, probably the well-nigh acclaimed and important living painter today, was allowed to pursue his art full time because of his 1991 NEA grant is part of his official biography.

Then you can manipulate with the "government funding leads only to mediocrity" line.

On the flip side, nevertheless, it may be worth adding that I notice no evidence that the alternatives to government funding don't produce their own biases, particularly in the face of full-bodied wealth, the collapse of the eye of the art marketplace, and an increasingly inescapable corporate pop culture. The results of those pressures include the "Zombie Ceremonial" painting boom of a few years ago—where galleries were swamped with blandly gimmicky abstruse paintings, courting herd gustation in collectors—or every museum badly trying to get a agree of a Yayoi Kusama mirror room to bring in the crowds.

The individual marketplace produces its own pressures: towards flattering rich people and safe corporate ideas of what's going to court mass-appeal profitability. The indicate of arts funding, over again, is to provide a small counterweight against theseother pressures towards conformity.

Anti-NEA Talking Betoken #5: The NEA Will Continue to Fund Pornography

Answer: This i dates the Heritage commodity. The year after information technology was published, in '98, the Supreme Court upheld an advisory "decency standard" for NEA grants. In 2010, looking back two decades on from that decision, the National Coalition Against Censorship wrote:

[I]t appears the decency amendment—coupled with the removal of private artists grants—did not and then much go a reason to censor specific work as accept a spooky effect on programming at recipient institutions. Information technology as well seems that the amendment shifted the NEA's emphasis from supporting innovative original work to supporting fine art and fine art education that would not likely disturb mainstream standards and values.

I'one thousand not aware of anything since that changes the calculation. And nevertheless, the Civilisation Wars permanently fixed in the public listen the association of the NEA with Andres Serrano'due south Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe's BDSM photos. It's part of why information technology is then easy notwithstanding to score points bashing the bureau on Fox News.

It's easy to point out that the Heritage study was more concerned with cherrypicking private instances of controversial fine art to whip up outrage confronting government subsidy overall than with accurately assessing what whatsoever of the art in question meant. Among the items that Heritage wants to offering—even today, evidently—as irredeemably offensive is the NEA'south support of the arrangement Women Make Movies. The scandal was that WMM helped distribute films that had lesbian themes.

Similarly, the report cheerfullyclassed the fact that the NEA'south literature program helped fund "The Gay 100," a historical digest of famous gays and lesbians, as "pornographic."The libertarian flacks at Heritage were happy to court homophobia to button their anti-regime calendar. That probably seemed a good bet in the late '90s. It looks plainly like nasty opportunism now.

Reviewing today the report's appendix purporting to prove the "regular pattern of support for indecency, repeated year later yr," a lot of information technology fudges the nature of the NEA's back up, and a lot more burlesques the works in question very uncharitably, takes hostile reviews as proof positive of worthlessness, and shows ignorance of the field information technology claims to authoritatively opine on. It refers to William Pope L. as "William Fifty. Pope." It includes as authorities-funded "pornography" the scandal of MoMA showing Bruce Nauman neons that say "Shit and Die" and "Fuck and Die," considering MoMA showed them and received some NEA funding. The horror.

Visitors line up for the Bruce Nauman works during the 53rd International Art Exhibition on June 5, 2009 in Venice, Italy. Photograph by Massimo Di Nonno/Getty Images.

In the end, though, getting sucked into defending individual works is a waste matter. Not everyone is going to exist convinced to like Bruce Nauman. I mean, he did actually represent the U.s.a. of America at the Venice Biennale, where his acerbic, hard work won the Golden King of beasts for Best National Pavilion in 2009—something like winning a gold medal in the Olympics of Art—but it is challenging for many viewers.

Debating the claim and demerits of individual works of fine art, and even whether they wereindividually worth funding? That'southward a chore for criticism.

Outside of that, what you have to defend is the principle of the thing.

In 1989, the year of the NEA supernova of controversy, panelists gave out thousands of grants (298 in the soon-to-be-terminated artist-grants category lonely!). These included funding such decidedly non-pornographic fare as a documentary virtually banjo legend Morgan Sexton and a "radio series about women in old-time music" in Kentucky.

"Shady Grove" by Morgan Sexton, a 1991 NEA National Heritage Swain.

The NEA could boast, that year, of having funded the initial workshops that became the playDriving Miss Daisy, nominated in picture form for All-time Movie in 1990. It gave early support to A Prairie Home Companion in the '70s. In the 2010s, Lin-Manuel Miranda workshopped his beginning musical at the O'Neill Musical Theatre Center, partly funded past the NEA.

Taking a few examples of things that the NEA directly or, more than often, indirectly funded that offended conservative sensibilities, and caricaturing authorities art fundingas a whole as being a scheme to corrupt the youth? That'south textbook demagoguery.

Anti-NEA Talking Signal #vi: The NEA Promotes Politically Correct Art

Reply: In that location are interesting debates on this score. Governmental arts-funding systems are inherently subject to political pressures. That does tend to put pressure on artists to make work that avoids controversy. This is, bluntly, a complaint that some artists have almost more than social autonomous arts-funding systems—though they usually wouldn't give them upwardly, either. The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies has some very idea-provoking discussion nearly what mix of "arm's length" policies best guarantee security and liberty for the arts.

As we have seen, a lot of the NEA'southward intensified focus on "community-focused" arts came in the wake of the Civilisation Wars. So if what yous mean past "politically right" is safety, carefully workshopped, offends-no-one expression, you might exist able to make a case that the agency does somewhat tend towards this kind of piece of work. But it is precisely the right's relentless efforts to demonize the NEA that have led to such "political correctness."

But that is not what Heritage meant by "politically correct" art. It meant that the "radical virus of multiculturalism" has "permanently infected the agency, causing creative efforts to exist evaluated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation instead of artistic merit."

Nonetheless the i big piece of evidence Heritage mustered was an commodity by 1-fourth dimensionLos Angeles Times theater critic Jan Breslauer in the Washington Post decrying how "race-based politics" had entered arts funding. It's worth, so, reading the volley of letters that the Post received rebutting Breslauer. Calling it "a crazy quilt of misinformation," Olive Mosier from the NEA wrote: "[Breslauer's] suggestion that artists of color accept been presented more for their race or ethnicity than for their artistic excellence is demeaning and untrue. The isolated examples of those who contort themselves to qualify for a grant are the exception, and certainly not part of any dominion here at the National Endowment for the Arts."

What is true is that, as already mentioned, arts funding has been a small-scale way to offer back up for underserved communities: poor communities, minority communities, rural communities, disabled communities, veteran communities. Guaranteeing admission to the arts for a wide spectrum of the denizens is part of what the NEA was designed to do: "The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States," is the first line of its founding act. Merely saying that it takes those factors into consideration is rather different than saying that it is placing "political correctness" over "artistic merit."

The idea that in that location is some hands accessed universal standard of "merit" to judge art by is false. Cultural background matters a lot in terms of what is considered skilful. The factors that brand a great fiddle histrion and a great violinist are a trivial dissimilar. The NEA funds both.

Hither is what Michael Kahn, the legendary artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater, wrote the Post in response to the Breslauer essay that Heritage touts:

Such policies practice not issue in 'pigeonholing artists and pressuring them to produce work that satisfies a politically correct calendar,' every bit Breslauer maintains. Rather, such policies provide in a modest measure out the ways through which these artists may flourish and grow. By encouraging this dialogue, the NEA has created artistic possibilities in an environment that had previously not been hospitable.

But then.

Anti-NEA Talking Bespeak #vii: The NEA Wastes Resource

Reply: Heritage writes that, "[fifty]ike any federal bureaucracy, the NEA wastes tax dollars on administrative overhead and bureaucracy." This is stated as a universal constabulary.

But in that location is no universal law that makes this "private = skillful, public = bad" calculation axiomatically true. In health care, for example, regime programs like Canada's spend far, far, far less on administration than we exercise in the Us, where our welter of private insurance companies compete to spend on advertizing, marketing, administration, executive salaries, and shareholder profits. Just 17 percent of Canada's health expenditures go to administration; 34 percent of Usa health expenditures get to such things.

When it comes to the arts—and arts advocates should know the following fact, then that they tin hash out it honestly—nosotros are e'er talking most a battle over how the government gives abroad money to support the arts, not whether it does.

Our regime gives abroad astronomically more money in tax breaks than it does in direct grants of money to the arts. The tax intermission for charitable giving is the single largest way that the U.s.a. government gives to the arts—orders of magnitude more than important than the NEA.

If your objection to arts funding is that it's wasteful to spend tax coin on arts, the NEA is only an incredibly small, random fight to pick, while the tax-break model means that, substantially, government is subsidizing the social calendar of the wealthy, who get to write off their gala tickets and charity-sale purchases.

This model, of course, seems like a adept deal from some angles: It incentivizes rich people to requite to causes by allowing them to get the social and PR boost for doing so, while at the same fourth dimension making certain the government isn't on the hook for the whole neb, since donors can merely write off office of their contribution. (Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Deed tipped the benefits of charitable giving even more towards the top.)

In an historic period when, for decades all over the world, the residue of power has shifted abroad from the state and towards the wealthy and corporations, this has appeared to be a good deal. We may admire governments like Federal republic of germany for their strong public arts support, but Europeans have been talking of the demand to move towards "US-style" arts funding for some time.

There is, however, a night side to this system. Or multiple dark sides.

For one, it skews the priorities of institutions towards short-term thinking. It has led The states arts institutions to overbuild, for example, equally it is very hard to become private patrons to fund boring things like operations and maintenance, because what donors want are flashy new buildings and other highly visible initiatives to put their name on, which atomic number 82 to the most prestige. Just to keep up in the race to court donors, an arts system and then heavily dependent on private giving is stuck in permanent expansion mode.

For two, cultivating patronage is not without its ain wasteful administration costs. Rich people don't just requite—they demand to be romanced. In the '90s, for every new dollar of private giving raised, institutions incurred 25 cents more of fundraising costs.

Grant writing, of course, has its costs too: an often-cited figure puts information technology at about xx cents for every dollar raised. The preferred special event/benefit model, on the other hand, is thoroughly the most wasteful way to raise money for nonprofits, with an boilerplate of 50 cents spent for every dollar raised (and plenty of events that yield very picayune after the lavish civilities to lure the patron course are paid for, while sucking up vast amounts of staff resources.)

The most cost-constructive mode to get money is "major gifts"—but, to repeat something that has been a theme here—it is the glamorous, established, most-connected major institutions that are best positioned to attract major gifts. Government arts funding is certainly not "wasteful" if it is viewed as helping to correct for this imbalance.

Protestors at the Guggenheim Museum stage a "die-in" to protestation Sackler funding. Photo: Caroline Goldstein.

Finally, it's worth noting that an arts system that tips things and then far towards private tax breaks has made United states institutions e'er more dependent on currying favor with the rich—which has now left them in a terrible demark, and the target of agitation, as exposure of corporate misdoings throws a harsher and harsher light upon the patron class. But as dependence on government makes institutions vulnerable to anti-government movements, dependence on the mega-rich makes institutions vulnerable to popular protest—and our country has grown then skewed by its extreme levels of inequality that it is cracking apart.

Anti-NEA Talking Betoken #8: The NEA Is Beyond Reform

Reply: The only reason to believe this is if you dogmatically believe that, by its nature, the NEA is bad.

It has reinvented itself over the years in many ways, partnered with new organizations, and created new categories of funding. In the recent by, these have included its Our Town grants (established 2010) for "creative placemaking," which is essentially arts funding targeted at local economic development, and the Blue Stars Museums program (also established 2010), which makes museums gratuitous to active duty military and their families.

Outside a pop-upwards gallery in Mount Ranier, Maryland, an effect in the Art Lives Here series, a recipient of an NEA Our Town grant. Photo courtesy of Art Lives Here.

In that location are debates about what the all-time forms government arts funding might have, definitely. You can fence over how it divides up its funds between larger and smaller institutions. Yous tin can complaining the loss of the private artist grants. Yous tin can suspect that the "creative placemaking" doctrine amounts to substituting a weak arts policy for a potent regional economical development policy.

But, to me, the fact that foes of the NEA tend to be more than interested in debatingwhether it should exist rather than debatingwhat it should do seems to suggest that opposition to it is really about something else entirely… I wonder what that could be?

Anti-NEA Talking Point #9: Abolishing the NEA Will Evidence to the American Public That Congress Is Willing to Eliminate Wasteful Spending

Reply: This is that "something else."

The volition to cut the NEA has very little to practice with the tiny NEA itself. It is symbolic. It has everything to practise with regime arts funding as a symbol of the regime doing things—something opposed ideologically by Heritage, not because what the NEA does itself actually is provably bad or especially unpopular, but because conservative retrieve tanks simply define regime spending as wasteful, a priori, and art funding seems an easy symbol of this waste.

Anti-NEA Talking Indicate #10: Funding the NEA Disturbs the U.S. Tradition of Express Regime

Reply: Here'due south the last matter I volition say: The NEA is not even my preferred arts policy.

My preferred "arts policy" really looks merely like good social policy. Information technology looks similar robustly funding public education, including arts programs for all students—subjects that accept been cutting in general, even as flush parents keep them for their ain kids. This kind of public funding cultivates a futurity audience for arts, proves the social do good of the arts, and, of course, provides jobs for artists that employ their talents.

It would look like a housing program and an terminate to turning cities into luxury playgrounds for concentrated wealth. Having a cheap place to work and an affordable identify to live are what make art scenes thrive.

It would look like a robust social safety cyberspace, to provide the kinds of defenses against extreme precariousness that brand it easier to sustain a creative practice if yous don't happen to be built-in into a fortune.

In comparison to all these things, the NEA is an instance of express authorities intervention. But I'chiliad in favor of it, I'1000 in favor of expanding it, and I'm in favor of defending information technology every bit a symbol of a much broader principle: not giving in to the austerity-for-the-many, worship-of-unchecked-capitalism mindset that institutions similar Heritage continue to push, twelvemonth after year.

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