At Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen posts some recommendations on US federal government arts policy. He has written at length about this in his book Good and Plenty; here he gives some ideas for the new administration. The thing I always enjoy about Cowen – especially in his blog – is his ability to put fresh ideas out there as sparks for discussion; this is particularly important in arts policy, which is, especially in the US, conservative and hesitant about any departures from the status quo, save for appeals for more money. He limits himself thus:
I applied several standards to my recommendations. First, they must save the federal government money, to appeal to the Republican Congress. Second, they should stand a chance of appealing to Trump, given his stances on other issues. Third, they should offer a reasonable chance of improving the quality of the arts in the U.S., and fourth, the arts community should not hate every aspect of the changes.
He makes two recommendations, each involving a reallocation of spending:
- End the transfer of 40% of the NEA budget to state arts councils; and
- Restore NEA funding for individual artists.
The two recommendations are driven by a common goal: help fund more interesting, innovative art. Transfers to state arts councils don’t do much for that goal, since they are driven by local politics and the need to serve constituencies on building projects and established arts organizations. Even at the federal level, grants to composers and artists have a chance of doing more to generate interesting art than traditional grants to orchestras and museums.
So, what do we think about this? Whether you agree with his advice or not, he does raise an important issue: arts policy in the US at the federal and state level lack clear goals, and as such rigorous evaluation of the success, or failure, of their policies is near impossible. That in turn explains why the academic literature on arts policy in the US is so uncritical. What is there to criticize? What is the NEA, and in turn the state arts councils it helps to fund, trying to achieve? Without knowing that, it is not possible to evaluate whether transferring such a high percentage of federal arts funding to the states is actually a good use of funds. Nor is it possible to evaluate whether dropping funding for individual artists (except for writers) in the 1990s was a good or bad policy (yes, I know the politics behind it, but we can still ask about the long term effects of the change in terms of outcomes). Who knows?
We are so used to writing about the NEA in terms of politics, “culture wars” and all that, that we are bereft of analysis of arts policy as policy, compared to, for example, the mountains of empirical studies we can find evaluating federal policies in health insurance, education, public housing, or environmental management.
Of Cowen’s recommendations, I am solidly behind (2), on the fence on (1). But at least he is trying to suggest an end for arts policy, which in turn suggests ways of criticizing alternative means to those ends and suggesting better ones. More like this, please.
It should be understood that Cowan is a libertarian largely opposed to public arts funding. His thought is strongly filtered by a neoliberal ideological lens. Small government, privatize, let the market and private capital be the ultimate arbiter of all human endeavor, etc. His evaluations about Europe’s public funding system are thus at best questionable, and often simply misinformed. He cannot acknowledge the empirical evidence which shows that their cultural lives are richer.
He is also notable for his inconsistency. He praises private funding, for example, because it is decentralized, and yet says the NEA should cease to distribute money to the states.
And he blithely ignores important history. The centralization created by NEA’s direct grants to artists left the organization completely open to right wing attacks. Washington cannot meaningfully serve the local cultural lives of 320 million people in 50 states unless it distributes money to those states.
In many respects, his work is just more fanatic neoliberalism that lies at the heart not only of American exceptionalism, but also the Trump disaster. Her should be sent to Gary, Indiana for the next ten years and required to rebuild the city’s cultural life based on private donations. He would need the first 8 years to simply clear away the ruins…
I doubt the Trump administration cares at all about arts funding and I think Paul Ryan would cut it entirely, without a second thought. I’d love to see grants to individual artists restored, and that seems entirely unlikely, too. In my experience and research, state arts councils vary widely in their effectiveness, and few states make arts funding any kind of priority. The most productive NEA chair in the recent past inho was Dana Gioia, who had a broadly democratic vision (though he was reportedly a Republican of a moderate variety now rare in elected office at the federal level, and so far entirely absent from Trump’s appointees). He was evidently able to speak to Congress as well as American communities. If there were 50 such arts administrators, one for every state capitol, the NEA’s redistribution of funds might be effective at reaching for the presumed goals of stimulating artistic creativity and community engagement. But unless there is a strong (“autocratic”?) chair, the NEA seems destined to limp along, trying to stay under the radar, offending no one, doing little beyond contributing to the funding large, well-established non-profit arts centers. Taking the money and responsibility for it back from the states won’t solve much if the NEA remains scared of Congress and Presidential disapproval. Any artists or arts administrators called to the Tower to confer with the president-elect?
The combined arts funding provided by state governments is about 5 times more than the NEA’s budget.
The federal government, states, and localities appropriated a combined $1.14 billion to the arts in FY2013, for a total per capita investment of $3.60. See:
http://www.giarts.org/article/public-funding-arts-2013-update
About 60 cents comes from the Federal government and about $3.00 from states and local governments.
Combined with private donations, the US arts funding comes to about $23 per capita.
The average for Western European public spending on the arts is around $180 per capita per year – or about 8 times higher than both private and public funding in the USA combined. Some European countries spend over $400 per capitia. See:
http://www.culturalpolicies.net/web/statistics-funding.php?aid=118&cid=80&lid=en
One need only look at our cities like Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, East St. Louis, Watts, North Philadelphia, the South Bronx, and on and on to see what American political philosophies create. The attitude toward public arts funding is part of this destructive mindset.
Great post! This one gave me a lot of food for thought.
At first glance, Cowen’s policy seems to accomplish the four criteria he outlined above. I suppose that in that respect, these are good policies, however, something that is not addressed in those criteria is ACCESS to the arts, which concerns me greatly. I haven’t read the book, so someone please correct me if he has addressed this issue.
This policy worries me because it seems like it would quickly drain artistic talent and output away from the US interior to the coasts, exacerbating the (real or presumed) plight of the Midwest and Mountain regions as “cultural wastelands”. The most common narrative is that creatives tend to cluster in NY, LA, and other cosmopolitan cities on the coasts because conditions for them are far more favorable there. They benefit from networking with other creatives and assimilating, they have a much better shot of getting noticed and “making it”, they are often attracted to a bohemian lifestyle, etc. etc. While I’m not certain HOW much more concentrated creatives are on the coasts than the interior, it seems to be more or less undisputed that these clusters exist.
If this is true, then it stands to reason that most of the public money newly available to individual artists will wind up in cosmopolitan locales as well, creating one more incentive for them to flock to New York, LA, etc. I think that one could make a strong case for why this is good for the arts citing positive network effects that fuel competition and innovation. Maybe the end result would be more and better art, but would it not just wind up highly concentrated in our biggest, most culturally attuned cities? Maybe there is some benefit to art for art’s sake, but what about access to publically-funded art by the public themselves?
On a side note, I don’t believe non-coastal regions are truly cultural wastelands. I grew up in the Midwest and I’ve lived here all my life, along the way having witnessed many thriving arts scenes personally. However, the (earned or unearned) philistine reputation of “flyover country” can, at times, be palpable and impossible to ignore. The benefit of having significant parts of our arts funding controlled by state arts councils, it seems to me, is that it ensures that people like me in Michigan, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, etc. will have SOME arts, too.
Recent political events have demonstrated (to me, at least) that the US already has a cultural divide between the coasts and the interior that is deeper than almost anyone imagined, seemingly to the point of creating two separate Americas. I recognize that arts and culture may not be the at the top of many peoples’ lists of hot-button issues, but wouldn’t Cowan’s proposed changes drive yet one more wedge between the two factions of a country that already finds itself highly polarized?