So it begins. A report in The Hill, then picked up in the Washington Post, says that the Trump administration intends to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and sell off PBS. It’s part of a plan to cut some $10.5 trillion over the next decade.
Zeroing out the culture budgets isn’t about money; together, the NEA, NEH and PBS account for barely 0.02 percent of the federal budget. Neither is it about art the Trumpsters think is offensive or artists they don’t like (the “over-rated” Meryl Streep notwithstanding).
The Hill points out that if Trump wants to cut a trillion dollars a year, as his plan says, pretty much all of the government’s discretionary spending needs to go. And that means cuts everywhere (except defense of course):
The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.
The Department of Energy, for example, would see the Office of Electricity axed, and Trump would “eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and scrap the Office of Fossil Energy, which focuses on technologies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.”
What, you ask, is the “Department of Electricity? The department’s job, according to its website, is to:
provide national leadership to ensure that the Nation’s energy delivery system is secure, resilient and reliable. OE works to develop new technologies to improve the infrastructure that brings electricity into our homes, offices, and factories, and the federal and state electricity policies and programs that shape electricity system planning and market operations. OE also works to bolster the resiliency of the electric grid and assists with restoration when major energy supply interruptions occur.
In other words, it’s the department that looks out for our electrical grid to make sure it is dependable and efficient. It was surreal this morning to see incoming Energy Secretary Rick Perry weakly arguing against the cuts at his Senate confirmation hearing. This from the guy who had advocated killing the entire department when he was running for president. Oops.
No, this isn’t about the arts. It’s bigger and more insidious. It’s a vision of a country that doesn’t believe in collective public greatness. It’s the commodification of American values reduced to the profit motive. Everything for sale. Everything having to pay for itself. Everything measured by its profitability, its ratings, its popularity. Everything is a deal, a hierarchy sorted into winners and losers.
Winners are rewarded with opportunity, access and tax cuts. Losers are marginalized, priced out of basic services and having to fend for themselves. This is how undeveloped unambitious oligarchies behave.
Make America Great Again? Of Course!
Countries aspiring to be great understand that collective investment leads to great accomplishment. We used to know that, confident enough to win world wars and go to the moon. But we seem to have forgotten how. In pursuit of privileging individual profit over collective accomplishment, we’ve let investment in our infrastructure crumble, allowed our students to struggle with crushing debt, and priced out the middle class from being the middle class.
The arts are a microcosm of this. We’ve commodified the arts in attempting to convince the powers that be that the arts have value. So art has to be not just art but a cure for whatever social or economic problems need addressing. What is great art anyway? In the commodified America we’re suspicious of any claim to greatness if it isn’t vouched for at the box office or can check off a list of social goods.
We miss the point if we think this is about arts funding. It really is about a vision of greatness. No country has ever staked a claim to being great because it balanced its budgets or glorified a culture of winners and losers. That’s just bookkeeping. Sad.
You can’t be great unless you invest in being great. The challenge for the arts now is to remind us all of that.
Fine article, thanks Doug. Questions remain: Will the destruction being rained from this administration destroy what we’ve built of a public sphere over the past century, or only damage it so a subsequent administration can restore? What can we who remain committed to the American values you mention – a large constituency, after all – do to protect and promulgate those values?
Perhaps we overestimated what we thought we had built in the public sphere if it was this easy to tear down… And perhaps it takes an existential threat to focus on things that matter. Trump didn’t even really have to articulate a vision of greatness, merely that he was going to make it so and it would be “tremendous”. Reagan proclaimed morning in America and Trump says he’ll make America great again. These messages resonate because many seem to find them to be messages of empowerment and optimism. They’re simple goals with the details to be filled in later.
But details are messy, and jobs and healthcare for all are the consequence of greatness, not the way you become great. Balancing budgets and reducing taxes are a consequence of being great, not the goal that makes greatness so. In fact, if being a good bookkeeper is your version of greatness, it’s a puny unambitious version of it. Surely we can articulate something more compelling than that. The fact that we haven’t been able to is our failure and we need to do better. In the meantime, this is a helluva wakeup call.
Gee, I have to copyedit my posts better. “committed” is what I meant for “committee”, and though “rained” works I probably meant “reigned.”
Let me clarify, I don’t believe the direction of American culture can be destroyed by one administration quickly — but I do wonder if the NEA and NEH can be ended, and what it would take to rebuild them. I’ve had direct experience with NPR, and it’s not much projection to suspect the very notion of privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting could have on-air consequences (possible reflecting new coverage starting immediately about the incoming government). As you say, these very small and (as I’d say) not 100-percent effectual offices would be collateral damage in the sweep of the cuts reportedly being planned. Nonetheless the NEA, NEH, CPB (and latest FCC position on net neutrality have provided symbols of and some sort of framework for official investment in what I take are admirable ideals: respectful, unimpeded support of creativity, scholarship, individuals and communities alike participating in free and honest expression in avenues available to everyone, and so on. America IS great, regardless of someone saying they can restore it somehow by force of personality. And ’cause someone says it’s not great just means they’ve got blinkers on, or are blinded by their own light.
Thanks for inspiring my rant.
I feel like those ideals are articulated in all the best artistry I encounter, whatever the media.
Howard,
First – I’ll say that I’m not a Trumpster. I’m most definitely not a Hillary fan either. (Johnson’16) I’m someone that would rather see budget cuts elsewhere first if possible. That said – you do realize these institutions have only been around since ’65 (’70 in the case of PBS). Were we in the US really devoid of Arts & Humanities prior to Johnson’s expansion of the federal Government? I think not.
Of course KL_Bray we had arts and humanities prior to ’65. What we lacked was acknowledgement and endorsement of them at the federal level, and therefore also at most state levels. Such endorsement, whether symbolic or financial, suggests the nation is proud of its cultural legacy and wants to continue to nurture it. What kind of country does not recognize in some sort of official way its artistic heritage? One that’s soulless? Embarrassed of the roots of its artistry? Uninterested in protecting fragile, endangered forms of creativity? Willing to disregard or dismiss its past, recollect, revisit or analyze it? Only able to regard art as of value if it’s commodified? Which brings us back to where this discussion began.
This was a really interesting essay. For me it speaks to a kind of confusion that plagues us in so many facets of our lives. I especially enjoyed when you broke it down in your comment to Howard that “jobs and healthcare for all are the consequence of greatness, not the way you become great.” What we so often confuse are one way of taking an issue with other possible ways of looking at it. I’ll call the one you just highlighted mistaking causes and effects. As you put it, greatness causes there to be jobs and healthcare. They are the effects of greatness. What we confuse is taking greatness to be an effect of these other things. As if greatness were caused by having enough jobs and adequate healthcare.
You are right to make this distinction, because taking our eye off the real causes and focusing instead on the effects, even taking them to BE causes, puts the cart where the horse should be. Often we can’t properly tell our apples from oranges. It is important to know whether one is treating symptoms or the disease. If you focus on the wrong thing the patient sometimes needlessly dies…..
Another common confusion that you address in the essay is mistaking value and worth. We are so consumed with consuming that the commodification of our values always seems justified. We have simply traded our real values for what they are worth. We have auctioned off value to the highest bidder. We have put a price on everything that matters, as if it (and we) can all be bought and sold. What a strange culture!
I’d like to suggest another confusion that gets us into trouble: We also mistake ends and means. We are so hypnotized by these other confusions that we can’t see where true value lies. We spend all this time marketing the arts as instrumental and have abandoned the idea that the arts themselves have value. In other words, that the arts are not merely good for something else but are good in themselves. We have traded out the intrinsic value of things like the arts for the suggestion that with the arts you can bolster other social goods. All of which may be true to some extent, but it comes with a cost. It is no more true than that you CAN commodify values or seek the effects of effects and causes of causes. And the cost is no less horrific than turning our values into a stream of cash….. Thank instrumentality for that too. Is it any wonder that the NEA and NEH are threatened?
These confusions interfere with our thinking all the time. We confuse signs with ingredients, the necessary with the sufficient, meaning with truth, a job with a calling, strategy with tactics, differences of degree with differences of kind, and a whole host of others. We are not immune to making these mistakes. Important distinctions are being swept aside in some mindless rush to settle on what we think is right. We need to step back from the headlong race to the cliff’s edge. We need to get a better handle on these distinctions. We need to investigate better and deeper, and at the same time unlearn the poisonous habits of our minds. Value is not a commodity. Greatness is bigger than our small ambitions. And means are not more important than ends.
Its a different question for WHY the arts have intrinsic value, but I will leave you with this:
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” -John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams (May 12, 1780)
It took admitting the importance of the creative arts to justify these other pursuits. They were the means to that end. And if it took three generations or longer to bear fruit, so be it. We plant the seed and till the soil not for the seed but for the plant which may grow from it. And now we are contemplating erasing the NEA and public support for the arts. As you point out, the excuse of doing so as a means of balancing the budget is a smokescreen for us having lost the ideal of the arts’ value in themselves. Rather than aiming toward a world in which our children’s children can study poetry, painting, and music we no longer count those things as value.
THAT is our problem. How did we get here? How did we lose sight of the value that to Adams drove three whole generations in its direction? I suspect the bait and switch occurred when we began staking the value of the arts on their instrumental benefits rather than accepting Adams’ claim that the arts themselves were worth fighting for. Its the same deflection that mistakes carts and horses. We have sold the intrinsic value of the arts for the hope that their instrumental value will make the right difference. And it has failed.
Mark Twain’s comment on American society, that “we have dethroned God and set up a shekel in his place”, was not about religion. He recognized that there are other ways to measure value besides, and sometimes more accurately than, money. If all a society can do is put a price on everything, then it no longer knows the worth of anything.
Doug writes: “You can’t be great unless you invest in being great. The challenge for the arts now is to remind us all of that.”
Actually, that challenge started at least 37 years ago when Reagan took office with the declaration, “…government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In 1987, he appointed Alan Greenspan, who was literally a student of Ayn Rand and one of her staunchest acolytes, as Chair of the Federal Reserve. Under Bush the Second, officials polemicized about making the government so small that it could be drowned in a bathtub. And if there was government, it was to be made as bad and incompetent as possible in order to weaken it.
And yet the arts world has done little since then to counter how these insidious philosophies affected society and our political climate. including in 1996 when the NEA budget was cut in half. (Inevitably, some will object and say it has, which only further illustrates the weakness and delusion.)
Here is a sizable, documented article published 13 years ago on AJ, long before it had any bloggers, that discusses in detail the commodification of culture Doug describes, its history, philosophical origins in the USA, its consequences on our society, and for contextualization, a comparison with the public arts funding systems in Europe:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/arts_funding.htm
It’s still on the AJ site, though now misformatted. It is just one example of how the problem has been clearly defined for years and how the arts world simply stood by. There’s little reason to expect any change. Paul Simon described this sort of moral confusion well in 1964:
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening…
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
Auden also described this sort of moral stasis in 1939, another time of disaster in human history:
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
In the fields of my focus, freelance journalism and creative music, I know of no participants who confuse commodification with genuine, inherent value. Jazz musicians and jazz writers, photographers, broadcasters for example know going into they are not entering lucrative professions – we do what we do for other rewards. Perhaps arts administrators and policy makers have been confused about this, and turn to financial valuation to justify arts’ efficacy, but I can’t believe that many artists working in any media do so, at least to start with. There may be misunderstanding about arts’ commodification in our society due to the money flowing to and through popular entertainments, but even pop fiction and films typically ascribe usefulness and values to artistry they portray as being beyond profit motives. Could it be that arts nonprofits have veered too far from the basis of the arts they attempt to support? Imho the NEA has from the outset worked better for institutions than individuals – perhaps that has been inevitable (and reinforced by Reagan-era prohibitions of individual artists grants) but I think it has created distance from artists, arts lovers, general audiences and federal/state offices intending to nurture the arts.
Actually, Howard, while I think that you’re right that artists themselves don’t confuse commodification with inherent value, I think that the ways art and artists get funded – and therefore much of what gets made – is very much at the whim of the commodification arguments.
In other words, inside the arts the arts have inherent value, but outside the arts they do not. Isn’t this precisely the problem? The question is, can people have this insiders’ appreciation of the arts without actually being on the inside? If you stand on the outside will you be necessarily excluded from the inherent value? And if how we apprise value conforms specifically to where one is standing, can we make any headway in conversion without at the same time changing where people are in fact standing? Can you believe in the value of the arts while standing outside them? You may be able to see the instrumental value, but can you see the inherent value? Is this why arguing for the arts on instrumental grounds has only limited effect?
My fellow progressives realize that Trump didn’t just drop out of the sky. The two parties, each in their own way, helped create him.
And most of my fellow artists realize that the overt commodification of arts advocacy (I’m not concerned with the art market) was sold to us by the thinking of people like Richard Florida and others.
Arts organizations and arts advocates bought into his pop-sociology hook line and sinker and to this day are still arguing over why art is good for people and how to measure it.
Your critique of that system is welcome.
In classical music, there has been a clearly observable move toward the commodification of its culture. This was done mostly under the rubric of “entrepreneurialism” — a central tenant of neoliberalism. Through commodification, classical music was to be moved away from government to the marketplace.
Under this philosophy, composers were to leave behind the presumably rarified world of modernism and write music that would have a more immediate appeal and sale tickets. In line with postmodernism, composers were to place popular music on the same level as classical music and use its elements in classical compositions. Orchestras and smaller ensembles were to develop new forms of concert etiquette, new venues, popular culture, etc. to be better entrepreneurs. Organizations like New Music America used its website to strongly promote these philosophies of commodification. University music departments established highly ideological courses in music entrepreneurship. And here on AJ, Greg Sandow became a notable spokesperson for these philosophies.
Naturally, none of this did much to improve the financial situation of classical music, and certainly not in a way that provided significant overall results. It was all pretty much a fad, and now that it is weakening, the sheep will all stampede off to the next new thing.
Doug argues that we need question the commodification of culture, and let people know that we must invest in the arts. That’s true. So how do we inspire support for the arts, and especially in the many valuable forms that do not pander? How do we revive the NEA and develop a public funding system like those used by every other developed country in the world? We know what the problem is. The question is how to solve it.
Arts education may be the answer, if we start with teaching politicians in and out of Congress. And personally I believe the NEA should not treat the for-profit arts world as if it doesnt exist. It need not fund for-profits, but it might include them as part-and-parcel to America’s artistic ecosystem.. To my mind, the NEA could turn its attentions from financial support for the kinds of arts institutions that can raise substantial matching-funds to receive large cash grants to collecting and disseminating information throughout the US – as no agency does – about local and regional arts activities, giving special attention, perhaps, to those that do not “pander” (i.e., appeal on their own immediate affects). From my vantage, the movement to de-formalize classical music has resulted in numbers of chamber music groups staging their own concerts, series and fests highlighting new composers (some of whom write very non-pandering music) which attract young audiences to informal venues. There is even a bit more diversity, as we see composers/performers/audience members of greater demographic diversity than in the past participating. And while that may not solve the problems of classical music institutions, it’s not a bad thing and may have beneficial consequences for artists and audi nces alike.
All very true. The postmodern shift and entrepreneurialism have created a much more lively arts world in contemporary classical music. But the point is that it hasn’t solved the financial problems. Even with more accessible music, profits didn’t appear. It seems that the vast majority of classcial music just doesn’t work that way. Or at least, no one has figured out how to make it work.
And I like your idea that in some cases the NEA fund for-profit arts groups as well. This is really important for jazz, because at some point, to speak very broadly, it became in large part a kind of profit/non-profit hybrid. There are groups like big bands that are for profit, but with some subsidy they could take their work to a lot more people, and do a lot more educational work. As it is now, we have to rely on government owned and operated military bands for much of that sort of thing. And they too are facing threats of massvive cuts.
And I like your idea that the collection and dissemination of information be a substantial art of what the NEA. As a national coordinating agency, that should be right down its line. I hope they will listen to you.
BTW, the EU has an agency devoted to the collection of arts data called the Council of Europe that function in conjunction with the European Institute for Comparative Cultural Research. And almost every European country has an agency dedicated to the collection of data about the arts. In Germany, it’s called the Deutschen Musikinformationszentrum. Their website give a clear picture of the sort of work they do:
http://www.miz.org/
Finland, I learned from visits in the ’90s (maybe things have changed) also has middle school tests that determine who can pursue what kind of education and career path. As a small, relatively homogenous society, maybe that works, but I’m not sure for the Sami minority.
I don’t counsel to NEA to fund for-profits, only to take them into account in describing and analyzing our culture. I’ve spoken about this and arts info collection to NEA officers. It is not in their purview of the agency’ s capacity of maybe mission.
Most European countries decide whether students will go into a college prep curriculum or a trade school during the Middle School years. Students have the option of switching later if they qualify. After the war, the USA wanted to change Germany’s system to our one-size-fits-all 12 years system, but both the British and French intervened to preserve the German system since their systems are similar.
Such a system would have been a disaster for me, since I come for a working class family and was a late bloomer as far as academics go. But the German economy is a testament to how well the system works. They have a massive system of high quality, and often high tech manufacturing that powers their strong export economy. BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, Bosch, Siemens, Miele, are a few brand examples, along with machine tools, medical equipment, optics, and so on. Their educational system trains the workers for these high tech, high precision jobs.
Almost all European countries (if not all) also forbid by law private universities and private grammar schools with very rare exceptions. Schools for the elite are thought to create social problems by strengthening classism. There is also a law in Germany that all universities have the same or similar quality. And throughout Europe, universities are free. There is no tuition, and no such thing as student debt. There’s also a law called the Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz which gives university students a monthly stipend if their family is too poor to support them.
Germany’s 131 state orchestras and 83 state opera houses are required by law to maintain educational programs and reserve seating at low prices for young people — a practice found throughout Europe. Their citizenry is raised to appreciate the so-called high arts. Again, societies get what we pay for.
Here we are in a publishing platform that does not pay contributors, nor as far as I know is it funded by either the market or philanthropies. In America and indeed the whole world that depends on exchange of goods and services, the influence of commodification, I suppose, can never be entirely avoided or dismissed. Yet there seems to be quite a lot of creative, artistic activity, perhaps amateurish, community-oriented, decentralized, unsuccessful in financial terms and beneath the the of most commentators, audiences and presenters, that has only the flimsiest relationship to any marketplace.
These arent activities in the arts that require high levels of training, coordination and staging such as symphonic music, ballet or theater, although many small towns somehow muster local orchestras and community theater seems to be a thing, still. In my reading of American popular music history, new forms have often emerged by exploiting, if not initiating and establishing new media prior to that medium’s costs of entry rising prohibitively upon market controls responding to its unexpected success.
I’m not clear on how that correlates with commodification arguments, but consider the rise of rap and hip hop, today’s most commodified music — unfunded at the start, denegrated upon mainstream notice, disrespectful of all conventions, wildly embraced by audiences among the marginalized, now a dominating cultural force and so, so distant from our cultural institutions that it may as well be on another planet, though of course cultural institutions covet its crowds.
Those crowds identified something in rap/hip-hop’s messages of immense value to them. That music and its corresponding culture would never have been initiated by the non-profit world. Only after it proved its popularity did market forces enter to co-opt its direction. Seems like it’s been this way since Stephen Foster, if not William Billings. Am I missing something?
In this telling, a Laurie Anderson becomes a popularizer of ideas grown in a small, bohemian, anti-establishment arts world, virtually the sole figure of that world to crossover to commercial success while retaining (or gaining) uppercrust art world regard. Funding for many artists’ projects comes only after they have succeeded in proving their presumably non-commercial works attract attention. Funding for other arts projects seems based on a perceived value of the work evident to a very small strata of society’s representatives. Yes, those representatives have sought to justify their investments by claiming they pay off, if we but look at the ancillary profits. But this argument fails because people dont find the intrinsic value in the works being promoted as “great” by the “art world.” Maybe the work IS great, and most people (other than the art world’s funders) are not educated, or not ready for it. In that case the art world, or governmental entities in the US may be guilty of not investing in educating Americans sufficiently about the arts. But adapting the European tradition/attitude of nobless oblige arts philanthropy does not appear to me likely to make our arts great again, or convince ignoramuses that art is a good thing just in itself. Only powerful, relatable art can do that.
I think it is true that *some* kinds of music and its corresponding culture (like jazz and pop) would never have been initiated by the non-profit world, but that doesn’t apply to all music.
Finland, for example, has the highest per capita ratio of orchestras in the world, all owned and operated by the state. Finnish conductors, composers, and soloists hold a dominate position on the world stage even though the country only has 5.5 million people. These artists also command very high fees. Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho have become major figures in NYC’s cultural life, as well as in every other cultural capital in the world. Esa-Pekka Salonen made the LA Phil one the most discussed, popular, and innovative orchestras in America. Osmo Vänskä with the Minnesota orchestra was not far behind.
The USA, with 58 times the population has not created a similar group of artists. These Finnish artists all developed their skills in Scandinavia’s very lively classical music world made possible by generous state funding that includes state orchestras, state radios, and massive funding for music festivals.
This should be no surprise to Americans. We dominate the areo-space, computer, nuclear, and telecommunications industries exactly because they were massively subsidized by the government.
If we want world class artists in proportion to our population then we’ve got to pay for their training, and for the cultural milieu that allows them to develop. You get what you pay for.