NOTE: This is the first of five posts with my thinking on addressing long-term problems in the arts. My overview framing of the five can be found here. My case for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the pandemic shutdown offers to reinvent is here. I don’t have any easy answers or magic fixes. This is an attempt to organize my observations (from my vantage point)
and try to provoke fresh thinking.
The pandemic has exposed the poverty of our infrastructure across sectors: medical, political, postal, financial, logistical, and more. Add the crumbling of our roads and bridges, and it’s easy to see a pattern — we’re a country that has taken for granted a facade of competency but has failed to invest in or maintain the mechanisms that make it possible behind the scenes … until a disaster hits. Katrina. The financial crisis. COVID.
Consider our cultural infrastructure: it’s been failing for years, and while the pandemic shutdown hasn’t revealed previously unknown weaknesses, it both puts an exclamation point on existing frailties while blasting away remaining resources and goodwill being thrown into the breach in attempting to survive this crisis.
The poverty of our cultural infrastructure isn’t just in non-profit arts, where philanthropic and corporate funding has lagged and production expenses have increased, but in for-profit culture too. The digital revolution has disrupted virtually every creative industry. The internet has decoupled the ability to access content from the need to pay for it. A good example is the music recording industry, which sold $22.4 billion worth of music in 1999, at the height of compact disc sales, compared to last year when it sold $11.1 billion as streaming dominated and consumption was significantly higher.
Great for the consumer, but when Spotify pays only $0.00318 per stream, the rights holder(s) of a musical work earns only about $3,180 for a million listens. Such disruptions have played out across creative industries over the past two decades.
So now the virus has shut down whole sectors of the creative economy, commercial and non-profit alike. Foundations are rushing in with emergency funding. A consortium of national funders banded together to offer hundreds of millions in aid. The Ford Foundation says it will borrow $1 billion to help. There has been a campaign to lobby the government to create a new WPA program for the arts, modeled on the 1930s Great Depression model. Live music venues lobbied Congress for $10 billion in the “Save our Stages” Act to tide them over. Congress so far has provided $300 million in the first CARES act for non-profit arts, but as Americans for the Arts points out:
As of July 13, 2020, the Coronavirus has had a devastating $9.1 billion economic impact on America’s arts sector with a 67% unemployment rate among artists and gig workers. Since the first U.S. case was reported in January, 96% of arts and culture organizations have cancelled events—some as far out as 2021—resulting in a loss of 325 million ticketed admissions and billions of dollars more lost in event-related spending by audiences at local businesses (restaurants, lodging, retail), impacting 533,000 jobs.
The federal government, which makes the NEA, NEH and CPB go through an existential funding dance every other year, and whose funding is less now than it was in the mid-80s, is unlikely to help on the scale needed to avoid mass defaults in the cultural sector. Nor is Congress, even under Democratic control, suddenly likely to wake up and significantly increase its annual support.
Traditional arts funders will be weakened by their emergency efforts and less able to invest in culture going forward. And whatever emergency aid is possible will, at best — at best — save some cultural institutions, but surely leave them severely diminished and weakened going forward, propping up business models that already weren’t working very well.
And the aid so far is doing little to help artists outside institutions: our funding models were designed at a time when institutions were at the center of our cultural life, and those days are long gone. One can see the history of the internet as a subversion of institutions, but the non-profit arts model, created in the 1960s, is largely unchanged and has failed to adapt, even in the midst of enormous change.
And yet…
It’s easy to talk about the stresses of the cultural sector, but in context of the national economy, the creative sector is huge and successful. There are many business models for culture, many of them successful. The creative industries’ production, as defined by government statisticians, was worth $878 billion in 2017. Taken together, creative industries including “core arts” ($180 billion) accounted for 5.1 million jobs and 4.5 percent of GDP, making it America’s second largest sector after retail.
But just because creativity is popular and glamorous and generates lots of money, doesn’t mean it’s healthy, and again I come back to my infrastructure argument — the facade might gleam, but the mechanisms that support it are rotten.
Not just on the non-profit side. When we talk about culture models, we separate non- and for-profit culture for a number of reasons, both obvious and not. And those on either side often eye one another warily, even though many artists cross back and forth across the line wherever the work happens to be. But it’s impossible to think about commercial culture — design, movies, video, music, dance, broadcast, writing, fashion, publishing, entertainment, etc — without the significant contributions of the non-profit side.
Europe and Canada have very different models, dependent primarily on government funding, with much less philanthropic and individual giving. But those models too have significant limitations (which could be a topic for a whole different post). The funding models have created very different cultural production aesthetics and expectations but each is also suffering.
When we talk about trying to fix the arts model in the US, non-profits tend to think about it in only non-profit terms — more government funding, more philanthropy, tax breaks, etc. and in the reform hierarchy, for good or bad, preserving traditional institutions always seems to be at the top of the list. So non-profit models have stayed relatively static for 60 years, even as their ability to fund the arts has eroded and innovation has lagged.
Much of the artistic poverty, lack of leadership and equity struggles across many of our institutions is because the non-profit /institutional model is broken — resources are so scarce and institutional survival is such an all-consuming boulder to push that the marketplace of ideas has ceased to function effectively. Cost structures are locked in by calcified institutional silos, union contracts, insufficient investment in technology, and funder mandates that force institutional behavior. I’d suggest that much of the institutional bad behavior is because the field is so under-resourced and the need to raise money plays such an outsized role.
For-profit models rise and fall all the time, consolidating and selling off, going through vertical integration, then blasting it apart. Artistic vitality waxes and wanes as the models change — for example, movies are at a creative ebb right now while TV is vibrant and experimental. Both industries are currently undergoing enormous transitions as streaming takes hold. But as technology disruptions continue, the wreckage along the way is significant.
So what to do?
Few industries in America are simple buy/sell transactions. Agriculture functions on an elaborate system of federal crop subsidies to even out losses and keep the larger farming industry viable. Motorists don’t pay directly to use a road every time they want to go somewhere; we pay gasoline- and motor vehicle taxes to subsidize the larger road system. Readers of newspapers traditionally haven’t paid for each story they read; journalists gathered up as many readers as they could and sold them to advertisers. I don’t watch ESPN on my TV but my cable provider makes me pay a monthly fee that includes it.
The dominant tech industry model is to give away product to gain customers, then turn around and sell those customers’ attention and data to others. It’s a business that in addition to making enormous money for the companies also pays for the infrastructure that powers the web and its innovation. (Notice one infrastructure than hasn’t failed during the lockdown is the internet, despite getting slammed with exponentially more use.)
In each of these cases (and many more), the infrastructure that keeps the system viable — even possible — is funded as a routine part of the individual transactions that run atop them. Where is that mechanism in the arts? I don’t profess to have the magic answer, but I think we need to acknowledge that the fact we can’t pay the full cost of making culture only out of ticket sales isn’t a failure — many so-called for-profit sector products are subsidized through a variety of infrastructure mechanisms and their consumer cost doesn’t reflect the true cost of making them. It’s just that in the arts, we call those subsidies charity, and the reality is that altruism is rarely a good model to depend on. So now we need to figure out something better.
We need:
- A significant, stable ongoing source of new funding that is politically insulated and inflation-proof.
- The funding needs to be related to the interests of those who provide it — in other words, not altruistic or just the government deciding to give more money to the local arts commission or the NEA out of general funds (which will never happen) or private foundations that — however well-intentioned — have their own agendas.
- A solution that doesn’t just include non-profit arts but also for-profit models that employ creators and artists.
- Funding that allows investment in basic artistic infrastructure, however we define that. Innovation, so our technology is as good as anything the social media platforms design. Capitalization, so we don’t lurch from crisis to crisis. A system so artists get paid properly for creating. Support for community facilities through which the public accesses art. Education. Access. This is just my list, but there’s much more.
A Creative New Deal
A “creative dividend” collected at a rate of one percent of spending on all creative industries would generate about $9 billion in its first year and grow as the sector does. Rather than hide the charge inside ticket prices or services or products, highlight it right out there on the package or on the ticket. Make a campaign of it. Consumers have shown over and over again that they’re willing to pay for culture. Indeed, the only reason we’ve been able to survive in the non-profit model for so long is that consumers are willing to pay for culture. We need to build on that.
A couple of infrastructure examples: Until Apple created iTunes, music piracy was rampant. It turns out though, that people were willing to pay for music, as long as it was easy to do so. Apple made it easier to buy music than to pirate it, and in setting up a workable mechanism, took a healthy portion of each purchase for running the infrastructure — the store. It transformed the course of the industry.
Another example is ASCAP. In 1914, a group of composers and publishers got together to create ASCAP to charge licensing fees to those wanting to use music. Creators register with ASCAP and the organization charges licenses to TV and radio stations, orchestras, restaurants and bars — anywhere where music is played in public. It counts 750,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers as members, and is owned and run by those members, with over 11 million registered works that earned $1.274 billion in license fees in 2019, a $47 million increase over 2018. That money is paid to owners of the music. This system does not, it much be said, compensate performers. But before it was set up — a radical idea at the time — there wasn’t a way for creators to get paid for the use of their music.
How would you divide $9 Billion?
It’s a wonderful, game-changing question, a thought experiment that gets you thinking about the value of culture in different ways. Other industries have formulas for distributing infrastructure money so it can be done. You don’t get it for doing nothing, and you’d have to decide mechanisms for who (and what) gets it. But think about how such a yearly sum would instantly change discussions about equity, about education, about creativity and rewarding innovation. About the place of culture in our society. It certainly wouldn’t solve all our problems (see the rest of my five things to fix), but evidence of its impact should be public and inspiring.
How to go about making it happen?
It would take leadership. One of my pet frustrations (here Rover!) in the arts is the lack of big picture thinking and places to do it. It’s understandable — our best talent is consumed with running organizations, being creative and keeping the lights on. There’s no natural leadership to take this on. And what leadership there is is rooted in the non-profit mindset or in the industry-specific for-profit sector. The national arts service organizations don’t have the muscle or resources to lead, and the for-profit industry groups don’t have a mandate beyond their industries. That leaves the big arts foundations or a consortium of large arts organizations or a university, perhaps. The lack of some entity that gathers and filters and works on ideas across the sector is another example of the poverty of our arts infrastructure. Most healthy industries — law, medicine, politics — have think tanks and institutes and publications that support field-wide thinking. Yet another reason we need a new model.
NEXT in Five Things To Fix: Technology
I should also point out another example of collective public investment. There’s a long history of local improvement districts (LIDs) and Public Development Authorities (PDAs) that tax themselves to fund “improvements,” usually public amenities or services that collectively benefit members of the LID or PDA. Such common purpose initiatives are often essential investments needed to keep neighborhoods viable.
So, in a nutshell: Form a pan-cultural industry group. Institute a 1% surcharge (on spending, not revenue) with costs passed on to the consumer. Put the earnings into a common fund for the purpose of distributing it to recipients to be determined, for purposes to be determined, in a manner free from the effects of politics, inflation, and organizational agendas by mechanisms to be determined.
Good sir, if you were waving your hands any harder your fingers would wiggle off.
LIDs and the the like can work because everyone understands when you need a drain under a road so that it doesn’t flood after every gullywasher. ASCAP can work (after a fashion) because it pursues a specific and commonly desired goal for its members. (In practice, what it does is indistinguishable from any other kind of rent-seeking, and among other things has tried to shake down the Girl Scouts for singing campfire songs.) On the flipside, agriculture in this country makes the defense industry look principled. iTunes, far from halting piracy (which may account for a quarter of global bandwidth), has once again just been hit with a lawsuit for piracy.
When the tech sector funds its infrastructure, it does so by contributing to the open source ecosystem. As demonstrated by the lawsuit against the Internet Archive’s Emergency Library project, possibly nobody is more hostile to that attitude of generosity than the creative industries. You want technology as good as any social media platform’s to do what, exactly? It’s probably already available as open source. Where’s the commensurate contribution from the artists?
The challenge of your picture is not that it’s big, but that it’s fuzzy. I applaud you for admitting that you can’t answer a lot of your own questions or spell out how to implement your proposals. However, I don’t think that you adequately appreciate that no one else can either. It’s possible for a notion to live in the ideals and die in the details, and overhead you’ve listed quite a few of them.
I don’t have a problem with Douglas’ lack of details on implementation. It is normal to develop the larger frame of ideas, then workout the details. A tax on for-profit cultural products like popular music, TV, and movies would not be so complex to implement if the usual reactionary political blockades could be broken down. I think one thing that might help would be a stipulation that the money collected go straight back to each state according to how much of this tax it paid. On a state and communal level, people could more clearly see how this funding would directly improve their lives–better arts education for their children, more local cultural institutions, better cultural infrastructure that would enrich their lives, a clearer expression of local identity and “values,” etc.
There are already advanced mechanisms in place for monitoring the consumption of mass media culture. The tax sums paid by each state could thus be determined and given back to each state. Federal Arts agencies could maybe get about 5% of the total.
We should note that the right wing doesn’t oppose big government. It enthusiastically supports military spending, agro-business, and scientific research. It only opposes government programs when they might weaken the right’s hold on power. We thus see that even the postal service is currently under attack because it would increase the number of votes for the left. The arts tend to encourage progressive thought, so they are also nixed.
This is not a natural state of affairs. It is the result of politico-cultural engineering. We need to realize this, better understand how it was created, and work to deconstruct these social mechanisms that have largely been created by a plutocracy. When we fix that problem, the way will be cleared for a more sane form of government that will include arts funding and many other things. The arts world can’t stand by and wait for others to do this work. We must be part of the effort.
Franklin – my examples were to illustrate how infrastructure costs are built into keeping the system functional. Such systems are essentially an agreement on the rules on the costs of doing business. Within that, players are free to make decisions to their own advantage. But the underlying infrastructure is essential to the players in it being able to run their businesses, whether or not they want to acknowledge it. Lack of investment in cultural infrastructure has made it difficult for the whole system to operate sustainably. LIDs are a great parallel because, as you point out, they work for a shared interest. As this would. Before iTunes piracy was the primary way people could get digital music. Apple didn’t stamp out piracy, but it created a functioning market that for the first time made digital music files a viable business.
People are very willing to pay for culture. There is insatiable demand for movies, music, etc. But because the system is set up the way it is, little to none of the money they pay goes to supporting the system. The problem has become acute as writers, musicians, etc have a more and more difficult time earning a living. And in the COVID shutdown, most of the theatres, halls, clubs and the presenters which run them have gone down.
My argument is this: 1. A dramatic increase in government support for the arts a la the European system is extremely unlikely, as the political right characterize it as unwarranted charity. 2. Philanthropic support has been unable to keep up with the costs of producing culture. 3. Corporate support has declined as as they exit philanthropic giving. 4. Technology disrupts cultural business models faster than they can keep up.
The non-profit model was set up in recognition that a pure capitalist market doesn’t work in the arts (or many other for-profit markets, for that matter). But it no longer works as it was intended, so we need to rethink. A simple across-the-board small surcharge on creative industries would be fairly easy to set up and collect. It wouldn’t be an undue burden on either consumers or producers.
As for the lack of details — I actually have ideas for how it would work, but first it’s important to introduce the concept, one that breaks out of the usual non- and for-profit boxes. The how-to-spend-it question would be a helpful discussion in clarifying the role of culture in this country. I think it would be possible to get the non-profit side on board with it. As for the for-profit side, – which you point out is hardly generous – I think they are also persuadable, by showing them how they would benefit in common purpose. And I think if it was branded as a “this is how we support artists” campaign, they would find public support.
Douglas,
Thank you for your reply. I think that what you’re calling “cultural infrastructure” or “the system” is an aggregation of activities that relate categorically, perhaps, but don’t operate in the same ways or in conjunction with another. You’re proposing that this aggregate doesn’t attract enough money to perpetuate itself – which, as you’ve conceived it, I suppose is correct. So, movies seem to earn enough to make more movies. Do they earn enough to support everyone who wants to work full-time as a poet? Of course not. Should they? Why? How many poets should they support? Which ones? What is the “shared interest” between the moviemakers and the poets? And that’s what we get for aggregating just two of all the fields you would aggregate.
By all means, sketch some things out and let’s see where it all goes. (I hope I’m participating in this process usefully.) That said, we have markets to reveal the immense complexity of interests that indicate which resource is wanted at what location at what time. Those wants are specific, detailed, nuanced in more ways than can be imagined, and take place at the level of the individual. Here then is economics, and the field to which vague ideas will come to die if they don’t account for the reality of what goes on there. This is just a restatement of the Knowledge Problem as described by Hayek.
I direct a 501(c)3 corporation, the tiny entity that produces Delicious Line. All this does is relieve me from the responsibility to maximize shareholder value, as is required of for-profit corporations, and allow people to deduct gifts to my entity from their taxes. Significant as those are, I am otherwise in the market in every way that matters. Fundraising is just sales based on a different set of value propositions. I am most certainly underfunded. (I hope you can hear the irony here.) I could believe, if I would, that more people should want what I’m doing, and they should want it with greater zeal. I would find it quite acceptable (and a little hilarious) if The American Arts, your aggregate, was made to fork over some dough so that my little art criticism publication could thrive. But I can’t point to any principle as to why the arts landscape ought to be terraformed accordingly, I can only say that it would suit me. Instead, I have to persuade people that my work has value – just like everyone else on the planet who’s not living by themselves in the woods.
This will continue even after the establishment of the great common fund you envision. It is not infinite, after all, and I will be obliged to convince its custodians that they ought to shower funds upon me, as opposed to some other deserving (but not quite as deserving as me, obviously) culture workers. Here I am back in sales, under yet another guise. It will continue even under the Osbourne Regime, the “natural state of affairs” that will replace the supposedly unnatural one that we have now, despite relying on all the same mechanisms of force and power-hoarding. There sales will take the form of mere influence peddling. Notice that the base exercise isn’t changing, it’s only becoming more dishonest.
Sorry, “in conjunction with one another” in the first paragraph, and not really influence peddling in the last one, but lobbying and cronyism, though the rest of the point holds. Also citizens of the Osborne Regime will spell his name more carefully than I did.
Franklin – thanks for this. Very useful. A few things – your example of the movies – the creative side (as opposed to the money side) of the movie business has lamented for some time now about how uncreative it has become. The business model has a blockbuster imperative because of the enormity of the financial risk. So the big studios won’t make “mid-range” movies right now. For a while, so-called indie studios made them, but as they got successful they were acquired by the large studios, and mined until the economics no longer worked. Increasingly, the international market drives what gets made, and the smaller creative movies we used to get have no home. It’s way more complicated than this, but it’s one of the reasons that movies have been on a creative wane and much of the talent moved to TV. (Then there’s the rise of the giant streamers such as Netflix and Amazon, which have thrown billions into production and have distorted the model at least for a few years until the streaming wars for eyeballs changes again – the latest tech bubble).
Anyway – my point is that it’s not really about movies subsidizing poets, but an attempt to add perhaps a rationalizing force to the markets that isn’t just about popularity. The movie industry benefits enormously from the non-profit world that trains and supplies it with creative talent. Governments invest in education to support all sorts of industries, but arts education has been cut across America, and as it was, the burden shifted to arts organizations (most(?) of which aren’t very good at it). Another example of essential infrastructure being shifted and becoming “lesser”. The arts in America survive not because of system that supports it but despite it.
It may surprise you, but I actually think there are many arts organizations that are over-funded given the uncreative work they do. Often institutions lumber on long after they’ve stopped being relevant. They’re more about survival than about excellence. We’re so reluctant to give up an institution once it’s created, even if it has stopped being creative, that we prop them up year after year. Why? Because we’re worried that if we let them go not that something better won’t rise up but that nothing will because it’s so difficult.
Both the for- and non-profit models are based on popularity (for- in its ability to sell product, and non- in its ability to attract funding/underwriting). But popularity as the primary market imperative is increasingly broken as a way to fund creative activity when work can increasingly be accessed for free because of technology. The National Endowment for the Arts has transformed over the years largely from supporting excellent art to expanding access to art. Leaving aside whether this is a good or bad thing, it is an attempt to add a different market force. You’re right – the market is incredibly complex, and it is efficient (and ruthless) at determining winners and losers. But the winners aren’t always solely determined by pure buy/sell transactions, nor are they always in the public interest, and governments put their fingers on the scale all the time, attempting to incentivize behavior it likes and discourage that which it doesn’t.
Since you mention Delicious Line, let me use arts criticism as another example. Arts criticism fills many functions, from alerting people to art they should pay attention to, to establishing a discourse around the art form. I’ve been an arts journalist for 32 years and monitoring arts journalism on ArtsJournal for 21 years. In that time arts journalism has changed enormously. The number of staff arts journalism jobs is way less than half what it was in 2000. Coverage of the arts has mostly disappeared from the pages of all but the largest newspapers. This is part of a general decline in the fortunes of traditional journalism after the business models collapsed.
As someone who has closely monitored both the quantity and quality of arts journalism over this period, I have found a disconnect – I would say the writing is generally better today than it was 20 years ago. Also there is more quality writing. But because it has fallen out of general publications, people not specifically interested in art don’t encounter it much in the wild. Second, the kinds of coverage have changed. Few reporters cover local theatre, music, art institutions and how they work and how they’re doing. It’s also difficult for artists to get intelligent public reviews of their work because there’s so little market for critical reviews. As arts organizations have moved to social media in the belief that they can better communicate with their communities directly rather than through critics or publications, there is the danger that culture has moved out of larger public view.
I happen to believe that a healthy vigorous cultural sector needs scrutiny and debate. That doesn’t mean lavishly subsidizing critics because I think they’re important, but currently the marketplace for arts criticism is mostly broken (and bravo to you for finding a way to make it work). Directly subsidizing publications or critics probably isn’t the way to fix it, but there are other ways to spur the market.
The government didn’t invest in space exploration, it invested in NASA, which helped create and support a generation of engineers and jumpstarted whole industries. Investment in the US military has made numerous civilian industries viable, built on the infrastructure the military maintains. When it comes to the arts, however, any government investment is framed as subsidy or charity for which no amount of pointing out the economic and social benefits will win over political opponents.
I’ll attempt to fill in more over the rest of this series.
Douglas comments that our current private funding model “no longer works as it was intended, so we need to rethink.” In reality, its never worked, as comparisons with public funding systems clearly show. We should note that a tax or surcharge placed on for-profit cultural products with the proceeds passed on to non-profit art forms is public arts funding. We should also know that the mass media industries with their huge lobbying mechanisms will battle to the death any such tax or surcharge.
Douglas,
I can’t thank you enough for this post. I’ve been working on a new model of executing management for artists whom I handle and, to me, the most challenging thing is to face the hard and usually unexplored question of whether the paradigm that arts organizations/artists/administrators follow is even workable (it barely has been, long before the current Covid crisis). If one can break that inertia, we can begin to move to a healthier model.
Earl: This is a whole different topic of course, but one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I think the traditional model has increasingly not fit the ways artists want to have careers today. As more artists break out of traditional categories, it becomes more difficult for them to have the kinds of careers they want. I think part of the problem is that the whole thing is too institutionally-based. At a time when creative digital collaboration has adopted dynamic networks of networks to create projects, the traditional institutions are locked into more or less static models in which their access to talent is more limited. I can think of all sorts of amazing performing artists who are increasingly frustrated by a system that slots them in to projects they don’t necessarily want to do but can’t afford to say no to. Topic for another post. Bravo to you for trying to rethink.
About “static models.” Private funding systems are sometimes promoted exactly because they are thought to be more flexible than public systems which are often overly bound to the cultural institutions they own and operate. Wealthy donors can spend their money on whatever arts project they want, like the woman who gave $100 million to a poetry magazine which had no idea how it could use so much money. Christo’s expensive projects are another example. And a range of avantgarde theater projects. There are countless examples. In a sense, we already have a strangely flexible system for new kinds of artistic “networks” for new kinds of artistic expression. It’s just that our system provides as little money for those kinds of projects as it does traditional ones.
So the problem isn’t a lack of new ideas for new kinds of art and new kinds of collaboration. The problem is that private funding systems don’t work and haven’t since the end of feudalism. And in the USA, this is more specifically a political and social problem in how the arts are viewed, and the political structures that shape those views of the arts.. Until those problems are solved, it will not be possible to pass laws putting a surcharge on mass media cultural products to fund the non-profit arts. This system is just public arts funding in another form, and I suspect it would fail just like all other attempts to create public arts funding in the USA.
I agree with Douglas that public arts funding is too politically fraught in the United States to grow it to a size that would suit the arts lovers. Public arts funding is only relatively uncontroversial in countries homogeneous and durable enough to have a Volksgeist and several centuries of shared culture. We Americans, in contrast, are diverse and recently arrived in the grand scheme of things. When NASA, which he brings up as an interesting contrast, puts a robot on Mars, everybody agrees that it’s wondrous and the people involved are geniuses. There’s not a lot of emotion-laden fighting over funding for NASA. Nothing America has ever done culturally has elicited an equivalent response. (We have a statue to Copley here in Boston. I wonder if one person in ten thousand could identify one of his paintings.)
Increasing public funding would not simply be a matter of running the conservatives out of office, particularly in a country where professed conservatives outnumber self-identified progressives by a factor of three, yet the arts skew progressive to an extremity that has prompted Douglas himself to wonder whether we can really call them “diverse” until they’ve achieved political parity. That’s leaving aside this new breed of progressive who believes that every cultural contribution of Europe is tainted by whiteness and capitalism. Many of them are calling for the museums to be broken up. Good luck getting your opera houses out of them, even via taxation.
The claim that private funding hasn’t worked since feudalism is striking. Markets gave us, among other things, the Dutch Golden Age.
Ahem, so where’s our Dutch Golden Age? We’re to take such narrowly viewed and decontextualized anomalies as a norm?
It’s also a mistake to think that Americans are somehow inherently incapable of supporting public arts funding–that old hackneyed conceit of American plutocracy. We’ve once had a successful public funding system, but it was systematically dismantled for political reasons, not cultural ones.
During its years of operation, the government-funded Federal Art Project of the WPA hired about 10,000 artists who collectively created more than 100,000 paintings and murals and over 18,000 sculptures during the program’s 8 years of existence (1935-1943.) A consistent goal of the WPA was to support and celebrate cultural diversity across the country, including in smaller cities and towns. Public arts funding doesn’t fail due to diversity; it succeeds exactly because it supports diversity far better than plutocratic systems funded almost exclusively by wealthy whites.
The Federal Theater Project existed for four years, from 1935 to 1939. Within a year it employed 15,000 people who created about 1200 productions (not including radio.) It played to an estimated 30 million people in more than 200 theaters nationwide, as well as in parks, schools, churches, clubs, factories, hospitals and closed-off streets.
The Federal Theatre of the Air began weekly radio broadcasts March 15, 1936. It presented an average of 3,000 programs annually on commercial stations and the NBC, Mutual and CBS networks. Radio divisions were also created in 11 states.
Alas, the programs were eventually shut down mostly because the disruptions of WWII allowed reactionary Senators to portray the programs as too “socialist” – an accusation now universally regarded as false by historians. Cultural questions of diversity had nothing to do with it.
Nevertheless, efforts to support high culture continued for a while after the war. One example was the NBC Opera Theater which existed from 1949 to 1964. The company performed a total of 43 operas for NBC, the majority of which were broadcast on the program NBC Television Opera Theatre. The organization’s work received 3 Primetime Emmy Award nominations. All of the performances were broadcast live from a NBC studio. The program commissioned about ten new operas by composers ranging from Mennotti to Lukas Foss to Norman Dello Joio. If I remember right, Amahl and the Night Visitors was one of the operas commissioned and premiered.
This kind of programming eventually failed exactly because commercial television relied on the market for its aesthetic values.
Europe continues this sort of publicly funded arts activity to this day, which also includes massive public media corporations like the BBC in the UK, the ARD in Germany, and the RAI in Italy.
Americans do not realize the extent to which their country and cultural lives were strongly damaged by postwar political and economic philosophies that destroyed our systems of public arts funding – a situation that can only be described as a form of oppression. And of course, racial minorities are even more strongly affected in a system funded by and for wealthy whites. And yet you talk about us not being able to have a public funding system for the arts when greater diversity is exactly what it would promote.
So is it just a natural phenomenon that Americans seem uninterested in public arts funding? Or is this lack of interest a consciously engineered social construct? I’m inclined toward the latter view, and think that organizing public funding systems regionally would give Americans far more cultural diversity, and a closer and deeper sense of connection to the arts in their lives. With intelligent organization and a long-term vision, we can rebuild our cultural lives. When people take a local sense of pride in their cultural institutions they support them. It builds motivation and creates audiences. To do this, we need well organized, regional public arts funding systems like every other developed country in the world has long had.
Of course, I know this is a David against Goliath undertaking to educate a massively brainwashed public, including even intellectuals, but it is a long-term project that can be realized.
William,
It’s no more anomalous than any other slice of human history distinct enough to have a term for it. We don’t have our Dutch Golden Age because we’re not Dutch, it’s not the seventeenth century, and necessity isn’t sufficiency. I don’t know where you’re marking the end of feudalism, but if it’s where Europe starts to recover after the travails of the fourteenth century, you’re going to have a hell of a time establishing that private funding of art never worked from then until the present day, and every time it did was a fluke. That’s 600 years flukes to explain away.
Not incapable, but unwilling, and not inherently, but consistently with an ethos of a country founded by citizens who among other things were furious about taxation, and who established a political order based on individual rights. That ethos ensured widespread skepticism about the socialistic experiments of the early 20th century, whether of the Russian or Italian variety. (Angelo M. Codevilla recently: “Until 1935 New Dealers, though careful not to add to their opponents’ ammunition, did not hide their administration’s kinship with what the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists were doing to redirect the societies over which they ruled.” The first broadcast by the company that become the RAI, which you mention above, was a speech by Mussolini.)
Representative democracy in this country produces political actors who represent that unwillingness to support arts funding. To attribute this to “social construction” and “brainwashing” is the kind of condescension that justifies conservative revulsion at the progressive skew in the arts. They vote accordingly. You would too if somebody who thought you were a thrall or a zombie was trying to tax more of your money in order to pay for art that you don’t want and will probably insult your values.
One of the curious features of the WPA regarding visual art is that it supported a wide range of artists who went on to produce masterpieces, but it produced no masterpieces itself. If you compare what Guston did for the WPA to what he painted in the Fifties and afterwards, it’s night and day. You could attribute that to youth, but in fact this seems to be the case with everyone. “He was magnificent during his WPA period, but it was all downhill after that” is something that is said about absolutely nobody. State sponsorship, when we’re talking about 20th- and 21st-century states, seems to be enervating in general. This includes the local funding groups, unfortunately, which are not exactly ruled by Kantian disinterestedness – they’re subject to vogues like community participation and skew politically at that level as much as the national one.
This only threatens to worsen with all of these late-late-modernisms in play. It’s not clear to me that you can rally support around “the arts,” broadly speaking, when they are perceived (not entirely incorrectly) as having no intact conventions. That also weighs on Douglas’s considerations in this series and I look forward to see how he deals with it.
THIS x — I’ve been wanting this so much. We need a think tank — or a think tank with an arts program.
“That leaves the big arts foundations or a consortium of large arts organizations or a university, perhaps. The lack of some entity that gathers and filters and works on ideas across the sector is another example of the poverty of our arts infrastructure. Most healthy industries — law, medicine, politics — have think tanks and institutes and publications that support field-wide thinking. Yet another reason we need a new model.”