Museums are not like highways

In a New York Times op-ed, Laura Raicovich and Laura Hanna call for a generous increase in the way the government, in particular the federal government, funds arts institutions:

As policymakers in Washington gather to draft a new budget for fiscal year 2025, they could solve culture’s current financial crisis and radically reshape how we think about sustaining the arts. They could do this by tapping into abundant appropriations that already enjoy bipartisan support. To make this possible, first we need to stop treating museums, theaters and galleries like sacred spaces that exist in some rarefied realm of public life. And we need to start treating them — and funding them — like interstate highways, high-speed internet and other infrastructure projects, using money that’s earmarked to maintain the country’s infrastructure.

There is not much evidence that the American public is wanting a general increase (or decrease, come to that) in government support of the arts, and so there is a hill to climb in making the case for it. And I don’t think they succeed. Let’s consider the argument they present.

To start:

Certainly, some politicians will object to funding the arts as infrastructure, just as they object to funding the arts in different ways now. But other industries are already subsidized by the federal government directly, as with the farm subsidy, developed during the Great Depression, which supports agricultural corporations to the tune of more than $10 billion a year.

Back in Canada I used to teach our department’s course in public economics, and would present to students a gem from the mayor of Moncton (I have lost the source – so I am working from memory): the Canadian government was about to close the CN railyards there, finding it an expense that had no good economic rationale. The mayor said, “the government wastes money all over the country; we are just asking for our share of the waste.” That the government wastes money in various subsidies across industries is not the way to justify increased arts spending. We really should have a second look at agri-business subsidies though.

Federal funding for the arts is largely allocated through the National Endowment for the Arts, or N.E.A., a beleaguered and consistently underfunded agency. The N.E.A. provides funding only for exhibitions and projects, and for fiscal year 2024, its allocated budget is $211 million for the entire country, which is less than the amount allocated by New York City for culture for the same year.

The NEA is not what I would call beleaguered. It has a steady budget, which has increased, in real terms, slowly over the past ten years. It took a big hit back in 1995, but, that was back in 1995.

And that New York City has a larger publicly funded cultural budget is a feature, not a bug, of the American system. This is a great big and diverse country, and it makes a lot of sense for a significant amount of the NEA budget to go to state and regional arts councils, who in turn funnel spending to local organizations, who can respond with much more local sense to what the community would like to fund. Public support for the arts is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean the priority ought to be to increase the amount allocated to arts organizations nationally out of DC.

The N.E.A. is also a constant target of party politics over questions of content and appropriateness. Bad-faith actors earn political points by identifying the most controversial art exhibit in the country and using it as a cudgel to make all funding untenable. Political backlash over several N.E.A.-funded initiatives, including a 1989 exhibit of the photograph “Immersion (Piss Christ)” by Andres Serrano, who had received a small N.E.A. grant, led to attempts to defund the agency.

Yes, there are bad-faith actors in American politics. I teach this controversy to my graduate students in arts policy. But I am teaching them about events from before they were born. That the Serrano exhibit was thirty-five years ago tells us something about the current state of affairs: when was the last time you saw a news story about the National Endowment for the Arts? It is not a “constant target”. I work in a university – their weapons are turned in my direction now.

That’s why we need federal infrastructure funding for facilities, salaries and other infrastructural needs that can be delivered directly to institutions through a separate grant system. Infrastructure funding is plentiful and appealing across party lines; in 2021, in a bipartisan bill, the federal government allocated $1.2 trillion to national infrastructure projects over five years. If even 0.5 percent of those funds — $6 billion, or $1.2 billion annually over the same length of time — were marked to keep the lights on and pay salaries at the physical facilities that incubate, develop and present culture across the country, it would radically reshape our national cultural landscape.

I just don’t see the logic in this. The NEA is a “constant target” and so all we need is a different federal funding program? Would it also have peer review? Why would it not also draw complaints from the political world? And, again, the argument that the government spends lots of money on other things is not an argument for increased arts funding.

As with infrastructure projects such as the building and maintenance of highways, funding cultural institutions will directly support employment: Culture in the United States employs about five million people and pumps about $1 trillion into the economy annually.

No, no, no. “Economic impact” is not an argument for public spending on anything. It is junk economics. Advocates for the arts: just stop doing this.

…it could defang some of the most pernicious culture-war arguments against arts funding, since it’s much harder to object to paying to fix a museum’s leaky roof than to paying to exhibit a photograph.

Well, maybe. But there is a lot unanswered here. Who decides which museum has the roof most in need of fixing? How do we know such a bill would be in any way equitable?

And would it solve the problem of funding controversial art? On that I’m not sure. When Ms. Raicovich stepped down from her position at the Queens Museum, we read:

“There are so many big things that art and culture have to contend with that are so wrong in the world,” Ms. Raicovich said in a telephone interview. “That’s where my focus and energy needs to be, and at the end of the day, I just felt that my vision and that of the board weren’t in enough alignment to get that done.”

There was not one specific precipitating event, Ms. Raicovich said, though she did mention that some board members had objected to her decision to close the museum on Donald J. Trump’s Inauguration Day. The museum instead invited members of the community in to make protest posters, buttons and banners.

In addition, Ms. Raicovich said, she recently proposed to the board that the museum — in collaboration with other institutions — consider becoming a kind of sanctuary space that connects immigrants with social services. “It was made very clear to me that that was not something that was of interest,” she said.

Now, if this is a direction the board of a museum wants to take, and believes it is consistent with the mission of the institution, then that’s fine. But I’m not sure how long this proposed new “infrastructure spending” would last in such a world. I don’t want the 1990s “culture wars” to return either, but, as in that era, a result would have to be a clause something like what the NEA created in the 1990s, a proviso that grant recipients are not to frighten the horses. Even when there are so many things wrong with the world.

Maybe there could be funding for museums that have that old-school notion of exhibiting great art as a priority. But the highways department doesn’t get to protest the inauguration of a president they don’t like, and neither would a museum receiving “infrastructure” funding be able to.

I wrote a book about making the case, or not, for public funding of the arts. It needed book-length treatment because the arts are not like ordinary public infrastructure: art museums, live theatre, the symphony and opera and ballet are minority tastes – a well-off minority at that – and it is a challenge, though not impossible, to find justifications for taxing people who have no interest in any of these arts to fund them. Highways and water systems and internet-connectivity are different – there is a very broad consensus that we need these things. We cannot evade this distinction simply by calling arts subsidies “infrastructure”. This hints at trying to slip by the public, keeping the spending in a place where it is hidden by the crowd of spending on other projects. To really justify to the American public increased government spending on the arts, we need something more than this.

Cross-posted on Substack: Arm’s Length | Michael Rushton | Substack