Abstract
Why should the government be in the business of subsidizing the arts? The United States is a large nation of very diverse cultural tastes, with a robust private sector producing film and television, live and recorded music, theater and dance, and visual art. All survey data point to the highest levels of arts consumption being concentrated among the richest and most educated citizens. And public funding of artists always runs the risk of politicizing what ought to be their independent creative vision. Arguments for government support on the basis of public benefits arising from private arts consumption and production tend to be vague at best. This skeptical view is more pronounced in the United States than in other rich countries, resulting in low levels of direct public funding for the arts (though with very high levels of philanthropic support).
James Bennett is one of those skeptics, andhis Subsidizing Culture is, from beginning to end, an indictment of U.S. federal government programs in the arts, their wastefulness, their elitism, and their self-serving transfers of funds at public expense. The book focuses on three eras: the New Deal programs for writers, theaters, and artists; the Cold War (discreet) funding of abstract expressionist art and various highbrow publications; and the past fifty years of funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. In the introductory pages, he explains that he will betaking a “public choice perspective”; but if that simply means recognizing that citizens, bureaucrats, and elected officials will attempt to steer government policy toward satisfying their private preferences, then, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, we are all public choice economists now.
And therein lies the problem with the book. There is not any analysis or vision regarding arts funding by the federal government beyond describing events through the jaded lens of skepticism. Each of the three main chapters consists of a one-damned-thing-after-another history of the government programs, quoting politicians, writers and artists, and newspaper editorials, without any frame that would add to what canalready be found in the many histories already published on each of these arts policy ventures. Virtually every page contains a quote, sometimes ridiculous, from an advocate for increased arts funding (and for that funding to be entirely unrestricted), followed by some other quote in rebuttal. The tone isconstant throughout: elite New Yorkers “sniff” or “huff” that the philistines of Boise and Baton Rouge ought to subsidize the Metropolitan Opera, whether they like it or not. The author aims for a lively, non-academic, humorous style, but the effort shows, and diminishing returns quickly set in. Even he seems to tire of it. The book is three-quarters done before it reaches the election of Ronald Reagan, and recent arts policy gets little attention; the post-1995 history of the National Endowment for the Arts gets only a few pages.
The issues the author sees as of most importance get little sustained analysis. The book’s subtitle is “Taxpayer Enrichment of the Creative Class,” but it is hard to see who is being enriched by the National Endowment for the Arts. Grants to orchestras deemed worthy of funding average $25,000, a small fraction of a typical budget. Grants to writers are more generous, at $25,000 for the Literature Fellowship program, but those go to fewer than one hundred writers each year and are tremendously competitive. There are places in the government procurement process where someone might see a chance to make it rich, but it is hard to see the arts as one of those places.
It is not that there are no interesting topics worth writing about. What does analysis rooted in political economy have to say about whether arts councils can ever truly be “arm’s length”? If there is to be direct public funding, should there be considerations of “public decency” in the grants process? Is the post-1995 NEA policy of granting to arts organizations, but not individual artists (except for writers) a good one? Should the generous tax treatment of charitable deductions to the arts be subject to greater scrutiny? What should we make of former NEA chair Bill Ivey’s contention that arts policy has been too focused on nonprofits at the expense of the commercial creative sector? What does it mean for arts funding to support diversity? And, is the current fixation on “creative placemaking” at the NEA a worthwhile turn, or the promotion of the flavor-of-the-month with no obvious lasting public benefit?
In general there is too little critical thinking about arts policy in the United States (I would suggest that the UK maintains much more lively debate in this particular field), and rigorous analysis unafraid to identify poor program design and/or execution in the cultural world would be welcome. This analysis might even provide support to the case James Bennett wishes to advance: that it is practically impossible to have public support of the arts that does not lead to corruption of the art by politics, or that what potential public good there is in arts support will be captured by private interests. But Subsidizing Culture stays in the shallows, rehashing the many histories already written, and leaves to others the task of exploring the depths of American arts policy.