Should government subsidise the arts and sports?
No.
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I completely agree.
Are you trying to encourage the British spelling of subsidize?
Philanthropy is not an essential function of government.
Local governments have had some great success in revitalizing neighborhoods by offering incentives to artists to move in. It's cheap, too.
On the national level the arts budget is miniscule. It's money I feel a whole lot better spending than what we spend to butcher Afghan wedding parties or to waterboard cabdrivers, but maybe this is the Age of the Warmongering Cheapskates.
This country spends more government money putting up advertisements for Baby Jeezus at Christmas time than it does supporting the arts.
I almost completely agree... I'm okay with a small amount of art subsidy, though it's not something I would spend a lot of time fighting for.
ML&J - That fact that some money is spent unwisely is not justification for spending more money on anything else... the two are entirely unrelated. We should try to spend all of our money wisely.
As Sir Humphrey Appleby once said "We do not subsidize what people want [sports, in this case]. If people want something they will pay for it. Our jobs are to subsidize what they should want."
Since you can't cut a coasian bargain with every person enjoying a public work of art, isn't there a market failure?
If the size of the market failure is eclipsed by the expected size of the government failure involved in "fixing" it, which it is, then it is better to do nothing.
Indeed, this is true of most market failures.
So sad.
I'll agree it's bad to invest in art when we eliminate all corporate tax breaks from the tax code and stop investing in machine guns.
But I'm married to a jazz musician. Pretty much the only benefit we've gotten from public investment in the arts is a paid gig in Montreal for the Carnival, courtesy of the ME Dept. of Tourism, and a few interviews on the radio of college stations that may or may not have public funding.
We also pay a lot of taxes; and I'd be delighted if more of those taxes went to pay for and support artists; for I know a lot of gifted people who are at the mercy of libertarians and their theories of economic evolution.
MLJ and Zic,
Perhaps we Warmongering Cheapskates can find some modus vivendi mutually acceptable to the International Brotherhood of Starving Artists, Garret Dwellers and Freelance Bohos?
I propose a program whereby the U.S. government subsidizes the export and income of self-designated, unemployed artists of all kinds to rural Afghanistan where the stipends to be provided would afford them a much more handsome standard of living than that achieveable on the mean streets of NYC, SF, etc. Why the cost of living in the Afghan outback is reputed to be even lower than it is in Indiana! No industrial pollution! Everything - simply everything - is organic and biodegradeable! And the weed and smack are said to be plentiful and laughably cheap!
The Taliban forbade representational art and all forms of music as un-Islamic. Now that less draconian rules apply, there must be enormous pent-up demand for all manner of painterly and strummerly endeavours, yes?
With such boundless vistas beckoning those who must - simply must - follow their muses, I predict clamorous throngs wishing to leave oppressive bourgeois fascist AmeriKKKa for the unspoiled wilds of Helmand and its simple, art-starved tribesmen.
Earnest Iconoclast writes: "ML&J - That fact that some money is spent unwisely is not justification for spending more money on anything else... the two are entirely unrelated. We should try to spend all of our money wisely."
Yes we should, but since we never have (and most likely never will) I'll still say that quibbling over insignificant spending on the arts is about the very last thing an honest critic of government spending should do. Yet I see a lot of it, and I think that's because the yahoos on the right think that good art matches the couch.
How much federal money is given to the NEA each year - $100 to $150 million, somewhere in that range? That much money probably gets stolen in Iraq each month.
Dick Eagleson writes: "The Taliban forbade representational art and all forms of music as un-Islamic. Now that less draconian rules apply, there must be enormous pent-up demand for all manner of painterly and strummerly endeavours, yes?"
Was your mom psychic, Dick? She was very prescient when naming you.
Unfortunately no such opportunities exist in Afghanistan, because your boy Dumbya has screwed the pooch there, too, and most of the country is still run by the Taliban. So much for that "success story."
What are the arts?
Do the academic humanities count as art? Where's the line? Do we fund English Departments at universities? Or should they all be private (in some fashion or other)? Does not funding the arts mean we don't fund any programs that teach artistic skills to children (whatever those skills may be)?
Actually, in in similar vein, should we fund the sciences? In particular should we fund useless subjects, such as the more estoric corners of theoretical physics (i.e. the ones that will never have any practical benefit)?
"I know a lot of gifted people who are at the mercy of libertarians and their theories of economic evolution."
Zic, unless your gifted friends are being cornered at cocktail parties, I doubt they are at the mercy of any libertarians. That would imply that we held some sort of political power.
There are plenty of people creating art every day. Graphic artists and pop musicians do pretty well from what I understand. But they're being funded privately by people who actually want their product, so I guess that doesn't count.
DDP says: "Graphic artists and pop musicians do pretty well from what I understand."
Some of them do, some of them don't. What's your point?
But it's good to see someone use "pop musicians" again. Has that phrase been hiding in your attic for 30 years or what?
What is left of past eras and civilizations? Their economic theory, business practices? We read Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Plato, collect Rembrandt, DaVinci, and Roman pottery. What will we leave behind? The market sells what most people will buy, how many of history's great artists would pass that test? Let government subsidize what the market cannot, in this case art.
Scott
"How many of history's great artists would pass that test"?
Pretty much all of them - art that no one wants tends to not survive long, if it is produced at all. Van Gogh was the exception, not the rule.
Dick
Nice comment, and not just because it hit LMJ on the surly bone.
I agree. What is the last sports stadium in the United States that wasn't publicly funded? Wrigley Field?
Welfare for me but not for thee.
Perhaps the value of public art is as hard to pin down as the value of a start-up company going for it's first round of venture funding; certainly the worth is greater then the tiny amount we spend to support it. In most smaller communities, it gets limited to the uses folks like Dick approve of -- monuments for dead soldiers.
But when those who would take away freedom grab political power, among the first things they do is imprison the artists, the writers, the free thinkers. In the former Soviet Union, when men and women couldn't talk about freedom with words, they did it with jazz.
We should support art and artists, in part, because we don't understand the value of what they do, how they reflect our culture back to us. We should pay for art because, as Scott pointed out, it is what survives that speaks for us.
(And a note, some of the posters here seem to think "art" is limited to paint on a canvas. They also demonstrate a limited Euro-centric understanding even of the medium of paint. I wonder if this ignorance is because there's so little spending on art, artists, museums, and teaching art in schools.)
I completely agree that the state should not subsidize or otherwise fund "artists".
But what about the nation's heritage? Landmarks, important buildings, institutions like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, etc?
It's OK to fund those, right?
I don't mind government funding for the arts as long as it is a small percent of the total funding for any organization. Maybe a theater can get a grant for a specific project, or for new equipment. I wouldn't even mind a government-funded venue that could be used by lots of different arts organizations.
But if the government (especially the federal government in this country) becomes the primary source of funding for a large group of arts organizations, we can expect to see federal bureaucrats attempting to "steer" the content of the art that gets produced. That's something I'd rather avoid. The current system of many diverse funding sources, mostly private, seems to produce a pretty good range of artistic content.
We may not explicitly read the past business practices or economic or political theory of past civilizations (actually, many of us do) but we are LIVING them every day. Our society is the result of thousands of years of people trying out different systems and keeping bits and pieces of them.
ML&J - Given that we're all just here complaining about the government as a sort of hobby, it doesn't really matter how "useful" or "important" what we're complaining about is. If you want to actually make a difference, go and bother politicians or special interest groups or something. Posting here is interesting and/or entertaining but probably useless. Even if we were making a difference, there is plenty of room for people to talk about different things without everyone having to talk only about the "biggest" problem.
Oh, and I HATE the fact that we subsidize millionaires in the form of sports stadiums. My city didn't just give them the usual tax breaks and good deals on everything, but has been building public transportation around the stadiums and not around commuter traffic.
Earnest Iconoclast writes: "I HATE the fact that we subsidize millionaires in the form of sports stadiums. My city didn't just give them the usual tax breaks and good deals on everything, but has been building public transportation around the stadiums and not around commuter traffic."
I don't mind a city/state providing infrastructure help for a stadium in the form of highway access and that sort of thing. I can even see the sense in providing short-term tax breaks if the purpose is to revitalize an urban wasteland. But actually paying for the construction and enriching already-rich people is basically insane.
Of course this wasn't mentioned much when Dumbya was running, but as owner of the Texas Rangers he ended up becoming one of the biggest welfare recipients ever as he hornswoggled stadium funding out of the public.
Completely disagree. Who the hell wants to live in a society that does not fund the arts? Even repressive governments have funded artistic endeavors (although generally for propoganda purposes) that still maintain their power and beauty today - Soviet Union anyone?
Maybe we can consider artistic expression a form of religous expression and start to give tax exempt status to galleries, music halls, etc...
And the arts and sports are not in the same category...
Neither sports or the arts deserve government funding- neither is an essential government function. If you are an arts lover, fund your likes yourself. Same applies to sports lovers.
If you are an arts lover, fund your likes yourself.
What if you're an arts hater, like me? Can I get some kind of subsidy for having ugly public "art" put in my path where I can't avoid looking at it?
Apologies to Megan for incorrectly spelling her name. The government should subsidize the arts but it should not subsidize sports.
The view from Europe: please do stop subsidizing the Arts and cut as much as possible from Higher Education. Schools vouchers are also good: keep that spending in check. No harm in any of this. Really. People learn a lot from TV and anyway they just need their magical "Economic Preferences" to make your markets run real smooth.
Also, if your industry ever falters, you can always sell grain and lease out your freeways...
Ta-ta now.
The view from Europe: please do stop subsidizing the Arts and cut as much as possible from Higher Education. Schools vouchers are also good: keep that spending in check. No harm in any of this. Really. People learn a lot from TV and anyway they just need their magical "Economic Preferences" to make your markets run real smooth.
Also, if your industry ever falters, you can always sell grain and lease out your freeways...
Ta-ta now.
"We should support art and artists" Zic
TR: Yes we should, but that doesn't mean the state should. Art is expression like religion or journalism. It's also a bit intangible. Government should be about tangible things. When it gets into the intangible there's too great a risk it'll start controlling it or develop a desire to. People like to say how the Greeks and Romans sponsored the arts, but they also sponsored people to do art that was little more than propaganda for the state. As did the Soviets.
I think Private Art endowments are generally preferrable and I would be happy to give my money to them. True they also have the risk of domineering behavior, but at least they have greater chance of diversity and non-coercion.
Yancey Ward:
Neither sports or the arts deserve government funding- neither is an essential government function. If you are an arts lover, fund your likes yourself. Same applies to sports lovers.
I don't see any chance that we will stop subsidizing sports stadiums any time soon, so what we're really talking about is cutting subsidies for the arts, yes? Your evenhandedness is pointless.
It's like the statement you see from libertarians every once in a while: "There should be zero public funding for transit, but it's okay for me to say that because I also support zero public funding for roads." The problem is that one might actually happen and the other is pretty much impossible. "Intellectual integrity" on the cheap.