Comments on: Public Money and the Arts

By: How important is Art? Try giving it up. | On the Territory Blog

How important is Art? Try giving it up. | On the Territory Blog — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 07:36:30 +0000

[...] You can read the rest of his article here [...]

By: ChrisAshworth.org » Blog Archive » Toward A New Funding Model for Theater

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:36:06 +0000

[...] not sure. Because I love it, I guess. Because although I’m not convinced the arts are strictly necessary, I am convinced they’re one way we make the effort to survive worth the [...]

By: Scott Walters

Scott Walters — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:20:54 +0000

As an old person, I thank you.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:05:58 +0000

And for the record, I can’t tell if you’re trolling me or seriously proposing that old people are worthless. I’m wildly unsympathetic to either position.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:55:59 +0000

Or how about making tough and equitable calls for all the irresponsible spending, instead of deciding that billions of “wrongs” eventually do make a “right”?

I know it ain’t real practical, but I keep getting hung up on these “principle” things. Wish I could just get rid of those. It’d make life so much easier.

By: Thomas Garvey

Thomas Garvey — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:30:05 +0000

Chris, very little in the government budget is really defensible under strict utilitarian terms. Keeping old people alive, who merely consume resources, is really just sentimental, isn’t it? Yes, it is – far more sentimental than funding a high school orchestra, trust me. Maintaining a nuclear strike force that could destroy the entire planet is – well, actually, isn’t that simply insane? And I wonder, seriously – what exactly is the Dept. of “Defense” defending us from? An invasion from Mexico or Canada? Something tells me their budgets are not driven by utilitarian arguments, either. So, now that we’ve disposed of Medicare, Social Security, and the Defense budget, I think that leaves us with something like 80% of the budget to devote to the arts. NOW you can begin making those tough, but equitable arguments for them.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:45:23 +0000

I expect I’d judge the arts to be more important than some things on which the government already spends money. So I’d prioritize the dissolution of some government programs over others, certainly, but that wouldn’t mean I’d give the arts a free pass.

Tough and equitable love, man. Tough and equitable love.

By: Scott Walters

Scott Walters — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:38:13 +0000

I don’t think anyone would argue that the arts are more important than health care or social security or schools, or even as important. But there are huge swaths of government spending in areas like, say, military bands or scientific research into obscure areas or providing subsidies for US corporations. How would you put the arts in terms of those things?

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:40:08 +0000

I’m running out the door for rehearsal in a few minutes, so I’m going to pound out a response super-fast and hope I don’t mangle my ideas TOO badly:

It’s an important and worthwhile point about the meaning of “necessary”. The concept is, as you say, defined by a cultural context and in practice it is rarely a truly binary condition.

So, yes, I accept that “necessary” is in reality a sliding scale of priorities, and that assigning necessity is better modeled as assigning a position on that scale. Some stuff is clearly at the top of the list, and some stuff is clearly at the bottom, and then there’s a lot of room for debate in the middle.

Also, as you say, the scale is defined by the cultural context. The necessity of paved highways changes in the context of a culture where the wheel has not yet been invented.

But the question of cultural context is not, I think, all that relevant, because the only one that matters is the one we’re in right now. Since “necessity” can’t be absolute across time and space, then we’re not talking about some platonic ideal of necessity, and the next most obvious answer about context is: here and now.

Which leaves us trying to figure out where the arts fall on the scale in America right now. Where do we place them relative to roads and medical care and social security and schools and the armed forces in our society right now?

I submit that, right now, we have very weak reason to put them anywhere near the high end of the scale. I submit that in our current cultural context, with our current set of evidence, I feel really uncomfortable arguing for public money for the arts when our health care system is so broken. That (and other things) are so insanely far up the priority scale that, to me, the arts effectively fall into “unnecessary” territory, when it comes to Government Priorities. When it comes to Personal Priorities, well, that’s another matter. But I’m just talking about the government right now.

It’s worth noting that this perspective leaves the door open for this status to change. I’m not saying the arts are always and forever unnecessary in the eyes of the government. Just that in the current context they don’t really qualify.

Switching gears just slightly:

>I’m not actually interested in making a utilitarian claim for the arts

Well, that’s fine, but I’m not sure if any other kind of claim belongs in the realm of public policy. It could be other kinds do, but I don’t presently see it. I don’t have time to try to expound on this point, but if it’s worth an attempt I’ll try later.

By: Scott Walters

Scott Walters — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:44:11 +0000

Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, and I can sense the freedom that letting go of the “necessary” label holds. However, what a slippery word “necessary” is. As Thomas Garvey says, are nuclear weapons “Necessary”? Education? Highways? The fact is that much of the world gets by without those things, so how can they be “necessary”? That is a word that is defined by a culture. True necessity would be the bottom row of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion. That’s a pretty narrow slice of reality. But government does more than that. It is focused on increasing the public welfare.