The Arts Don't Need Subsidies to Thrive
When the Washington Post recently honored Sidney Yates, 89, on the occasion of his retirement, the headline emphasized that he “Made His Mark on the Arts.”
Is Sidney Yates a composer? Musician? Painter? Poet? Writer?
None of the above.
He was a congressman.
Don’t laugh. In Washington, you can make your mark on the arts by chairing the subcommittee that oversees appropriations for the national endowments of the arts and humanities. From that vantage point, Yates, as he himself modestly put it, “help[ed] the arts and the humanities be the pride of the country.”
After 24 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (no advocate of term limits he!), the Illinois Democrat gave up his office. His retirement was taken as a blow to American culture because he has been, according to the Post, such a “fierce defender of the arts.” His claim to that title lies in his unflagging belief that the taxpayers should be forced to finance artistic activity—and jailed if they refuse. (Okay, the second part is never pronounced in polite company; but we all know the score.)
For Yates, the greatest threat to American art came in the 1980s when Republicans talked about cutting the funding of the endowments. There were even murmurs of abolition. “Talked” is the operative word here. They didn’t do anything. (A treatise on Republican dismantling of the welfare state would be titled Human Inaction.) The jeopardy to the endowments subsided largely because wealthy old-line Republicans feared losing the prestige they get from sitting on boards of symphony orchestras and community cultural organizations that receive federal grants.
In the silly world of Washington, if you favor forcing the taxpayers to finance artists (including those whom they find repulsive), you are a champion of the arts. If you oppose compulsion, you are an enemy of the arts, not to mention of free speech and all other forms of civilization. By any objective standard, that is of course nonsense. What do tax subsidies have to do with the artistic vitality of the American people? As for freedom of speech, forcing people to finance expression that they wouldn’t voluntarily support surely violates the First Amendment.
To hear the inside-the-beltway crowd tell it, you’d think that before the endowments were set up in the mid-1960s, America was a cultural tundra. It takes prodigious oversight to believe that. You’d have ignore such innovations as jazz, the Broadway musical, modern dance, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, bluegrass, several schools of painting, and lots of fiction and poetry. Somehow, the originators of those minor contributions managed to get along without state beneficence. Many art forms that are today considered mainstream were so on the edge in their early days that the arts bureaucrats probably wouldn’t have lowered their noses long enough to notice them. Have government subsidies produced anything approaching the greatness of the unsubsidized American arts and letters? Besides, “performance art,” the delight of lovers of chocolate and gore everywhere, it is hard to think of anything.
Great and good art doesn’t need help from the government. (Even a lot of bad art thrives without subsidy.) The freedom of citizens not to support art is not only consistent with cultural vitality, it is the key to it. How odd that the so-called champions of the arts have so little confidence that they would flourish if the taxpayers were not harnessed in their service.
Those champions are caught in their own hopeless contradiction, however: while they insist that without taxpayer support America would turn philistine, they simultaneously insist that the amount government spends is minuscule, surely too little for the troglodytes to furrow their eyebrow ridges over. Truth to tell, taxpayer support is a tiny percentage of the federal budget. But in a $1.7 tee-rillion budget, that’s true of lots of things. The subsidies are also a small percentage of what Americans spend privately on the arts.
So why the fuss?
To begin with, there is the little matter of principle. Imagine if someone proposed a small subsidy to religious institutions—no more than 64 cents per man, woman, and child—the price of two stamps before the latest postal increase. Would the quasi-socialists who are mistaken for liberals accept the argument that the amount of the subsidy is too small to bother about? One suspects that they would invoke the principle of church-state separation regardless of the paucity of the alms. When it comes to their pet projects, a similar commitment to principle is scorned. As Mayor Daley once said, there are times when it is necessary to rise above principle.
The endowments’ backers resolve the aforementioned contradiction by pointing out that the money provides leverage to summon forth big private donations. It’s the multiplier effect. The prestige of taxpayer largess apparently so impresses arts patrons, they can’t help but write checks. If so, that’s an excellent reason to abolish the endowments with dispatch. If bureaucrats are able to channel not just taxpayer money but also private benefactions to their favorite artistic causes, that is more power than a free society should tolerate. Of all places, the United States should not be proud that the government aspires to pick cultural winners. You’d think that people who were regarded as competent to pick their political officeholders would also be able to allocate their own income when it comes to the arts.
What the advocates of subsidy don’t appreciate is that culture, like language, is a spontaneous and undesigned institution. No central planner is required or desirable. Government subsidy designed to nudge private patrons in one direction or another is a step toward centralization that arts lovers should deplore. The color of government is mediocrity; why would we want it anywhere near the arts?
Throughout history the arts have flourished when artists were at liberty to offer their products to the broad or narrow market of their choosing and when art consumers were at liberty to accept or reject those products.
Artistic freedom is for both buyer and producer. The endowments must go.
