Help the Arts By Ending Taxpayer Subsidies to the Arts

“Art should be immune from politics,” said actor/comedian Greg Proops last week on Fox News’ late-night banter show, Red Eye.

By that, he meant not that art should be apolitical, but that it should not be subject to political (rather than market-based) decision-making.

Although government subsidies for the arts have deep roots in history — the Medici and the Borgia families supported Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci even as they were killing each other and poisoning their own relatives, Renaissance or not — that does not mean these are legitimate uses of taxpayer money. Arts funding is not a necessary or proper function of government. State funding of the arts simply politicizes art, theatre, and music, which should succeed or fail on their own merits.

This issue came to light this weekend when complaints were levied against an art exhibit soon to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Virginia Beach.

Ben Loyola, a member of the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission, found work by one of the artists offensive. According to a report on WAVY-TV:

“Look at this, she’s got a saw in her hand cutting off a piece of ham with the words on the ham ‘Corpus Christi.’ That is Latin for body of Christ, and the hand is dropping down and eaten by rats.” Loyola says. He also pointed out that the girl is wearing a first communion dress with a crucifix around her neck, and a figure of Jesus on a bottle of wine. Also there’s a rabbit pouring a teapot with blood is coming out.

(I looked at the same surrealist painting by Mark Ryden that drew Loyola’s attention and saw it as a bizarre re-interpretation of the tea party scene in Alice in Wonderland.)

The report notes that “Loyola only cares about this because MOCA gets $120,000 in taxpayer money which is 26% of his commission’s budget” and that he has contacted the Virginia Beach Commonwealth’s Attorney “and wants him to confirm whether the art show is obscene or pornographic.”

Just to be clear, I believe there is no question that the arts deserve to thrive. My own participation in the arts dates back to high school and college, where I acted, directed, and designed for the theatre and sang in the choir. For 15 years, I was entertainment editor of The Metro Herald, an African-American weekly newspaper in Alexandria, reviewing music, film, and drama and interviewing a range of actors, composers, directors, and designers. I have been a booster and fan of Virginia-based arts organizations like the Tony Award-winning Signature Theatre in Arlington and Live Arts in Charlottesville. I even briefly served on the Arlington County Arts Commission. I feel compelled to say all this in order to preempt those who want to mischaracterize my opposition to government funding of the arts as the policy position of a philistine. To the contrary, I strongly believe the arts will thrive, resulting in more independence and creativity, when they are free of government interference.

Whether painting and sculpture, music and drama, or literature and folk art, humanistic pursuits contribute to our larger culture and make our lives richer and more challenging. But acknowledging this is not the same as admitting that the arts deserve to be underwritten by taxpayers rather than by private, voluntary donors.

In his 1998 book, In Praise of Commercial Culture, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen noted that “art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles. In the field of art new masterpieces usually bring aesthetic revolutions, which tend to offend majority opinion or go over its head. In the field of politics we seek stability, compromise, and consensus. This same conservatism, so valuable in politics, stifles beauty and innovation in art.”

Cowen goes on to say that “government involvement in cultural preservation involves costs beyond the immediate tax burden – state support makes the arts more bureaucratic and less dynamic.”

The marketplace is inherently flexible; government is inherently sclerotic. Just as markets for food, furniture, and fashion adjust readily to the needs and wants of consumers, so too do markets for the arts. Arts organizations that rely on government funding find themselves either stultified by the slow pace of political decisionmaking, or they end up paying obeisance to their political masters — or both. “He that pays the piper, calls the tune,” applies precisely here. Government funding always comes with strings attached.

When an arts organization — or any non-profit, for that matter — relies too heavily on government, it has to submit to that government’s wishes. Officials like Loyola can make demands or threats. There is no other government to beg from. When the organization relies, instead, on private donors, it can be more flexible. If one donor objects to what the organization does (or wants to do), it can turn to any number of alternative donors. If the Ford Foundation dislikes your project, the Rockefeller Foundation or the Koch brothers might jump at the chance to fund it. Dependence on government forecloses this flexibility.

The fact is, arts organizations can and do survive without government subsidies. Film and television are fully commercial — though both will suck at the taxpayers’ teat when it is offered to them — and Broadway is gaining a windfall from the musical Hamilton alone. Charlottesville’s Live Arts, mentioned above, built its theatre complex without any help from the public treasury, unlike the nearby Paramount, which took hundreds of thousands of dollars from local and state governments for its restoration earlier in this century. There are hundreds of private art museums in the United States, from Crystal Bridges in Arkansas (the legacy of Sam Walton’s Walmart fortune) to the Getty Museum inn Los Angeles (thanks to Big Oil).

The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), which does not directly support creative or performing arts endeavors but gives grants to non-profits engaged in the study and promotion of the arts and humanities (including history and folk life), gets just 15 percent of its budget from the state government. That’s still too much but I find it encouraging that most of the rest comes from private sources.

VFH chairman Rob Vaughan told me in an interview in 2011 that

the foundation has “a very active private giving program. Our private giving has increased over the past five years significantly.”

Even before five years ago, he said, private giving “was getting better and better,” but added that in the past half-decade, “we flipped, actually, from being about 60 to 65 percent either federal or state funding to being about 60-plus percent private funding.”

If there is any role for government money in the arts, it is in supporting arts education in government schools. In this, I agree with former Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser, who once told me that, when he talks to legislators, he focuses on “arts education more than I do on performances or exhibitions because, frankly, the money they can provide for arts education [and] the leadership they can provide is more important.” (He also noted that he was barred by statute from directly lobbying for the Kennedy Center itself.)

Because of changes in the economy, he explained, citing (incorrectly, as it happens) the loss of manufacturing industries that generate middle class jobs,

we have “to train people to participate in the creative economy,” which requires that students “exercise their creative muscles in schools” through arts education programs.

That, he said, is “something we can do very inexpensively. To save a few bucks here and there per student and to cut out everything that doesn’t allow them, I think, to become fully functioning members of our economy, I think is really crazy.”

Now, of course, local, state, and federal funding for arts education will still result in meddling by politicians. There will still be calls to cancel high school productions of West Side Story or The Laramie Project, for instance. School boards shun controversy, so they prefer anodyne pablum, even if that undermines the educational purpose of arts projects.

The purpose of the arts — whether painting, sculpture, music, or theatre — is to induce thinking. Sometimes those thoughts are light and happy, sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes simply challenging. For arts organizations to lay themselves open to censorship by reliance on public money is, I think, an error in judgment, one that is all too common.

We can help reduce this error by telling our legislators — serving on boards of supervisors and city councils, the General Assembly, and the Congress — to cut arts funding from the budget. Taxpayers and artists both will benefit.

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