Trump’s Call to Eliminate Government Art Funding

[A discussion post.] President Trump’s now-serious proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities has elicited the first round of responses ranging from Philistine! to It’s about time!

Both agencies were created in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, who said at the time:

“it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”

Half a century later, about $297 million per year is at stake.

The art establishment is naturally vehemently opposed to Trump’s plan. Caroline Elbaor argues in ArtNet:

“The elimination of both agencies would total a mere $300 million out of the allotted $1.1 trillion overall annual discretionary spending — a small amount that would still have a serious impact on cultural production, and the artists, musicians, writers, and scholars who rely on it.”

James Bovard counters in USA Today:

“The vast majority of spending for the arts comes from private pockets. America does not need a culture commissariat to give federal seals of approval to efforts that please Washington bureaucrats. There is no justice in taxing dishwashers in Arkansas to subsidize programs such as Synetic Theater’s Silent Shakespeare — in which actors gyrate and grope in lieu of delivering the richest bounty of the English language.”

Cutting the NEA was first raised seriously in the 1990s, sparked by federal funding for Robert Mapplethorpe’s gay S&M photos, Andres Serrano’s crucifix-in-urine “Piss Christ,” and other provocative pieces.

* Senator Jesse Helms then introduced a bill asking Congress to eliminate funding for obscene and offensive works. On democratic principle, he argued, it is improper to force a majority of citizens to pay taxes to fund things that are offensive to them.
* Robert Hughes argued in Time that governments should subsidize artists and promote high culture — but not impose content standards. Any such government standards, he feared, would amount to censorship and take us down the road to the ayatollahs and other dictators.
* In Newsweek, Robert Samuelson asked why we don’t also fund rodeo — pointing out that most of the subsidies goes to high-brow outlets such as symphonies and avant-garde postmodern productions, which are patronized mostly by rich people. So the government funding, he concluded, amounts to a transfer of wealth from working-class rodeo fans, for example to high-class opera fans, for example.
* In High Performance art magazine, Steven Durland countered that the “offensive” works in question were by mostly by blacks, Latinos, women, and gays — so Helms’s bill was merely a backlash by the dominant white-male-Christian-heterosexual majority protecting its cultural turf.
(Those four articles can be read here.)

The NEA survived the 1990s attempts to cut its budget, but twenty years later here we are again, and President Johnson’s initial two strong justifications for the NEA and NEH are in the harsh spotlight:

1. Is government funding really necessary, as he claimed?
2. And is it really appropriate?

The necessity claim comes from asking whether artists can support themselves in the market.

3. Should we be pessimistic about artists’ abilities to find customers and other private sources of funding for their work? Can much important art be done only by government welfare?
4. Or should we be optimistic, on the grounds that artists are creative and energetic people who can be entrepreneurial, especially in our prosperous and art-loving society?

The appropriate claim comes from judgments about the fairness of using tax dollars, given that taxes are compulsory and not voluntary payments.

5. What is the range of government “public goods” that are properly funded by taxes?
6. Does art meet that standard — that is, is art so important to society that it is moral to force people to pay for it?

Another complicating factor is that art is very close to the center of our culture wars, and much of mainstream American culture’s disdain for the art world comes from its sense that the high-art world is not only alienated from American culture but actively hostile to it. So:

7. How much will the debate over the NEA be decided on content grounds, i.e., that the NEA’s reputation for funding mostly anti-mainstream productions will, in a democratic society, make it vulnerable to democratic backlash?

What do you think?

Related:
Michael Newberry, “Support Art, Cut NEA.”
Stephen Hicks, “Why Art Became Ugly.”