Why would anyone vote to cut public funding for the arts?
Yesterday in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I overheard a libertarian woman (in Greater NYC? what a find!) arguing with a college hipster guy in skinny jeans. I’ve transcribed their discussion below:
SKINNY JEANS: I wish the city would pay to give more playwrights and choreographers a space to perform their shows. I also wish the city commissioned more public sculptures, performances, and murals. Can you imagine how many talented voices we’ve failed to discover? To pay for these public arts would cost most taxpayer less than a dollar a year.
LIBERTARIAN: I agree that we wouldn’t notice the bump in taxes. But here’s my hurdle: the city council only bankrolls a few art projects each year, and I don’t trust their judgment.
SJ: I love the murals and public sculptures they’ve commissioned around town.
LIB: I’m not sure you’ve seen the same public art I’ve seen. What about the new sculpture of a neon pink sunbather that the Department of Cultural Affairs installed in Long Island City? Listen, private art buyers are free to display whichever art they want in their homes. But when my tax dollars pay to install sculptures in my neighborhood, out in the open . . .
SJ: You want more say over which public art gets commissioned. Is that it?
LIB: Actually, we might be wise to defund public arts.
SJ: That would be incredibly irresponsible. The city’s ballet, theater, and museums all get help from tax money too, you know. They’ll die the day public funding dries up.
LIB: Not necessarily. You enjoy the city ballet, which means you buy tickets for performances. You’re voting with your wallet to keep the ballet solvent, and I’m doing the same. So when enough ballet fans like us buy tickets, the ballet fills its seats and balances its budget. Only 7% of their revenue comes from public funding anyway. They’d do okay without tax money.
SJ: Why risk bankrupting them because you’re upset about one bad sculpture in LIC?
LIB: Only two scenarios could bankrupt the ballet. Possibility One is that their directors mishandle their money — you know, directors giving themselves unsustainably high salaries and spending money they don’t have on opulent galas. They’d solve the problem by paying themselves less. Possibility Two is that too few New Yorkers care enough about the ballet to buy tickets. Solve that problem by moving the ballet to a humbler venue.
SJ: And by your logic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn’t need a building with Roman columns and grand staircases. But you’re missing that a world-class ballet and a world-class art museum lure tourists and businesses to our city. The city council is clever. They know every million they spend on the arts could generate two or three million because an attractive city brings in tourists who want to spend their money here. It brings business too. An attractive city lifts real estate prices, and so on.
LIB: The private sector will give people what they want. It always does.
SJ: If that’s true at all, it’s only true over the very long term. But you’d wait decades to see it play out. An entire generation or two will grow up without ballet until the right entrepreneur gets around to filling that void.
LIB: For the record, I support the ballet, so keep in mind I’m not rooting for the end of ballet, public theater, Art in the Park, or any other expression of culture. If I have one thing against the Department of Cultural Affairs, it’s that they support a very narrow brand of artists and art genres. They say, ‘We’ll route tax dollars into a few elite institutions we think deserve it.’ But why won’t they use tax dollars to subsidize popular art?
SJ: By popular art, you mean Grand Theft Auto and Marvel superhero films?
LIB: And also Norman Rockwell, Martin Scorsese, John Williams, Harper Lee, and Dr. Seuss. I get the impression the city council thinks popular art is junk food for the mind, while anything made by Richard Serra, Damien Hirst, and John Cage is healthy, wholesome, and good. They’re full of it.
SJ: No I think they’re on to something. “Difficult” contemporary art makes us better people when it prods us to understand viewpoints different from our own. Art should burn slow. It should lead to uncomfortable dialogues.
LIB: Those are your priorities. And by the way, I respect your ambition to understand viewpoints different from your own. But other people might disagree with your take on art’s purpose. Can’t art offer different benefits to different people? For example . . .
Which character would you want running your city? Based on what I heard, I sided with the young man in skinny jeans because more funding for the arts would mean more artists in total. That guy was spot on when he said markets are only efficient over the very long term. I wanted to cheer him on as he fought the good fight for more public funding. I wanted to help him flip the libertarian into an arts advocate. Her free-market prescriptions were dangerous — they threatened whole art genres and thousands of careers. And for these reasons, I prayed that policymakers would never find someone like the libertarian whispering in their ears.
Yet — and I’m afraid I may be judged harshly for what I’m about to confess — I admired that she dignified popular art.
It warmed my heart to hear someone argue that a video game, a Calvin & Hobbes comic, an artisan book cover, and a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video might all be supercharged with artistic merit. Why not? Maybe artistic tastes were like accents, meaning they were neither good nor bad, and neither admirable nor shameful. Modern art and popular art were equally virtuous.
I smiled to myself. The libertarian would have my back next time I said I liked John Singer Sargent better than Damien Hirst. I was allowed to prefer Sargent. That was the accent I grew up with, and it didn’t make me less than. I understood why she distrusted those ascot-wearing snobs — those nose-in-the-air elitists — who’d belittle her for her middlebrow tastes in art.
So while I still disagreed with her call to drop public funding for the arts, I loved that she was a friend to middlebrow and lowbrow tastes.
