The End Of Arts Funding?

But--as the current arts-funding crisis suggests--the survival strategy might have topped itself out and ultimately killed public arts funding. By my estimation, a pure case for public funding of art for art's sake hasn't been made in more than a decade. By reducing arguments for art to economic impacts and by attaching art to laundry lists of social goods, art's been undersold, stripped of inspiration, vision and, yes, wisdom.

Playing art as economics forces you to play by economics' rules. That means drawing bigger audiences every year. That means improving your financial situation each quarter. And it means that others will continue to run their equations of profit and loss even when you'd rather they not (like now). Art may be a great economic investment, but if it's not an investment someone chooses to make, you're out of luck. Sorry, just business.

You can always tell a theater or symphony orchestra is on the ropes when it starts worrying more about getting people in the seats than it does about inspiring audiences; that's the point it has become a follower rather than a leader and that's when it slides into real trouble.

America has extraordinary artists. But for a decade now, public arts agencies that should have been promoting the best artistic vision have instead been following behind the public, trying to find a denominator that, if not lowest, is most common. The arts are not most common. The arts ought to lead. Public arts funding is important--for better or worse, money is how government signals what it thinks is important. But arts funding in America has been broken for a long time; if it doesn't find some compelling vision to inspire rather than follow, it won't just be broken, it will be gone.

Douglas McLennan is an arts reporter and critic and the editor of ArtsJournal.com

© 2003