(Jon Margolis writes political columns for VTDigger.)
[L]ike its counterparts in the other 49 states, Vermont’s arts and culture community is appalled by the Trump administration’s threat to cut off all funding for the federal government’s arts and culture agencies.
Wow! People think their own enterprises should get public money. Stop the presses!
Not that they don’t have a good case. “When you talk about what makes a community a place worth living in, you’re really talking about its art and culture,” Vermont Arts Council Executive Director Alex Aldrich said at a Statehouse news conference the other day.
Oh, that’s what we’re talking about, is it?
Maybe. But that doesn’t mean the federal government should be subsidizing it.
Then again, why shouldn’t it? The federal government subsidizes everything else: food, housing, medicine, transportation. communications, the National Football League (check the financing for those stadiums). The federal government subsidizes everything Americans hold dear. It should refuse to subsidize arts and culture only if Americans don’t hold them dear, which seems not to be the case.
In the (seemingly eternal) furor over public funding for the arts, two important truths are often forgotten. The first is that a society will either subsidize arts and culture (and science) or it will have very little of them. At least since Pericles made sure the Athenian treasury paid for building the Parthenon some 2,500 years ago, public support for the arts has been the norm.
Controversy arises only because of this infernal democracy business. Pope Julius II needed no legislative appropriation. He took Michelangelo into the Sistine Chapel, pointed to the ceiling, and said, “You paint it; I’ll pay you.” Nor did Prince Paul II Anton Esterhazy de Galantha have to get approval of a subcommittee before appointing Franz Joseph Haydn his court composer, allowing Haydn to do what he did best: create beautiful music and seduce the wives of the musicians.
What also gets forgotten is that the stuff folks get riled up about — whether Congress should appropriate money for the two national endowments (Arts and Humanities) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — is a distraction. When it comes to subsidizing arts and culture, those agencies are all but inconsequential.
Together, their budget this year is about $741 million. Contrast that with the tens of billions in annual tax expenditures resulting from the tax deductibility of contributions to artistic and cultural institutions.
When Mr. Moneybags gives $1 million to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Ballet or the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, he reduces his tax bill by a couple of hundred grand. He does not reduce federal spending. What he doesn’t pay, you do.
Pat yourself on the back. You’re helping support the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Ballet and the Joslyn Art Museum. You generous creature, you.
That means you’re also helping support the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, with exhibitions demonstrating that the universe is only a few thousand years old. Donations to it are tax-deductible. No system is perfect.
But this one arouses little opposition because it works. Museums, orchestras and ballet companies get funded, and the typical voter is unlikely to notice — much less complain about — the few cents that she doesn’t realize she is contributing to the Joslyn Art Museum. Money well spent. The Joslyn is a wonderful place.
Nor is there much dispute over the other important mechanism Americans use to subsidize arts and culture. It’s called the state university.
There are hundreds of public college and university campuses in the country, and most of them have departments of either theater or dance or creative writing or music or painting and sculpture. Some have two or three or all of the above.
That’s thousands of professors, and a careful examination would show that not all of them have heavy teaching loads. More than a few are effectively being paid by governments (and student tuition) to compose symphonies, write novels, design stage sets, paint, sculpt and create installations.
A little sneaky, perhaps, but this system works, too. With some exceptions, people who are good at doing something are also good at teaching it. So students get good instruction, the community gets good (and some not-so-good) works of art, and the artists get to pay their bills and have health insurance. The taxpaying public has not complained.
There is no reason to suspect that the 11 full-time and part-time staff at the University of Vermont’s theater department don’t fully earn their keep. The department offers 50 courses (though not all of them every semester). But those faculty members also act, direct, design sets and costumes, and light stages locally and elsewhere, said department Chair Gregory Ramos.
“The university provides a support system to let very talented people do their work,” Ramos said. “We don’t live in a system in which artists are supported by the government. What we have here is this academic support system.”
Or maybe that support system is one way artists are in fact supported by the government.
Another way is through these federal agencies the new administration wants to defund in order to trim the federal budget by less than 0.02 percent.
This is not about the money. This is about a segment (and only a segment) of America’s new conservatism, which actively disdains art, culture and scholarship, which is so obsessed with the making of money that it blinds itself to the reality that a thriving arts scene is (among other things) good for business.
That disdain can be defended. To repeat: A society will either subsidize the arts and culture or not have much arts and culture. Somebody could make the case that the subsidy is not worth it because arts and culture aren’t worth it, and people would be better off having little of them.
That would be an honest and interesting discussion, maybe even worth a work of art.
