Government Support for Artists
By Anindita Ghose • Apr 27th, 2009 • Category: The BlogThe combined impact of declining corporate sponsorship and drastic government budget cuts is producing a genuine calamity for arts organizations in the United States. In light of the economic recession, concerts, theatrical productions, art exhibitions and entire performance seasons are being canceled at an alarming rate. Public schools are losing arts programs and artists are losing grants. Numerous theaters, music venues and galleries face closure. Arts workers, too, are losing their jobs, with the current unemployment rate in the field estimated conservatively to be 12.5 percent.
Arts funding, in the first place, has never been nearly enough to match the needs of a burgeoning pool of artistic talent in all spheres. And now, to compound the long standing problem, they are fast waning. Barack Obama’s stimulus plan provides a glimmer of relief. Yet this funding consists of just $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Fifty million dollars is an embarrassingly low percentage of the total $787 billion stimulus package.
New York artists previously considered themselves lucky compared with peers in other parts of the country, because of a generous state-level organization like New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). But now, they are at a loss too: NYSCA’s budget plunged from $49.7 million in 2008 to $38.8 million this year.
Private grant giving foundations like Rockefeller and Ford are likely to divert their arts budgets to more pressing humanitarian causes that the economic recession has thrown up.
What is worrying is that this scrambling for funds is leading the art world to treat its creations as commodity. An entrepreneurial streak is a good thing. But sometimes things go overboard. What if young artists follow in the footsteps of British contemporary artist Damien Hirst? Hirst broke all sorts of norms in the art world by treating his ostentatious sculptures and installations like stocks in the share market. Six months ago, in an unprecedented and most horrific move, he bought back his own sculpture (”For the Love of God,” 2007) to keep up its “market value.”
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) created jobs for millions of American artists as part of the New Deal program. Endeavors were designed to keep painters, sculptors, and photographers employed through the tough years. This was required because great art does not materialize overnight. In order to focus on their work, artists need sustenance. A new age WPA format could be a lifeboat for artists today.
And while we wait to see what the new administration has in mind for the art world, while we petition for increased government funding for the arts, there’s something that we can do starting today. We can upon our generous selves to make that donations to the nonprofit arts center and divert our Starbucks coffee change into the subway singer’s violin casket instead.
Anindita Ghose is is a writer from Bombay, India and a 2009 graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism.
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Don’t you think that cutting funding just weeds out the less committed? I’m not saying an artist has to be willing to live as a pauper (lots of them have families to consider) but that it’s often these unforeseen difficulties with funding that make art worth producing in the first place.
I actually disagree with the argument that there is a connection between poverty and suffering and art. Certainly there are many cases when there is a correlation, but we forget that until relatively recently, most artists were funded, either independently or by patrons. Consider Leo Tolstoy or Shakespeare or the various Renaissance painters. Even now, we’ve found different ways to fund artists - a significant number of major contemporary writers (Marilynne Robinson, etc) have professorships, which is our version of patronship.
We have opposite to this not simply the stereotype of the suffering artist, but also particular examples. But do we really know that Dylan Thomas would have been a less talented poet had he not been starving? This stereotype is also almost strictly for artists, in contrast to other creative fields. There is not even the image of a the starving scientist, a field which is certainly requires an equal degree of commitment. How could Einstein have accomplished all he did, even with government funding “limiting” his commitment? Why do we have no difficulty in believing that great scientists are not limited by being paid by the government, but remain just as creative, just as independent, just as talented, while great artists are?
Daniel, sadly the starving artist cliche is widely propagated. I’m amazed often by the astute academicians and critics who play their role in it. The NYT’s Holland Cotter did so recently too, insinuating that the recession will bring out the best in artists because they will now starve: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/arts/design/15cott.html?_r=1
A month ago, another Times’ article, “Tough times call for shrewd artists”, labeled 19th century artist Thomas Sully as a sell out because he was audacious enough to turn to lucrative avenues in painting.
I agree with the first comment in the sense that I do believe that artists are inherently problem solvers and that great traumas can stimulate good art. We’ve seen that before. But to use that as a reasoning to cut funding for the Arts in the overall scheme of things is unfair. I’m totally for a Libertarian government which doesn’t fund anything apart from public law and order institutions but since that’s not the case in the United States, and since banks are getting bailed out and loads of money is going into fancy roads, a greater part of that money needs to go to public art.
I have less of a problem with Holland Cotter’s article because his (?) focus is that in the past, poor artists did exceptional things, and that this may happen again. It’s also certainly true that as a matter of course, currently, most developing artists are not wealthy, and need time and visual artists space to produce, and had the NYC economy and housing prices with them not collapsed, many might have either left the city and contributed to a different locale’s art scene, or gotten more traditional jobs. The point, I think, is not that talented artists produce because they’re poor, but that there were and are talented artists who produce despite being poor. Ted Kennedy had a wonderful line, quoting the Bible, and saying “I do not believe that “the poor you have amongst us” is a commandment.” I think the public sector has an obligation to guarantee that certain work which doesn’t have immediate benefit, from pure scientific research to artistic exploration and so forth, continues, and I have absolutely no qualms with the government doing its part.