by Bill Winter
Libertarian Solutions
Let's start with a pop culture quiz. Which of the following examples of art did you, personally, help pay for?
1) A "performance art" piece where a man wearing only underwear chained himself to an ATM machine in New York City.
2) A photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine, entitled "Piss Christ."
3) A one-word poem: "lighght."
4) Porn star Annie Sprinkle, ahem, pleasuring herself on stage.
5) A dead man's severed head being used as a flowerpot.
Answer: All of them.
Thanks to generous checks handed out by the art-subsidizing agencies of the federal government, you, the taxpayer, helped finance every one of those examples of modern art.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. Art is big business for Uncle Sam.
During 2003, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will spend $115.7 million of your money.
Add in the $124.5 million budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities, subsidies for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Department of Education's arts programs, and other direct appropriations, and total annual federal support for the arts amounts to $2 billion, according to the 2003 Cato Handbook for Congress.
Of course, if you read the Constitution, you'll not find any mention of government-funded arts. As Bill Kauffman noted in his 1990 Cato Policy Analysis, Subsidies to the Arts: Cultivating Mediocrity: "The Founding Fathers never envisioned federal sponsorship of the arts."
So how did we get to the point where Uncle Sam is spending $2 billion of your dollars annually on welfare for artists? Like many aspects of today's big government, it started with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1935, FDR's Works Progress Administration (WPA) launched the Federal Art, Music, Theater, and Writers Project, which paid direct subsidies to 45,000 writers, actors, musicians, and painters.
While marketed as a relief program to battle the Great Depression, the program also served another purpose: Promoting Roosevelt's quasi-socialist programs.
As Kauffman wrote, the artwork produced by these government-financed creative types "was frequently partisan, pro-New Deal propaganda."
After Congress shut down the program in 1939, Uncle Sam got out of the arts business until the Cold War heated up. In the 1950s, U.S. politicians began to voice concern that the country was falling behind the Soviet Union in an "Arts Race."
With the Communists boasting about their massive government-financed arts programs, U.S. Rep. Frank Thompson (R-NJ) fretted in 1956, "We can't afford to do less than the Russians in this field. We'll lose our shirts if we do." (How grim Soviet Realism-style, proletariat-on-a-tractor artwork posed a threat to the U.S. was never explained.)
By 1960, the Democratic Party's Platform supported a federal advisory agency to promote the development of "cultural resources." In 1961, President John Kennedy picked up the artistic torch, and argued for federal subsidies for the New York City Metropolitan Opera.
Following Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson prodded Congress to create the National Council on the Arts (1964) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1965).
The NEA started off modestly, with a budget of $2.9 million. However, like all government programs, it grew relentlessly, and by 1992 (its high-dollar mark), was spending over $175 million on government-approved music, dance, plays, folk art, writing, sculpture, painting, and photography.
However, as its budget grew, the NEA started attracting more attention from Republicans. Were right-wing warriors offended that the NEA was not authorized by the Constitution? No, they were outraged that the NEA was subsidizing the wrong kind of art.
Led by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and soon-to-be House Speaker New Gingrich, the GOP railed against tax-funded obscene, homoerotic, and sacrilegious artwork. They were particularly incensed by Andres Serrano (creator of the infamous "Piss Christ" photo), Robert Mapplethorpe (who pioneered new uses for bullwhips), and Karen Finely (who covered her naked body in chocolate syrup).
As Gingrich explained, "Taxpayers [should not have to] subsidize the weirdest thing you can imagine."
To put a halt to such weird art, Helms introduced a bill that required the NEA to consider "general standards of decency" when doling out money. Congress passed the law in 1990. In 1998, in an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional.
(In response, Holly Hughes -- an artist whose funding had been cut by the NEA -- articulated her principled argument against Helms' legislation. In a 2000 performance piece, Preaching to the Perverted, she kicked a cardboard box labeled "Jesse Helms" and shouted, "F**kin' a**hole!")
Wait a second: Wasn't the GOP going to get the government completely out of the art business, as part of their post-1994 Republican Revolution? Didn't they promise to abolish the NEA?
Well, yes. And in 1996, they worked up the gumption to cut the NEA's funding by 40% -- to about $99 million. It stayed at that level for five years, before starting to creep upward again.
By 2001, Republicans had apparently given up the battle. With the NEA "reformed" -- handing out money for folk arts, youth-art programs, and "community arts partnerships" in rural areas -- the GOP had largely made its peace with welfare for artists.
The NEA's new pork-barrel programs apparently helped, too.
As CNN wryly noted in 2002 when House Republicans voted to increase NEA funding by another $10 million: "All politics is local."
Among the Republicans who voted for the funding boost were Rep. Michael Rogers (R-MI), whose district got $40,000 from the NEA for a folk festival; Rep. Anne Northup (R-KY), whose district got $15,000 for a children's theater; and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), whose district got $12,500 for a symphony tour of rural communities.
(For Republicans, "abolish" is apparently a synonym for "temporarily reduce funding until they start sending more cash to my constituents.")
For Libertarians, the debate about the NEA has nothing to do with pork-barrel projects or indecency. As far as Libertarians are concerned, you have the absolute right to cover yourself in chocolate syrup and sell tickets, and adults have the right to pay to see the spectacle. Just don't ask for tax dollars to buy the chocolate.
And there's the crux of the difference between Republicans and Libertarians. Republicans ask: "Is this obscene?" Libertarians ask: "Is this a legitimate function of government?" In the case of the NEA, the answer is clearly: "No."
But the argument against the NEA -- and, indeed, against all government funding for the arts -- goes beyond mere principle. There are also a number of practical reasons to oppose it:
1) Federal subsidies aren't needed for the arts to flourish.
Supporters of the NEA will frequently argue that federal funding is vitally necessary for the arts. That's simply not true. Government money is a drop in the bucket compared to what Americans voluntarily give to the arts.
According to the Cato Handbook, the NEA's budget is a mere 1% of the $11.5 billion per year contributed to the arts by foundations, private corporations, and individuals. It's an even smaller percentage of the $53 billion that is annually spent on the nonprofit arts industry.
And that number, in turn, is dwarfed by the total dollar amount that Americans spend on entertainment of all kinds, which PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated will hit $443 billion in 2004.
Given Uncle Sam's insignificant contribution to the arts, the Cato Handbook noted, "Surely [artists] will survive without whatever portion of the NEA's budget gets out of the Washington bureaucracy and into the hands of actual artists or arts institutions."
American artists also seemed to get along just fine before the NEA came along.
As the Heritage Foundation's Edwin J. Feulner noted, "The NEA didn't exist before 1965, but that didn't stop Tennessee Williams and Frederic Remington from blessing us with their works."
2) Federal subsidies force the poor and middle class to pay for rich people's art.
It's no surprise that Washington, DC bureaucrats tend to fund art that Washington, DC bureaucrats are most likely to attend: Museums, operas, symphonies, and so on.
That's why, in a 1997 report for the Heritage Foundation, Laurence Jarvik, Ph.D. wrote: "NEA grants offer little more than a subsidy to the well-to-do."
The 2003 Cato Handbook for Congress made the same argument: "Since art museums, symphony orchestras, humanities scholarships, and public television and radio are enjoyed predominantly by people of greater than-average income and education, the federal cultural agencies oversee a fundamentally unfair transfer of wealth from the lower classes up."
The NEA sometimes argues that its programs bring art to the poor, who might otherwise not be able to afford it. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Economist Dick Netzer acknowledged that NEA programs had "failed to increase the representation of low-income people in audiences.''
As the Cato Handbook noted: "In other words, lower-income people are not interested in the kind of entertainment they're forced to support; they prefer to put their money into forms of art often sneered at by the cultural elite. Why must they continue to finance the pleasures of the affluent?"
3) Federal subsidies politicize art.
In recent decades, we've seen conservatives denounce NEA-funded "obscene" art, liberals denounce the Library of Congress for an exhibit on pre-Civil War slave life, and veterans denounce the Smithsonian Institute for a display on the Hiroshima bombing.
Novelist George Garrett predicted this when he said, "Whenever the government is involved in the arts, then it is bound to be a political and social business, a battle between competing factions."
Along the same lines, when bureaucrats hand out funding, decisions will frequently be made not for artistic reasons -- but for political or ideological reasons.
Some examples: The Heartland Institute's Laurence Jarvik reported that the NEA hands out money based on political correctness (in 1993, Roger Kimball reported that the agency made grants based on "quotas and politically correct thinking"), or shock value (in 1996, the Phoenix Art Museum hosted an NEA-funded exhibit featuring an American flag in a toilet), or energetic lobbying (Alice Goldfarb Marquis estimated that half of NEA funds go to groups that lobby the government for more money).
How do we prevent this? In a 1995 speech to the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz offered a simple solution: "To avoid political battles over how to spend the taxpayers' money, we would be well advised to establish the separation of art and state."
Conclusion
Let's end with a pop culture quiz. Which of the following pieces of art did the government help pay for?
1) The greatest American novel of the 20th century (according to the Board of the Modern Library): The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
2) The best-selling album of all time: The Eagles Greatest Hits.
3) The longest-running Broadway play of all time: Cats.
4) The highest-valued American painting of all time (sold at auction for $30 million): Lost On The Grand Banks, by Winslow Homer.
5) The highest-grossing movie of all time: Titanic.
Answer: None of them. When individuals value a particular artistic work, they are happy to pay a fair-market price to acquire it or attend it. It's only when people don't value something enough to pay for it that the government must step in.
In the satirical British TV show, Yes, Minister, one character noted that art subsidies don't need to be handed out for "what the people want. It is for what the people don't want. If they want something, they'll pay for it themselves."
Exactly.
Libertarian Solutions
Let's start with a pop culture quiz. Which of the following examples of art did you, personally, help pay for?
1) A "performance art" piece where a man wearing only underwear chained himself to an ATM machine in New York City.
2) A photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine, entitled "Piss Christ."
3) A one-word poem: "lighght."
4) Porn star Annie Sprinkle, ahem, pleasuring herself on stage.
5) A dead man's severed head being used as a flowerpot.
Answer: All of them.
Thanks to generous checks handed out by the art-subsidizing agencies of the federal government, you, the taxpayer, helped finance every one of those examples of modern art.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. Art is big business for Uncle Sam.
During 2003, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will spend $115.7 million of your money.
Add in the $124.5 million budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities, subsidies for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Department of Education's arts programs, and other direct appropriations, and total annual federal support for the arts amounts to $2 billion, according to the 2003 Cato Handbook for Congress.
Of course, if you read the Constitution, you'll not find any mention of government-funded arts. As Bill Kauffman noted in his 1990 Cato Policy Analysis, Subsidies to the Arts: Cultivating Mediocrity: "The Founding Fathers never envisioned federal sponsorship of the arts."
So how did we get to the point where Uncle Sam is spending $2 billion of your dollars annually on welfare for artists? Like many aspects of today's big government, it started with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1935, FDR's Works Progress Administration (WPA) launched the Federal Art, Music, Theater, and Writers Project, which paid direct subsidies to 45,000 writers, actors, musicians, and painters.
While marketed as a relief program to battle the Great Depression, the program also served another purpose: Promoting Roosevelt's quasi-socialist programs.
As Kauffman wrote, the artwork produced by these government-financed creative types "was frequently partisan, pro-New Deal propaganda."
After Congress shut down the program in 1939, Uncle Sam got out of the arts business until the Cold War heated up. In the 1950s, U.S. politicians began to voice concern that the country was falling behind the Soviet Union in an "Arts Race."
With the Communists boasting about their massive government-financed arts programs, U.S. Rep. Frank Thompson (R-NJ) fretted in 1956, "We can't afford to do less than the Russians in this field. We'll lose our shirts if we do." (How grim Soviet Realism-style, proletariat-on-a-tractor artwork posed a threat to the U.S. was never explained.)
By 1960, the Democratic Party's Platform supported a federal advisory agency to promote the development of "cultural resources." In 1961, President John Kennedy picked up the artistic torch, and argued for federal subsidies for the New York City Metropolitan Opera.
Following Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson prodded Congress to create the National Council on the Arts (1964) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1965).
The NEA started off modestly, with a budget of $2.9 million. However, like all government programs, it grew relentlessly, and by 1992 (its high-dollar mark), was spending over $175 million on government-approved music, dance, plays, folk art, writing, sculpture, painting, and photography.
However, as its budget grew, the NEA started attracting more attention from Republicans. Were right-wing warriors offended that the NEA was not authorized by the Constitution? No, they were outraged that the NEA was subsidizing the wrong kind of art.
Led by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and soon-to-be House Speaker New Gingrich, the GOP railed against tax-funded obscene, homoerotic, and sacrilegious artwork. They were particularly incensed by Andres Serrano (creator of the infamous "Piss Christ" photo), Robert Mapplethorpe (who pioneered new uses for bullwhips), and Karen Finely (who covered her naked body in chocolate syrup).
As Gingrich explained, "Taxpayers [should not have to] subsidize the weirdest thing you can imagine."
To put a halt to such weird art, Helms introduced a bill that required the NEA to consider "general standards of decency" when doling out money. Congress passed the law in 1990. In 1998, in an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional.
(In response, Holly Hughes -- an artist whose funding had been cut by the NEA -- articulated her principled argument against Helms' legislation. In a 2000 performance piece, Preaching to the Perverted, she kicked a cardboard box labeled "Jesse Helms" and shouted, "F**kin' a**hole!")
Wait a second: Wasn't the GOP going to get the government completely out of the art business, as part of their post-1994 Republican Revolution? Didn't they promise to abolish the NEA?
Well, yes. And in 1996, they worked up the gumption to cut the NEA's funding by 40% -- to about $99 million. It stayed at that level for five years, before starting to creep upward again.
By 2001, Republicans had apparently given up the battle. With the NEA "reformed" -- handing out money for folk arts, youth-art programs, and "community arts partnerships" in rural areas -- the GOP had largely made its peace with welfare for artists.
The NEA's new pork-barrel programs apparently helped, too.
As CNN wryly noted in 2002 when House Republicans voted to increase NEA funding by another $10 million: "All politics is local."
Among the Republicans who voted for the funding boost were Rep. Michael Rogers (R-MI), whose district got $40,000 from the NEA for a folk festival; Rep. Anne Northup (R-KY), whose district got $15,000 for a children's theater; and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), whose district got $12,500 for a symphony tour of rural communities.
(For Republicans, "abolish" is apparently a synonym for "temporarily reduce funding until they start sending more cash to my constituents.")
For Libertarians, the debate about the NEA has nothing to do with pork-barrel projects or indecency. As far as Libertarians are concerned, you have the absolute right to cover yourself in chocolate syrup and sell tickets, and adults have the right to pay to see the spectacle. Just don't ask for tax dollars to buy the chocolate.
And there's the crux of the difference between Republicans and Libertarians. Republicans ask: "Is this obscene?" Libertarians ask: "Is this a legitimate function of government?" In the case of the NEA, the answer is clearly: "No."
But the argument against the NEA -- and, indeed, against all government funding for the arts -- goes beyond mere principle. There are also a number of practical reasons to oppose it:
1) Federal subsidies aren't needed for the arts to flourish.
Supporters of the NEA will frequently argue that federal funding is vitally necessary for the arts. That's simply not true. Government money is a drop in the bucket compared to what Americans voluntarily give to the arts.
According to the Cato Handbook, the NEA's budget is a mere 1% of the $11.5 billion per year contributed to the arts by foundations, private corporations, and individuals. It's an even smaller percentage of the $53 billion that is annually spent on the nonprofit arts industry.
And that number, in turn, is dwarfed by the total dollar amount that Americans spend on entertainment of all kinds, which PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated will hit $443 billion in 2004.
Given Uncle Sam's insignificant contribution to the arts, the Cato Handbook noted, "Surely [artists] will survive without whatever portion of the NEA's budget gets out of the Washington bureaucracy and into the hands of actual artists or arts institutions."
American artists also seemed to get along just fine before the NEA came along.
As the Heritage Foundation's Edwin J. Feulner noted, "The NEA didn't exist before 1965, but that didn't stop Tennessee Williams and Frederic Remington from blessing us with their works."
2) Federal subsidies force the poor and middle class to pay for rich people's art.
It's no surprise that Washington, DC bureaucrats tend to fund art that Washington, DC bureaucrats are most likely to attend: Museums, operas, symphonies, and so on.
That's why, in a 1997 report for the Heritage Foundation, Laurence Jarvik, Ph.D. wrote: "NEA grants offer little more than a subsidy to the well-to-do."
The 2003 Cato Handbook for Congress made the same argument: "Since art museums, symphony orchestras, humanities scholarships, and public television and radio are enjoyed predominantly by people of greater than-average income and education, the federal cultural agencies oversee a fundamentally unfair transfer of wealth from the lower classes up."
The NEA sometimes argues that its programs bring art to the poor, who might otherwise not be able to afford it. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Economist Dick Netzer acknowledged that NEA programs had "failed to increase the representation of low-income people in audiences.''
As the Cato Handbook noted: "In other words, lower-income people are not interested in the kind of entertainment they're forced to support; they prefer to put their money into forms of art often sneered at by the cultural elite. Why must they continue to finance the pleasures of the affluent?"
3) Federal subsidies politicize art.
In recent decades, we've seen conservatives denounce NEA-funded "obscene" art, liberals denounce the Library of Congress for an exhibit on pre-Civil War slave life, and veterans denounce the Smithsonian Institute for a display on the Hiroshima bombing.
Novelist George Garrett predicted this when he said, "Whenever the government is involved in the arts, then it is bound to be a political and social business, a battle between competing factions."
Along the same lines, when bureaucrats hand out funding, decisions will frequently be made not for artistic reasons -- but for political or ideological reasons.
Some examples: The Heartland Institute's Laurence Jarvik reported that the NEA hands out money based on political correctness (in 1993, Roger Kimball reported that the agency made grants based on "quotas and politically correct thinking"), or shock value (in 1996, the Phoenix Art Museum hosted an NEA-funded exhibit featuring an American flag in a toilet), or energetic lobbying (Alice Goldfarb Marquis estimated that half of NEA funds go to groups that lobby the government for more money).
How do we prevent this? In a 1995 speech to the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz offered a simple solution: "To avoid political battles over how to spend the taxpayers' money, we would be well advised to establish the separation of art and state."
Conclusion
Let's end with a pop culture quiz. Which of the following pieces of art did the government help pay for?
1) The greatest American novel of the 20th century (according to the Board of the Modern Library): The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
2) The best-selling album of all time: The Eagles Greatest Hits.
3) The longest-running Broadway play of all time: Cats.
4) The highest-valued American painting of all time (sold at auction for $30 million): Lost On The Grand Banks, by Winslow Homer.
5) The highest-grossing movie of all time: Titanic.
Answer: None of them. When individuals value a particular artistic work, they are happy to pay a fair-market price to acquire it or attend it. It's only when people don't value something enough to pay for it that the government must step in.
In the satirical British TV show, Yes, Minister, one character noted that art subsidies don't need to be handed out for "what the people want. It is for what the people don't want. If they want something, they'll pay for it themselves."
Exactly.
