To start off the new year, I bought my family three museum memberships. My kids take music lessons, we attend plays and concerts, and our trips to the big city almost always include a historical, cultural, or artistic experience. We are above-average consumers of “the arts.” If Congress eliminates all federal arts funding, as President Trump’s budget proposes, I would be .  .  . perfectly fine with it.
Many in the “arts community” reacted to the news of Trump’s proposed elimination of National Endowment for the Arts funding the way New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reacted to Trump’s budget in general. “Reading through the Trump budget, I feel as the Romans must have felt in 456 a.d. as the barbarians conquered and ushered in the dark ages,” he tweeted. The very thought that NEA funding would disappear has caused a great wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of community theater wardrobe garments.
Some perspective is in order. As art gushes into the mainstream of American culture with unprecedented force, leaving no tributary of society unfilled by various expressions of imagination and whimsy, we are being asked to believe that defunding a single federal agency will cast the culture into a permanent, primitive darkness.
One could read dozens of commentaries and stories about this supposedly Neanderthal move without running across a single statistic on the proportion of U.S. arts funding shouldered by federal taxpayers. Advocates of federal funding for the arts shy away from that data for good reason. It renders their hysteria absurd.
How the United States Funds the Arts, published by the NEA in 2012, shows that federal arts funding accounts for only 1.2 percent of the money Americans dedicate to nonprofit performing arts groups and museums. Local governments nearly triple that share, accounting for 3.3 percent. All government funding combined comes to only 6.7 percent.
The federal government is not a major player in the creation or support of American art. Corporations, demonized by so many artists, contribute 8.4 percent of the nation’s arts funding, about 20 percent more than government’s combined share and seven times the federal government’s share. Earned income and direct support from individuals, foundations, and businesses accounts for 78.9 percent of U.S. arts funding. Another 14.4 percent comes from interest and endowment income.
So the question—will the arts survive without the NEA?—is easy to answer: yes.
The NEA’s numbers can be easily misunderstood, though. Critically, they include only nonprofit performing arts and museums. In the United States, a supposed wasteland of artistic ignorance enlightened only by the government, the vast majority of art is produced for profit.
The NEA in 2012 conducted a “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” that illustrated the problem in narrowly defining “the arts” as not-for-profit. It found that only 37 percent of Americans attended a live performing arts event. The figure was ridiculous. The survey’s performance categories included only “outdoor performing arts festivals, musical and nonmusical plays; classical music, jazz, or Latin, Spanish, or salsa music; dance of any kind; and opera.”
Rock, pop, country, bluegrass, and blues were excluded. The Kennedy Center Honors are an “annual celebration of the arts.” By the NEA survey’s narrow definition of performing arts, 2012 Kennedy Center honorees Buddy Guy, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and Dustin Hoffman could not have been categorized as performing artists.
The NEA’s questions were included in the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago. The GSS asked whether people had attended any live music, theater, or dance performance. By including popular music rather than officially approved categories of less popular styles, it found that 45.6 percent of Americans had attended a live arts performance. When art exhibits were included, more than half of Americans (53.6 percent) were found to have attended an exhibit or live performance in the previous year.
The survey also asked about people’s use of electronic media. It found that “nearly three-quarters of American adults—about 167 million people—used electronic media to view or listen to art, and large proportions of adults used electronic media to create music or visual art.”
This technological point is important. The phonograph was invented in 1877 and the Kinetoscope moving picture camera in 1891. Recorded music and moving pictures quickly changed American life. By 1929, Chicago had enough movie theater seats that half the city’s population could see a movie at the same time. By 2015, movie theater attendance was still trending sharply downward but U.S. consumers spent $18 billion on home entertainment. That’s more than twice the $7 billion spent on concerts in the same year, according to Pollstar.
To believe that the Trump budget, if enacted, would endanger American art, one has to believe two things that are not true: (a) that the federal government is the primary funder of the arts, and (b) that the technologies that democratized art consumption over the last 140 years were never invented. These technologies have allowed Americans to consume art every minute of every day. Because of them, art today is all but inescapable. We carry it in our pockets everywhere we go.
Americans have at their fingertips easy access to the greatest art humanity has ever produced. A construction worker on his lunch break or an inner city teen can pop into any McDonald’s, log in to the free WiFi, and access Shakespeare’s entire canon or the contents of the Louvre with just a few clicks. Or watch any of thousands of movies and TV shows, or listen to any style of music in existence.
We are creating so much new art, often of very high quality, that it is impossible to keep up with all the output even in a single genre. Consider television. That we are in a “golden age of television” is now a cliché. “The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet and threatening to consume my waking life in the process,” the late New York Times media columnist David Carr wrote three years ago. The same case can be made for movies.
So many great films have been produced since the turn of this century that the BBC noted last year, “we may actually be living in a golden age of cinema,” remarking “none of us is as far from a life-enhancing film as we used to be.”
Music? We can argue about quality and genres (I’m partial to jazz, baroque, and punk), but the affluence created by the modern market economy has generated a huge supply of instruments, editing software, and leisure time, and thus a proliferation of musical performers. Spotify, iTunes, Bandcamp.com, NoiseTrade, YouTube, and numerous other platforms have given neighborhood musicians the ability to record original works for mass distribution. The culture is awash in music of every imaginable variety. Whatever your taste, you can find an artist to satisfy it—without the helping hand of Uncle Sam.
Art museums? “The public continues to be highly engaged with their art museums, as evidenced through robust attendance figures and individual contributions of financial support and works of art,” the Association of Art Museum Directors’ January report, “Art Museums By The Numbers 2016,” concludes. According to the report, U.S. art museums get 6 percent of their funding from the federal government. Museum gift shops alone bring in more than that—8 percent.
Measured by both quantity and quality, we may well be in a golden age of American art. Were Congress to eliminate the NEA, American arts would continue to thrive because in the United States culture is not created via dispensations from the state. It is created organically by the people.
As for not-for-profit art, the NEA’s own figures show that American individuals, businesses, and foundations are extremely generous and enthusiastic supporters. There is no reason to assume that the private sector would fail to replace the federal government’s 1.2 percent share of nonprofit arts funding.
Eliminating the NEA would not decimate American arts. It would not usher in a new dark age. It simply would increase the private sector’s share of nonprofit arts funding from 93.3 percent to 94.5 percent. Arts supporters should stop wasting their time defending the indefensible diversion of federal taxpayer money to the arts and concentrate their energies on more worthy political battles—or perhaps even on creating art themselves.
Andrew Cline is a writer in New Hampshire.
