IN 1968, Americans donated (in dollars adjusted for inflation) $2.5 billion to organizations involved in arts and culture. In 1998, they gave more than $10.5 billion. The American nation has become the most generous patron of the arts the world has ever seen.
This explosion in arts and culture philanthropy has been matched by an explosion in arts and culture enjoyment. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, points out in a recent essay that between 1965 and 1990, "America grew from having 58 symphony orchestras to having nearly 300, from 27 opera companies to more than 150, and from 22 nonprofit regional theaters to 500. Contemporary Western culture," Cowen declares, "especially in the United States, is flourishing."
With all the heavy weather in recent years over the National Endowment for the Arts, it has been easy to forget that a mountain of private-sector support for the arts towers over the molehill of government arts funding. The NEA budget is $98 million, less than one-100th of the amount that private individuals, foundations, and corporations will donate in 1999. The warning that American art would be devastated if the NEA were cut back or eliminated has always rung false, especially when it comes from the likes of Barbra Streisand or Alec Baldwin, who would not find it outlandish to spend $98 million on a single movie.
 Kate Millet's "The American Dream Goes to Pot" — an example of "art" subsidized by the taxpayer — consists of a toilet bowl into which a US flag has been stuffed. |
The chief objection to government funding of the arts is not the funding but the government — not the number of dollars but that those dollars are being distributed by agents of the state, which has no business meddling in the marketplace of ideas and expression. The process of judging art — like the process of creating it — is highly subjective, even eccentric. Government is no more qualified to choose the best artists than it is to choose the best churches. Suppose Tom loves Haydn performed on period instruments, Dick thinks Webern's 12-tone bagatelles are sublime, and Harry has every song Smashing Pumpkins ever recorded, but the NEA spends their tax dollars on opera at the Met. Why is that a system any of them should favor?
To be sure, if the NEA had stuck to funding opera it would never have become a focus of controversy. What triggered the war over government arts funding was the discovery that federal grants were directly or indirectly promoting "art" that most Americans would find tasteless or stupid. Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine was only the most infamous example; there was a long parade of others, from the video of dancing lesbians costumed as vaginas ("We're Talking Vulva" at the Hallwalls center in Buffalo) to Kate Millet's "The American Dream Goes to Pot": a toilet stuffed with a US flag.
Critics of the NEA, myself included, never challenged the artists' right to create such works. What galled so many of us was that taxpayers were compelled to subsidize them. Make all the nasty shock art you like, we said; just don't force the rest of us to pay for it.
Comes now the Creative Capital Foundation to take up that challenge. Some two dozen private arts patrons, The New York Times reported on May 3, "have joined forces to support artists who challenge convention." Their intention is to raise $40 million with which to finance artists whose work "upsets people," as Archibald L. Gillies of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts puts it. "In this organization's absolute principles, one comes first and that is funding experimental, challenging art on its merits."
To be sure everyone understands what kind of art Gillies and his colleagues are talking about, the Times article spelled it out.
"Creative Capital's executive director . . . said contributors knew that the group would seek out and not shrink from artists like Karen Finley, who often performs in the nude and famously smears her body in chocolate; Robert Mapplethorpe, whose homoerotic photographs offended many, and other artists who caused headline-making conflicts."
The Times describes the new endeavor as "throwing down the gauntlet to conservatives," but here is one conservative who wishes the new foundation every success. For its approach is exactly the right one: They are supporting the art they find worthy by digging into their own pockets. Private patronage is how artists should be supported.
Tellingly, Creative Capital will not simply hand out checks with no strings attached. It will require its grantees to work with marketing experts on building audiences for their work. And grant winners will have to agree to pay back to the foundation a 10 to 15 percent share of any proceeds their art projects earn.
Clearly, the foundation's trustees are going to take market potential into account when deciding which artists to underwrite. My hunch is that they will therefore fund less of the vulgar fringe stuff than the NEA did. It is easier to subsidize rudeness masquerading as art when Congress writes you an annual check. But when next year's budget depends on this year's decisions, those decisions tend to get made more responsibly.
Even if I'm wrong about that, the birth of Creative Capital is good news. It opens yet another tributary into the great river of American arts philanthropy. And it shows more clearly than ever how little we need the NEA.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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