And it’s not as if the funds available for disbursement by the NEA and state arts councils (and on down to the local level, always in part via passthrough monies from above) were not useful, both in themselves and as catalytic agents. Let us keep in mind what that has amounted to in the past, and where we are now. In Opera as Opera, I pointed out that in 1971, the New York State Council on the Arts (the flagship of all such enterprises) had a budget of 20.1 million dollars, the real-dollar equivalent of $120 million in 2015. (That would be approximately $131.6 million now.) The actual figure, as of 2020 (the last full pre-pandemic year, appropriated in 2019): $46.9 million. As for the NEA, its 1971 budget was a mere $16,420,000—less than the New York State Council’s. However, its appropriations saw exponential growth over the next decade, and stood at $158,795,000 in 1981 (rounded off, approximately $540,000,000 now). But the real figure for 2020 was $162,250,000, and advocates, relieved that Congress did not acquiesce to the Trump administration’s proposal to kill the Endowments outright, are excitedly promoting the possibility (contained in a House proposal, not guaranteed to pass) that 2021 might clear the bar at $170 million! In other words, in real-dollar terms, both the national and New York State appropriations stand at less than one-third of the modest but helpful sums once allotted to them.

These are just rough, overall budget amounts. I haven’t run figures for other states, or investigated what percentages of either the national or state allowances are directed toward opera.^(I) I don’t need to. The picture is clear enough: for two decades or so, beginning around 1960, the arts, measured by the standards of the High Culture, gained some justification in the broad public eye through their admittance into the realm of governmental sanction and more-than-token public funding, and this acceptance acted as a stimulant to their growth and survivability. Since then, most of the chips have been swept from the table, and such activity as remains is conducted almost surreptitiously. I am also not going to recount, even in outline, the history of political controversy, economic slowdown, demographic shifts, technological changes, and educational decline that have brought us to our current state of cultural affairs. I’ve been through these before, and there are extensive literatures available to anyone interested. It is important, though, to have clarity about the current predicament.

Economically, the brutal truth is that demand has dropped. Culturally, the difficulty is that the High Culture model of evaluation, effectuated by an expert-judgment, peer-panel review system, has fallen into disrepute. And politically, most of the incoming fire, which used to come from the right, is now coming from the left, and is intensifying under the pressures of minority-rights constituents, along with resistance to any form of down-from-the-top dispensation. I mentioned demand. In Julia F. Lowell’s informative report on State Arts Councils (see the “Further Reading” suggestions below), she refers to the old funding structure as “supply-side,” as if Arthur Laffer or David Stockman had designed it, and I guess that in economic terms, that’s technically true—that is, the money went to artists and arts organizations, not to their consumers. Now, Lowell observes, the perception that this manner of distribution “serves artists and arts organizations rather than the broader public [my italics] is yet to be overcome,” and the priorities have shifted “from supporting arts providers to serving people and communities” (as if people and communities had not been served through the support of their “arts providers”). Oh, good, now we’re on the demand side. What demand, and for what?^(II)