Well, there has always been demand, or artists and their organizations would not be able to live. I certainly don’t know how the supply/demand interaction first worked out for art. I wasn’t there. But I have a hunch it was not from the demand side. I don’t think the cave community spokesman said, “You there, don’t come with us on the hunt,” or, “You, stay here, but don’t cook dinner,” but said instead, “Stay here and paint the wooly mammoth on the wall, because we must have art.” I doubt it. I think some person of artistic instinct began to draw on the wall, and folks liked it, and said, “OK, you don’t have to come on the hunt or cook dinner. Stay here and make a wooly mammoth, and you can still have the food and the bearskin.” It doesn’t matter why they said it, whether from religious or aesthetic or diversionary motive, and it doesn’t matter whether it was a painting or a song or poetic recitation—it started with some small creative act. Supply-side.

That is still how it works, I believe. Artists create, people respond. The people don’t know they want it, need it, till they see it, hear it, feel it. For that to happen, their attention has first to be drawn to it. That’s why arts education, especially at early age levels, and right there in mainstream curriculum, toe-to-toe with STEM, is crucial, and where big money should go. That’s where potential artists receive encouragement, and where an audience predisposition is built. But what “arts?” The arts of the High Culture, the ones that demand a heightened aesthetic discrimination and sensibility, the cultivation of taste, the drawing of lines between high and low? Between art deemed worthy for its “educational” content or something called “merit”—all of which require definition by some set of credentials or other—and art ruled out because of lack of same? The chances of those arts flourishing in this new community-based, demand-side set-up, and in the current socio-cultural-political environment (and by “current” I do not mean “Covid-duration”) are, in my opinion, in the clichéd slim-to-zero range.

Now, I favor the old model, only better: starting with, let’s say, ten times the funding the Endowments and Arts Councils had at their peaks, with loftier standards and better-paid consultants to match, and with the goal of working toward actual sustaining subsidy rather than piecemeal projects. That would help the art I value the most, and install it in its deserved social position. In the long run, it would also, I think, lavishly benefit that broader public. Call it “trickle-down” if you like. But the likelihood of that is the same as the new model’s, with the “slim” eliminated. As Ms. Lowell notes: “Just as curriculum reform had changed education, challenges to the accepted canon of great art had achieved legitimacy and (my italics again) been politicized.”  So: how can the very notion of “public good” arts funding run the gauntlet of challenges from both right and left in our capitalist democracy? Why, by removing all elements that are not both capitalist and democratic. Away with all artistic judgment and expertise, all attempts to classify art or to rank it. Away, as well, with all pleas on behalf of diversity, access, fairness of demographic or geographic distribution, any species of “relevance,” any developmental project favoring one kind of art over another, or service to any targeted group or identity. In short, disassemble the entire structure of reward by artistic preference, and by so doing end the politicization of art.