The reason no funding entity, public or private, wants to commit to true subsidy (in practice, they all support some of their grantees on more or less regular schedules, but always for specific projects, never for sustainment of the core raison d’être) is that they can’t. Our whilom rebellion against the European model is still our default stance toward public subsidy for the arts. So, although America is awash in money and its government provides billions in subsidies to certain industries, very little of it is ever made available for the arts and humanities. And there is certainly much in our public/private model that is healthy, and should be retained. But it’s not working well now, and the political will to elevate the public side of it has withered. So perhaps a radical reality-check overhaul would not be out of place. We’d find out how many of those political excuses were for real, and how far our $170,000,000, and our state and city allotments, will go if simply doled out on a portion-of-budget calculation. (At least, more of that $170M will go to actual support, since administrative expenses will be much reduced.) We’d see in stark terms how pitifully inadequate such appropriations are, who would gain and lose, among both our artists and their constituencies. And then, given some time, we would see where demand in response to artistic initiative truly exists, and whether some of our political leaders, in response to their constituents, might start to exert some leadership. I can’t predict how that would go (worse before better, I should think), but it would at least bathe in a clinical light what we claim for our way of governance—that it is both capitalist and democratic.

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Some further reading of direct relevance:

Julia F. Lowell: State Arts Agencies, 1965-2003—Whose Interests to Serve? (Rand Corp., 2004)

Michael M. Kaiser: Curtains? The Future of the Performing Arts in America (Brandeis Univ. Press, 2015

Joseph Horowitz: Our Revels Now Are Ended (American Scholar, Winter, 2021)

James Heilbrun and Charles M. Gray: The Economics of Art and Culture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2nd Ed., 2001)

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NEXT TIME: It will be back to opera, music, singing, but exactly how is not yet determined. The date: Fri., Mar. 12.