Do the Arts Need Government to Thrive?

0:00Today's speaker is Mr. Sean Rittenauer. He's of course led the discussion before. He's a Mises fellow, a graduate student here at Auburn University, and he's going to be telling us today about, or answering the questions, do the arts need government to thrive? So Sean, take it away. Okay. The short answer is no. The longer answer is that they're doing reasonably well in spite of government interference in the arts, which shouldn't come as any surprise. In terms of doing reasonably well, I just mean if you look around, if you look in the newspaper, there's a lot of stuff going on. Last night I read an article about a two-week chamber music festival in Maui, Hawaii, that you can call and get information on.

0:52If you're into chamber music or Hawaii, I know Jeff's into both. They just recently, at the end of last year, completed a John Bowles Music Festival in New York City that ran for, I can't remember exactly how long, a couple days, and was funded entirely by the organizer, Jonathan Schaeffer. The Omaha series Bagels and Bach in Omaha, Nebraska continues to run at the Johnson Art Museum every Sunday morning. You can find community playhouses all over the place doing contemporary and past theatrical work. So you can find art stuff going on all over the place. So in that sense, there's still a lot of stuff going on. Opera attendance increased by 68.3% from 1983 to 1990.

1:41Major orchestra attendance increased by 3.1% over that same period of time. Modern Dance Company attendance increased by 19.4% over that span of 10 years, and the disposable personal income spent on the performing arts increased by 29.4% from 1980 to 1990 in real money, in real $1987. Now the picture is not rosy or as rosy as it might be, there was a fall in regional orchestra attendance ship and also in ballet. okay so it's not an across-the-board increase but there is a in terms of dollars and in tendencies of these types of performances there is you know standard growth across this last ten across the decade of greed and nobody's blaming this growth in the arts and Ronald Reagan either anyway so what I'm saying is that there's a lot of stuff going on right now now before I go I want to get into some definitions. It's hard to talk about arts within a half hour, let alone any other time, because there's always people going, what's art? What do we make good art?

2:58You could spend forever debating that issue. I wouldn't spend forever debating that issue, but it could be done, I suppose. And I'm going to say that art, what I mean by art, for the rest of this discussion, is something, a piece of work that is capable of giving an aesthetic experience of a high nature, an emphasis on a high nature. It's not just something that has a beat you can dance to. It's not Baywatch, for instance. I know it's going to hurt Dr. Eakley's feelings, but nonetheless, I'm talking more in the lines of Renoir's painting, or Aaron Copeland's music, something like that, okay, and what do we mean by flourishing? There are basically two things I mean by flourishing. One is there should be an active appreciation of past artistic masterpieces. That means that individuals, I don't know how many, but a number of individuals have an active participatory interest in going to hear the symphony, going to be able, you know, going to see

4:00The Mona Lisa or pick your favorite, Grant Wood's American Gothic and appreciate it as a work of art. The second is that we should have an active current culture. We should have a multitude of active good regional artists and a number of active truly great artists whose work is a permanent value and who is receiving the recognition that they deserve. That's what I mean by arts that are Flourishing. It's not, it's appreciating the past masterpieces, but also its current artists doing work of value now, here and now. That's what's necessary to create an active culture and for the arts to flourish. Okay, well what does such an active culture need? Basically, I propose that it needs learned, artistically knowledgeable individuals with money and the willingness is to support those artists who are of the highest caliber.

4:56Good artists need to be funded, basically, and that's what we're getting at. The artist needs enough money and time to do his work, so he needs funding, and the question is then who gets the money? Who are the artists that are good? Who should decide who gets the great art is what Henry Haslund refers to as the social mind. He wrote a book in 1933 called the Anatomy of Criticism and he sets out to solve the problem or one of the problems he addresses in the book is how do we how do we assign value true value to works of art or to works and he was talking about literature is a book on literary criticism but he applies it to other parts of our ways modes of art throughout the book and he sets up the his theme is that the final arbiter of value or what makes it work good or not is what he calls the social mind and he sets up a it's in a

6:01dialogue discussion there's a thesis statement and an antithesis and then the social mind concept is part of his synthesis of the two so on one side the thesis side of the argument he says that the value of the book is not in the book itself at all. It has different value for every individual that reads it, has no permanent value outside of the widely varying individual values. And that's almost the deconstructionist approach to whether a work has value or not. So that's the thesis. The antithesis is your point is that the value of the book is something inherent in the book itself regardless of the Opinion of Individual Reader or of the opinions of all the readers taken together. That regardless of the opinion of any reader, this book has value in and of itself. It's almost like that the radical subjective, I mean the logmanian subjective is on one side and the labor theory value people on the other, okay. And bringing these two together is Hazlitt that says, look, man

7:08Man is a social product. Society is in the sense a unitary organism and there is a social mind. And what he means by that is not that there is some type of over soul or an objective mind that transcends individuals, or that there's some social consciousness that is outside and above the consciousness of actual individuals. What he's saying is that every individual thought has been influenced by the thought of others. And when I'm thinking something, I've been influenced by everything I've taken in over time. And every thought that I express is in turn affecting other individuals. And just as the subjective value comes to play in the marketplace to form objective prices, the subjective valuations of individuals as they approach works of art forms a value in what he calls the social mind.

8:02Okay, and the social mind is the final arbiter of value, of an artwork's value. It's not inherent in the work. It is not independent of the mind and desires of men, but it is in large degree independent of the mind and desires of any particular man. Okay, that's the point. Okay, but the price, for instance, the price, the price The price that we see for a gallon of gas is not independent of the demanders of gasoline. This price is arrived at as these subjective values come together, but it is independent of the desire or the demand of any particular single consumer.

8:48That's what he's trying to get at. Every individual receives a hierarchy of literary reputations that he learns in school or from from his parents or from the church or what have you, and these are not formed by the majority but by what he called the prestigious or powerful few, the people that are in the know, the people that know art, that know literature, they're the ones that tend to set the tone of the social mind, okay, and these would be similar to what Hoppe calls the natural elites, okay, so basically trying to tie it in with Hazlitt and Hoppe what we're saying is that the social mind is the arbiter of artistic value and in the best I would assume the best of all possible worlds you'd have the natural elites those are that are most have an artistic vision or sensitive to the arts but the ones that should be deciding what how the social mind is what the social mind is value and we can talk

9:54We'll talk about that a little bit later, but anyway, that's kind of where I'm coming from in terms of how do we know if artwork is valuable or not. Now, what happens when the government decides to get involved? There are several methods that the government has chosen or has partaken to try to support the arts. Arts. The first is job-owning. They just talk up the arts a lot. Presidents from George Washington clear up through Bill Clinton and talked about how important the arts is, blah-blah-blah-blah, trying to whip up support for the arts. The second, most visible or the most well-known is just the direct subsidies. The first national program of direct subsidies came with the WPA under Franklin Roosevelt and then of course since the 1960s we've had the National Endowment for the Arts and that's on the federal level and of course there are all kinds of local and state grants that have kind of kind of grown up as well. So we have job owning, we have direct subsidies, another third form is

11:04municipal ownership of museums. Several museums are owned by the city in which in which they're in. Okay, so that's a third way of directly supporting the arts. And the fourth is the public school system. Several people, most writers about the arts will look at the art education in the public school as a way the government tries to support the arts. Okay, so those are the four main ways. Now what is the effect of all this well-intentioned, all this good intention? Well, the first and most immediate and direct observable effect is certain artists and performers and citizens benefit from this a lot of the citizens in the middle class benefit from it because I don't I have to pay when I wanted to go see the Titian exhibit in in Washington DC I didn't have to pay 15 bucks to get in I just walked through the door and got and got to see it along with a bunch of other hot smelly individuals so there are costs

12:04involved even if the money price is zero. But some people benefiting however does not imply benefit, net benefit even to a flourishing culture and that's my argument here. Just like a certain people benefiting from the welfare system does not mean it's a good system, certain individuals benefiting from the government supports the arts doesn't mean it's the way to go in terms of Policy. In fact, Edward Banfield, in his book, The Democratic Muse, which I think is an excellent book, by the way, and you can get it at the Auburn Library, which is probably open because of state funds, very effectively argues the case for the ceasing of all government funding of the arts. And one of the main reasons is that public funding encourages arts agencies to emphasize activities that have little to do with art. They don't fund art as art. They They fund it as mere entertainment because it makes people feel giddy, it gets, again, it has a beach you can dance to.

13:05They fund art as psychotherapy. They justify art because it's therapeutic. They justify funding art because we need cultural history material. It's our heritage and we've got to learn about that. We've got to learn about our history. And it's also very effective propaganda in large respects. Now, these things may, some of them may be good reasons to support art, but they're not supporting art for art's sake. It's making art a tool of some other agenda. And Banfield says that art suffers as a result of this. Let's see. Oh, for instance, art is used, symphony orchestras now go out into major metropolitan areas and do Seino to drug performances. And So they're somehow linking art, good music, with not doing drugs, and I'm not completely sure of the connection completely, other than I guess Hector Berlio was an opium fiend or something.

14:08That's what the rumor is, but I don't know. Back in the 30s, the work project administrators, a writer's project, were funded by a bunch and a bunch of left-wingers who just did nothing but write left-wing theater projects that was seen as left-wing propaganda, and they were encouraged by elected officials to do this because the people need a voice. That means the unions need a voice, basically. And it caused a lot of problems, well, within the staff of the WPA, basically divided up between the Stalinist and the Trotskyite versions and caused a lot of tension, so not much came of all this money that was flowing to WPA. But that's just one way what happens in terms of propaganda. Banfield also argues that museums have become more or less houses of art relics, that they're not good, that their houses of art relics are not good institutions for teaching individuals how to experience art. Learning art history is not the same thing as learning and doing art. It's important

15:26but it's not the same thing, it's important but it's not cultivating an and an active culture, okay, right, right, that for instance, going and looking, me going and looking and learning about paintings is not going to necessarily teach me how to become a better artist or a better, it's not going to help me, or it's not going to make me an artist is what I'm saying, or better. Well, no, it shouldn't, but what he's saying is that if we want to, he's saying again that the motives are misguided. They're saying we need to, you know, he's saying that people apologize for government supporting the arts and government supporting art museums because this is going to make our culture live, or this is going to create an active culture, a flourishing arts culture, and he's saying that that's not the the case because they're learning art history. They're not learning, they're not learning art. So we'll talk about that later. Is my least comfortable point I actually have about this thing. But nonetheless, I say that more importantly than

16:49what's been said is that the government funding of the arts skews the process by which the social mind and those who listen to the social mind select great Art. Ernest Vanden Hegg points out that art production is self-selective. Few people produce art for the money involved, the money they can get for it. Okay. These people, these artists are willing to forego income for their art and for the art's sake. They're willing to forego the paycheck if they spend all the time doing art. And hence we get the struggling artist myth that somehow great art is produced after one's gone through the trials and struggles of life Life. And I think it's kind of got things backwards. It's like this statistical correlation that we've put a faulty interpretation to. It's not necessarily that struggling produces great art. It's that great artists will continue to create their art. People that have artistic vision will continue to work in spite of the obstacles. George Frederick Handel failed twice in his life. Not when they listen to The Handel's Messiah, they don't realize

17:53He failed miserably twice in his life. His opera companies fell flat on their back and he was victims of conspiracy by the Prince of Wales, by other society people, and by jealous composers, but in the midst of this he just continued to throw off great opera after great opera, and spun out the Handel's Messiah, and created the oratorio from scratch, basically. So the bottom line is that great artists continue to work and create in spite of these obstacles. The government subsidy process, however, messes this up, and not that it's a great thing that artists are broke, but they mess up the process in that they encourage people whose artistic vision and passion was not enough without the government subsidy to start producing now we know that they have money on the table okay that means that people with less artistic vision I would I would hypothesize people with less artistic vision you don't you don't care as much about the arts are now producing art because there's more money around

19:08okay and also more competition for subsidies exists so those with the The comparative advantage in grant applying and not necessarily in doing good art will be more likely to get the funds and be supported. Imitators and pseudo-artists are more likely to get funds and get subsidies because their work will be more readily understood and more instantly appealing. Samuel Lippmann, in an excellent article called Art and Patronage Today, written in 1986, May of 1986, in the New Criterion, reveals problems on the demand side.

19:53Now, the earlier part was that Mandenhague was talking about more the demand side of, wait a minute, was more the supply side of the equation. Now, Lippmann is talking about the demand side, the people who are doing the funding, okay, And Littman, for those who don't know, was, he was in, he was on the committee of the National Endowment for the Arts in charge of passing out the money during the Reagan administration. And he's written several articles about how did things work in this, and it's pretty fascinating if you read all the articles and find out how the decisions were made. and he says that patronage on the part of the government was done for prestige purposes and for anything else it was it was the prime criteria for giving and getting help is not the character of the art or even of the need of the artist but it is the probability of high visit of a high visibility potential for the giver so that you can get your name so at the end of I don't know the Civil War

20:59or documentary and get, you know, this is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts or performance today on National Public Radio, you know, made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. And in this article on patronage, he very closely links government and corporate America as opposed to individual wealthy patrons. And he says that they're very, the motives for both are very closely linked. We basically what happens is the government officials, the bureaucrats in the 60s decided that well we just like the rest of Europe and all the great European empires, we want to be associated with funding some of the great works of all time.

21:50And so we decided, well, let's start this National Endowment for the Arts. And that's what's happened. And in practice, again, as I said, instead of funding art for its quality or for arts sake, they fund work that tends to be well-liked, like they'll dole out money to arts institutions like symphony orchestras and play houses, etc., that produce works of long-standing value, what they call the war horse's leg, you know, as long as you have Beethoven's fifth on a couple times, you know, in three years, you'll be fine, you'll get your money. So you have well-liked, well-liked pieces that, or institutions that they fund. They also have this knack for wanting to be with it. They want to be, they want to be, they want to be on the edge of the arts world. So they end up funding, you know, shock, you the shock value avant-garde stuff, the Serrano stuff or the Mapplethorpe exhibit, or, this is great, this is an application I want to read to you, this is great, it cracks me up, this is actually in 19, I think it was the late 70s, this is an application that came across the desk, or the desk, not the desk, the desk of Michael Strait, and this is what the guy

23:12I will rent a ground-level studio with high ceilings and a cement floor adjacent to a lush meadow, and to this place I will bring pygmy, a full-grown sow, whom I have known since her ninth day, two female rabbits, who know me, each other, and me, a buck, who is a stranger, two ring-necked doves, also strangers, a wooly monkey, Georgina, who knows me slightly. We will all move together. I will also bring those things necessary for for a Comfortable Survival, including food and materials to use for building and maintaining nests. All of this will contribute to the creation, maintenance and change of such an environment. Once settled, we may discover that there are others who would like to join us, even if just for a short time, birds, mice, people, et cetera.

23:58I will record our activities so that those unable to visit and experience our situation directly will know something of what it is like. This will best be done by using portable video equipment. Sometimes we'll leave our place and go together to another place, or bring others to us. For these events, we'll need a vehicle, preferably a motorbike or a large sidecar. Perhaps this communal way of life will be quite difficult, however, the educational value for all of us will be extraordinary. Okay, now I don't know what the educational value for that will be to the sow, and I don't know what it is to be for the artist either. And this grant was approved over the objections of the vice chairman, and recently we just had the guy that got like a $10,000 NEA grant and then went and passed it out in $5 bills to those poor people in California or whatever.

24:50So this is a kind of with it, on the cutting edge of arts type of avant-garde stuff that's getting funded. Now, whether or not that's good arts, I mean, I would just say flat out no, but there's all kinds of debates on what's good and what's not. The point is that I don't think we're going to have a flourishing culture if this is the tendencies for institutional fundraising. Okay and quickly to some last points. Even if the bureaucrats were well-intentioned, meaning that they are, they're trying to fund good art, not just what's prestigious, but they're really trying to fund good art, the government bureaucrat is no more are more likely to be able to choose who will do great art than he is to choose what will be the most profitable firm to invest in.

25:37Arts are not some kind of homogenous blob with a capital A. Just like capital is not some homogenous blob of goods with a capital K. You don't just invest in arts and everything's going to be fine. When we invest in anything, it's investing in individual works for people who do art. okay investing in the arts makes no more arts with the capital a makes no more sense than investing in technology you wouldn't invest in technology the point of what technology you invest in that's the bottom line and the government bureaucrat is no more likely to do this in the arts or be successful in the arts as he is with any other type of venture the government also tends to tends to fund those projects where all that are already getting government or I'm sorry the government tends to fund projects already getting corporate support so So they'll start, they'll put money where GM's putting money or Texaco or Exxon's putting their money on the flip side, the corporations also tend to support those projects that are getting the NEA good housekeeping seal of approval, okay, because they don't want to be artistically responsible for, you know, some goofball, spray-painting himself orange and saying I'm art, I'm art or something like that. Right, right, exactly. We also have what I think the name

26:56There was Catherine Hightower who worked on some commission in the 1970s on arts and funding and based on non-profit foundations in general. But she theorized about what's called the project support syndrome for institutions. Money is given primarily for the purpose of enabling more money to be raised by others. Not, again, we see this as an investment. We're not funding art, but we're giving them money to enable them to raise more money from other people. The NEA funds projects with the expectations that the organization is getting the money, will be able to raise funds elsewhere to support a project if this, whatever their funding proves, is successful. And often what happens is this leaves the organization being overcommitted to projects it can't really support.

27:41And it's sort of like an arts trade cycle, if you will. That there's this inflated, the amount of money that's available to the arts, and so you have a lot of arts institutions undertaking and saying, Well, sure, we'll pledge to have this exhibit, or sure, we'll hire 10 more violinists, or what have you, and they, on the assumption of these people, that things are going to fly when, in fact, the market is not there for their stuff, and they tend to become, as an institution, overcommitted and causes themselves to be in dire straits. and this is one reason I think that a lot of smaller symphonies are in bad shape right now because they've been goaded into starting and you know been in the red ever since they've been like in the last five years ever since they've been in existence and then finally finally the grim reaper you know the debts have got to be paid sometime and they close up. Let's see okay in terms of economics of the current start situation

28:51Well, I won't get into that right now. Jacques Barzun in his book, The Culture We Deserve, has a really interesting opinion that we actually have too much art, that the people, you know, we don't appreciate art well enough because in some respects we've, the bottom line is is we don't have too much art, or we do have too much stuff that's called art, and it'd be worth looking into, and I can maybe expound that later in the question time, but the bottom line solution of the problem is I say stop, certainly stop federal funding of arts, and I would encourage stopping all government funding, and if there is going to be government Funding. I would like it to be, I approach it the same way I approach any government function is it's best done at the most local level the better. The most because it seems to me that you'll have a better chance of the natural elites being, you know, running the local establishment as opposed

29:59to the federal establishment. And also we need to encourage wealthy learned patrons. We need to, To, for one thing, cut taxes and cut regulation to increase, to allow people to create wealth again or create more wealth so that individuals can have this money that they're ready to spend. Art flourishes in a affluent society. It flourishes in a society that has enough wealth for people to have some leisure time. And so you're going to have to do some things like creating wealth, and like I said, cut taxes and cut regulation, let the economy work, and scrap the public school system that's bent on basically turning out standardized individuals that are relatively artistically ignorant.

30:54I mean, the kids that we have coming out now is what we don't want to see, if we want the So, reduce government, scrap the public school system, and that's basically it. That's my story I'm sticking to. How about overseas defense spending? Cut that too. I'm all for that. Cut it off. Roll her back.