Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 56

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
literature on de-funding federal cultural agencies goes, the arts should be subject to market
forces! Why do some people get to choose the symphony/ballet/museum for the rest of us?
Once again, the material and the symbolic are conflated to the point where they be-
come difficult to disentangle. It is true that some kinds of entertainment (classical music,
sculpture) receive federal dollars, while others (action movies, NASCAR) do not.
It is here that the NASAA argument (above)—which demonstrates that federal arts
funding is distributed widely across American communities—makes the most sense.
Local agencies of arts and culture require ongoing local maintenance, and ongoing re-
liable funding to make sure that someone is able to mind the store. The NEA makes art
happen for all kinds of people in all kinds of places, even those without wealthy local
foundations or edgy art scenes.
No matter. In the last moment, the CATO authors circle back around, claiming that their
previous points were actually not their previous points even though they brought them
up in the first place.
No, the issue is neither the content of the work subsidized nor the ex-
pense. Taxpayer subsidy of the arts, scholarship, and broadcasting is
inappropriate because it is outside the range of the proper functions
of government, and as such it needlessly politicizes, and therefore cor-
rupts, an area of life that should be left untainted by politics. (539)
It is a clever rationale, but not in fact the argument that the authors have been making
throughout the rest of the document. Rather, they have busily set about attacking the
actual workings of cultural agencies, only to repudiate those claims as a supposed matter
of principle.
Alongside the material question of how our tax dollars should be spent, two kinds of
symbolism operate. One is budget reduction as a symbol of fiscal responsibility; the oth-
er is art as a symbol of social permissiveness. Opponents of the NEA conflate these on
purpose, and to great effect.
What ought the response be? The NEA (and other cultural agencies) are not good be-
cause they run on next-to-nothing; indeed, their budgets should be increased so they
can run effectively and so more kinds of people can make—and be exposed to—more
kinds of art. Progressive supporters of art need to step away from culture war tropes, and
not get hauled into a media spin cycle of arguments with people howling about photo-
graphs Robert Mapplethorpe made in the early 1990s. The NEA, though not without its
flaws, is dedicated to making art flourish in American communities of all kinds, and this
is most consequential at this moment when creative expression has a mark on its back.
Like so much of the authoritarian policy agenda of the Trump administration, a detailed,
long-standing plan and a pointed architecture lurk behind the policies, a set of tactics
based in an overarching strategy to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a very
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