When Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler@@http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/yancey@@ pointed out (bragged) a couple weeks ago that his Internet crowd-funding outfit is well on its way to raising a total of $150 million this year, free-market enthusiasts felt vindicated. Why, that’s more ($4 million more) than the entire 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts, the troubled arts-funding agency created during Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society binge in 1965.@@http://www.nea.gov/about/40th/act.html AND http://www.ushistory.org/us/56e.asp@@
According to libertarians and others on the right, that this government organization has been bested by a Web start-up that’s not even three years old is salient proof, at last, that the “gov’ment” ought not mess around with art — or anything else, for that matter.
The argument certainly makes aesthetic sense. A deep-pocketed and generous resident of Eugene probably knows a lot more about the arts than, say, Speaker of the House John Boehner@@http://www.speaker.gov/@@ or Sen. Harry Reid (R-Nev.)@@http://www.reid.senate.gov/@@. Grab anyone on campus, and he or she probably has better cultural taste than every member of Congress put together. If Michelangelo were sculpting “David” today, he might be asked by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) @@http://www.louisville.com/content/sen-mcconnell-saves-louisville%E2%80%99s-cardinal-aluminum-400-jobs-opinion-arena@@to give the guy a pair of pants.
Kickstarter’s main appeal, at least among the mini-donors who’ve raised millions of dollars since the site’s founding, seems to be the empowerment of said mini-donors. It allows anyone with a dollar to spare to act as a patron of the arts, a Medici, the Renaissance-era family whose wealth kept afloat artists like the aforementioned Michelangelo. It’s both a populist and elitist project. It places the utmost faith in the wisdom of the crowds.
This is of course what critics of the NEA want. Their resolute trust in the free market to get things right, and their equally strong trust in government to screw everything up, is what defines them. Kickstarter is that ethos distilled: not a hand-out nor a help-up, but a kick-start. You can almost feel the pangs of frustration that we can’t apply the Kickstarter model to governance.
Democracy, pure democracy, is the dream of the free market practiced in the marketplace of ideas and policies. And it doesn’t work. People like Jefferson and Madison knew that, which is why we live in a republic. Which is why, in its way, Kickstarter is a republic: Anyone can fund whatever project he or she wants, except for those projects not approved by the Kickstarter gatekeepers. Even at Kickstarter, the free market has its limits.
During the mid-1990s, when a politician could score easy points by hating on the NEA and public funding of the arts in general, the art critic Robert Hughes defended the institution.
“One of the ways you measure the character — indeed, the greatness — of a country is by its public commitment to the arts … (As) a commitment arising from the belief that the desire to make and experience art is an organic part of human nature,” Hughes said. “Without which our natures are coarsened, impoverished and denied … When you boil it all down, that is the social purpose of art: the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning.”@@http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/05/27/1996_05_27_032_TNY_CARDS_000374550@@
In other words, art is worth spending tax dollars on because it keeps our social fabric together, whatever “social fabric” means to you.@@what if social fabric to me means people held together by NOT art?@@ Art creates social capital, the currency society trades in, and gives a community a sense of place and meaning. From this perspective, perhaps NEA grants should be considered defense spending.
If the NEA was abolished, the arts obviously wouldn’t die. We’d still have the film and publishing industries, charities, individual patrons and independent artists. And we’d still have Kickstarter. But in a world where meaning means a lot, getting rid of the NEA would send the message that we as an electing public are at best indifferent to the arts. Kickstarter is a great and innovative approach to making our culture more vibrant, but it shouldn’t at all be the only one.@@no campus relevaaaaaaance@@