Good and Plenty
The Creative Successes
of American Arts Funding
by Tyler Cowen
Princeton, 206 pp., $27.95
Arts funding is a murky subject. While our ears are bombarded with cries of starvation from operas, symphonies, museums, and the like, our eyes gaze upon clear signs that art institutions are thriving. Almost every American city with a museum has seen it expand in recent years. New York's newly redesigned and massively enlarged Museum of Modern Art now charges $20 for admission--hardly the behavior of an underappreciated institution.
The fact is that American arts institutions are the richest in the world. And private sector contributions have always been their lifeblood, with $14 billion in donations in 2004, up for the seventh straight year. Explaining how our government helped that to come about, and how the European approach differs, are the chief contributions of Good and Plenty.
Tyler Cowen is an economist who likes art--and possesses an impressive level of knowledge of some art forms. He lauds My Bloody Valentine and ably discusses the influences on Sonic Youth and Kraftwerk, all bands endorsed by rock connoisseurs but rarely familiar to members of Cowen's generation. So our first reaction is to trust his judgment, on matters of economics, and on art as well.
When you think of government support for the arts, it is the direct subsidies that first come to mind: the National Endowment for the Arts, military bands, the old Works Progress Administration programs, even the USO. But the sum total of these benefits pale in comparison with the amount of support the arts receive from government indirectly, largely because of tax policies.
Cowen reports that, because of tax deductions alone, the U.S. government loses between $26 billion and $41 billion in tax income each year to support the arts. Deductible donations of cash and art are just the beginning. Time that volunteers donate at art institutions is tax-free, and imported artwork is exempt from duties. The fact that tax laws require foundations to spend at least 5 percent of their income annually draws money out of foundation coffers and into nonprofits, including arts institutions. Cowen considers the reduced postal rates that government offers for the mailing of books, newspapers, and magazines to be an arts subsidy.
He has, indeed, looked at government's giving to the arts from all angles, and even sees subsidies in places where others might see only the normal machinations of government.
For example, Cowen categorizes Washington's 19th-century investment in railroad construction as support for the arts. "The railroads proved of central importance to touring musicians, theater companies, vaudeville, and other mobile forms of culture and entertainment," he argues. He makes a similar case for the assistance the government gave to the development of airplanes "during the formative years of flight."
Sure, airline deregulation in the 1970s made flying cheaper, enabling more people to move about, whether they were visiting relatives or attending an opera. But can we draw many truly useful connections to the arts from such generalizations?
It is when Cowen finds the need to include mention of water subsidies allowing for the settlement of California, and the subsequent "greater geographic diversity in American creativity," that the economist's libertarian devotion to seeing subsidy under every rock clearly appears to be leading him to overstate his case.
On the next page we learn that the tax-free status churches enjoy is an indirect arts subsidy. So is "the very existence of government jobs," since Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman worked for the national government while writing. Cowen further points out that "many notable literary works have been written in enforced confinement," and goes so far as to include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on a list of jailhouse authors whose work was enabled by government subsidy. He makes the same case for patients in state-run mental hospitals.
This is when you begin to realize that the arguments in Good and Plenty follow a pattern. Cowen's point that the government has played a substantial, though largely indirect, role in the development of American arts funding is entirely valid. But in the process of unfurling this and other arguments, his dedication to celebrating the purest form of private sector giving ends up driving his fundamentally sound thinking to odd, and occasionally unsupportable, conclusions.
For example, Cowen's argument about the superiority of the American versus European system of supporting art institutions is correct. He explains that "a German, French, or Italian theater, museum, or orchestra will receive 80 percent or more of its budget directly from the government." In most Western European nations, the tax rules for deducting private donations are so restrictive that no culture for such support exists. Whereas in the United States, art institutions receive just around 10 percent of their budget from the government, and cover the rest of their costs with support from individuals, corporations, and private foundations.
The benefits of the American over the European approaches are real. Here is a recent headline in Art Newspaper: "U.S. museums trounce European institutions." It reports that, with European governments cutting cultural budgets, French and British museums can no longer compete with their American counterparts for acquisitions. Vicente Todoli, director of the Tate Modern in London, explains: "In Europe we receive very few donations compared with the U.S. Museums cannot compete with private collectors. This is now a central concern for museums."
So Cowen is right: The American system yields a larger amount of support than the European system, providing our institutions more funds to better serve the public. It's Cowen's next extrapolation that doesn't comport with reality. He argues that the sheer quantity and diversity of support for the arts guarantees high artistic quality. When he talks about "the preconditions of quality of art," he names just one: "Diverse sources of financial support."
But few critical observers would agree that contemporary American art has put its best work forward in recent decades, when our artists and art institutions have enjoyed more riches than at any other time in history. Contemporary American artmaking has been monopolized for nearly a half-century by postmodernism, a politics-obsessed formulaic approach that has yielded such shock-art masterpieces as Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (which finds itself in numerous museum collections). Artists who do not work in the postmodern mode are excluded from museum exhibitions and the best galleries.
Of course, no better can be said of the products of the European art world, whose denizens have, at best, striven to vie with their postmodern American counterparts for the prize of Most Shocking. But to argue, as Cowen does, that "the American model encourages artistic creativity [and] keeps the politicization of art to a minimum," is to be unaware of how narrow and prescriptive American artmaking has become. The simple fact is that artmaking in America has been taken over by a single bad idea, despite the ample and diverse funding it receives.
Cowen seems to have been concerned that some readers may not agree with his diversity-yields-quality analysis of American arts funding, so he offers another instance of how the American system for supporting non-profits has resulted in excellence. But the example he has selected will come as a shock, even to a part-time student of the culture war.
Cowen points to the American system of higher education as another triumph of American giving. There is no arguing that our colleges and universities are among the wealthiest in the world--largely due to the impressive level of donations with which alumni enrich their alma maters. And, in so many ways, that wealth is a good thing. But for Cowen to hold up America's colleges and universities as beacons of diversity is a grave error.
The monopoly of political correctness in American higher education has been exhaustively documented. Approximately three-quarters of college faculty nationwide identify themselves as liberals. (The number jumps to over 80 percent at elite schools.) The undermining effects of this imbalance--not just on curricular content but on college life, from speech codes to freshmen sensitivity training--are well known.
But, in his eagerness to celebrate the wonders of the American system of giving, Cowen overlooks this corrupted outcome. He repeats the mantra that American colleges are "the envy of the world" and insists that "the university works by generating and evaluating ideas according to novel and independent principles."
In the sciences and in the social sciences, at some institutions, that generalization holds true. But in the liberal arts, where we've seen example upon example of conservative professors being forced out while students are force-fed liberal ideology, a case for intellectual diversity is difficult to make. Cowen even goes so far as to celebrate tenure--perhaps the single strongest force protecting and prolonging political correctness on campus--as a "virtue of the university" precisely because of the "absence of accountability" it allows.
Tyler Cowen seems so deeply fascinated by the dynamism of American giving that he chooses to ignore the mutations it has been unable to prevent. And Good and Plenty's very narrow agenda has kept him from pursuing the most interesting question that arises from his research: Why, despite the diversity of funding they receive, have so many of our art institutions been so deeply undermined by a uniform liberal philosophy?
I would certainly not argue that any system of philanthropy exists that is superior to the American. But to celebrate, without qualification, the institutions that have been the recipients of that generosity, while ignoring their real state, is to do American philanthropy a disservice. The more wealth that is poured into dysfunctional institutions, the less likely they ever will change.
Lynne Munson, former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is the author of Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance.