Taking Art For Granted

[millring]

This set of numbers (published by the NEA and "How the US Funds the Arts, Washington DC") came across my feed today. Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this lately, due to a couple of things coming across the desk of my mind.

Yesterday I listened to a podcast paid for by a very well known art/craft school -- Penland (ironically, funded by grant money). The subject, loosely followed, was how an artist might make a living from their art. And essentially the conclusion involved tapping into residencies and grants and having the good fortune of having the right people view your work within the framework of a political/social construct that they would like to see advanced and therefore supported with tax deductible money.

But if I look at that list of countries and how they "fund the arts", I feel somewhat compelled to point out -- having lived more than 40 years hip deep in the art/craft world -- that perhaps the numbers are skewed as they are for any number of reasons ... and not (as the meme might suggest) simply that Americans don't value the arts as much as other counties do.

For one thing, I wonder if any of those other countries have experienced or engendered the same entrepreneurial approach to making and marketing the arts? While the academic world continues to promote the idea behind this meme (that the measure of a country's valuing of the arts can be measured by how public money is spent), the reality is that millions of American artists have, for the past 50 years, been making and selling their own work to a willing and huge market. I'm sure the numbers have changed over the years, and the art fair market has diminished from what it once was, but I remember 20-30 years ago reading a NYT article claiming that art fairs had eclipsed all other means of selling visual arts.

It's a curious case of collective low self esteem that we somehow don't include the fact that most American artists have thrived without the support of grants of public money. In fact, a case could easily be made that the craft world has thrived in spite of -- not because of -- the academic world, and that the academic world of art has been more of a roadblock to that thriving than it has been an aid.

And quite often all that the world of grants and residencies and publicly funded recognition has done is to spoil the open market by which most artist/craftsmen are thriving by giving a select few a leg up, and then using public money to promote them over their peers in the open market.

I could go on, but this is a social media post and if I've learned anything, it is that on social media, expecting anyone to slog through a single sentence is like asking them to endure a Tolstoy novel.

[Cornflake]

Although I haven't thought about it much, I mostly agree with your views, John. I can't see much of a case for supporting individual artists with public funds. I think there's a stronger case for supporting some activities/institutions that usually can't pay for themselves, such as symphony orchestras. I'd add art museums but they seem to attract the patronage of enough rich people to survive.

I'm not sure what the academic world has to do with public funding, though. I think there's a place for teaching the arts. The best book I've read about making art is this one www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaking/dp/0961454733 The authors were artists and academics and they got into the question of whether MFA degrees have any value.

It's important to remember that we wouldn't have had the Talking Heads if three of them hadn't met at the Rhode Island School of Design.

[millring]

Apr 14, 2024 7:33:01 GMT -5 Cornflake said:

I'm not sure what the academic world has to do with public funding, though.

The podcast I mentioned was talking about theirs (Penland School of Craft) and others grant money and how it was being awarded -- not on the basis of merit or need, but on the goals of DEI. They weren't lamenting this development. They were celebrating it.

[Cornflake]

I don't consider that a fact that indicts academia. It's a choice by the Penland School of Craft.

[millring]

I'd be willing to bet my last cent (figuratively. Dar would kill me if I lost IceSha on a bet) that Penland is anything BUT an exception in that regard. I would bet that DEI is the principle factor in all academic arts grants today. At ALL universities.

[james]

*Yawns*

[Cornflake]

I'm not going to argue about these things for several reasons, one of which is that I don't know enough to have an informed opinion. But grants can be public or private. How a foundation dispenses the money of some dead philanthropist is its business. I could be wrong but I'm not aware of much public money being handed out as grants to artists. To the extent that happens, I tend to think it's a bad idea, and I don't need to drag in the culture wars to reach that conclusion.

[Marshall]

Taking art for “Granted,” - I get it.

[Marshall]

Most symphonies would disappear without grants. I think grants perpetuate classic art. I don’t know about DEI ( your whipping boy), but popular culture picks it’s own winners without much interference from outside arbiters.

[millring]

Apr 14, 2024 11:39:29 GMT -5 Marshall said:

( your whipping boy)

?

[Russell Letson]

This is a topic worth unpicking--which is to say, it's actually a family of topics, some of which are mostly about the "arts" proper (and the reasons for those scare quotes are part of that discussion), some are about economics, and some about the role of public policy/politics/private action.

I don't have time to do all of that unpicking right now--I have to get ready to spend several hours making "art" at a jam hosted by a for-profit enterprise (a tap house) for no money. But the subtopics I would unpick include how and to whom public money is distributed and how qualifications for and the benefits of that distribution are measured. Some of these questions are not unlike those asked of other public activities and institutions--schools and libraries, for example. Then there's the history of the economics of artistic production and consumption (to use some bloodless and rather reductive terminology), which needs to parallel examination of the role of "art" in general.

But playing starts in just over an hour, and my guitar and banjo aren't going to tune themselves. So more later.

[howard lee]

Apr 14, 2024 11:39:29 GMT -5 Marshall said:

Most symphonies would disappear without grants. I think grants perpetuate classic art. I don’t know about DEI ( your whipping boy), but popular culture picks it’s own winners without much interference from outside arbiters.

[james]

There may be people unaware that DEI policies, programmes and initiatives in Educational institutions (and other settings) are being/have been banned by lots of conservative legislatures. (Legislative developments that the people behind the right-wing's extreme Project 2025 agenda want to see turbocharged) .

pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/77/4/22/3278545/State-anti-DEI-laws-sow-uncertainty-in-public

abcnews.go.com/US/map-impact-anti-dei-legislation/story?id=108795967

[John B]

I don't know enough about arts funding to know what I think. But I do know that I believe in some amount of public funding for arts. I just really don't know what barriers, guardrails, hoops, etc., that I would erect to determine how those funds should be distributed. I have listened to albums by Canadian artists that were funded by the Canadian government, and at the time I was reading the liner notes I was pretty impressed Canada would do that.

But what about art I don't like? Usually it's "conservatives" complaining about questionable (sometimes very questionable) art, asking why we, the people, are funding it. And "liberals" arguing for the funding regardless of what anyone thinks about the results. But I'm sure there's plenty of art I don't think should be funded by the public.

[Russell Letson]

I can't say much about academic arts grants, since what I see* are entirely state/federal (Minnesota state-wide and regional and NEA/NEH), plus private foundation and corporate programs. If fact, aside from artist-in-residence situations (which are basically faculty appointments for artists, often short-term), I don't recall any university-based direct-to-artist funding--though there are various kinds of programmatic support (concert/drama series, museum/gallery shows, speakers). And just in case I'd missed something, I looked at the NEA's How the US Funds the Arts and found no mention of university-based funding of the kind done by arts councils and foundations.

www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/how-the-us-funds-the-arts.pdf

Which doesn't mean that the attitudes common in university environments aren't also found in the official arts-funding world. But then, those values (and anxieties) have spread across much of our public-policy/social-attitudes space. When I fill out the application for the Granite City Folk Society community arts support grant (administered by the Central Minnesota Arts Board), there are sets of questions about what demographic segments we serve--ethnicity, age, (dis)ability status. These are in a part of the application form marked as informational and not used to affect the award--nor does the GCFS membership and target audience profile (old and white) seem to affect our success--we have gotten full (modest) funding over the 14 years I've been writing the grants. I suspect the most important factors in our success are our modest needs (all volunteer, nearly no overhead, no paid staff) and the fact that 75-80% of what comes in goes back out to the artists we book.

Of course, GCFS is one data point, and I know that elsewhere there are grant applications that make appeals based on X or Y identity group or cause, and that there are private philanthropic foundations that focus explicitly on under-represented groups. And a few years ago, the Bush Foundation turned away from arts funding altogether in favor of social-action causes. But then, it's their money, not yours or mine. (Both Bush and McKnight Foundation money came from 3M-based fortunes.)

It's probably worth discussing the virtues of individual-artist vs. institutional support from public funds, but even institutional grants wind up supporting individual practitioners and support people--and even non-artists, like venue owners or caterers or stage-hands or equipment-renters. And I wonder about the problem of art practices that require serious capital investment. How much does it cost to set up a kiln?

* I do the seeing through C's grant-applications efforts and my own grant writing for the Granite City Folk Society.

[millring]

Apr 14, 2024 21:29:56 GMT -5 Russell Letson said:

But then, it's their money, not yours or mine.

You don't think it's tax deductible?

[millring]

But the point I am making is the very real possibility that the numbers presented in the image (how much various countries support the arts) is:

1. Provided by the NEA which has a vested interest in scolding America for its niggardly ways so that we straighten up, fly right, and fund the NEA with more millions than we currently do, and...

2. misleading because (as Russell is arguing in order to rebut me but accidentally swerving into making my point about the NEA's numbers):

A) Public grants (as provided by the NEA) are not the only grants artists vie for, but they appear to be the metric by which the NEA is scolding us.

B) How much a country supports the arts isn't indicated by those numbers that the NEA provided. How much Americans support the arts is measured by the number of self-supporting artist we have relative to the rest of those countries. If by THAT measure you prove that we are yet again inferior (as we are with health care and climate awareness and gender sensitivity ... as we appear to be by every other woke measure under the sun) then perhaps we are due the scolding.

[Cornflake]

I don't understand the suggestion that concern about the climate is "woke." I suspect that I have put more effort into understanding the science and the evidence surrounding climate change than most people here. I'm very concerned. That concern has little or nothing to do with my view of any other issues. It's a product of the evidence. I don't have the view I have because I was swept up in trendy groupthink.

I continue to be puzzled about how "wokeness," which I understand to mean awareness of and sensitivity to injustice, has become a sneered epithet. Indifference to injustice is no virtue. Sarcastic put-downs of people we disagree with don't get us anywhere.

[Marshall]

When I was about 12, me and Bruce Scholler found a big rock in the new area of the subdivision that was under construction. The rock had been dug up and discarded. To us it looked like granite. So, we formed a 2 person club; the Granite Club. Our motto was; Don't take anything for granite.

[millring]

Apr 15, 2024 7:18:52 GMT -5 Cornflake said:

I don't understand the suggestion that concern about the climate is "woke." I suspect that I have put more effort into understanding the science and the evidence surrounding climate change than most people here. I'm very concerned. That concern has little or nothing to do with my view of any other issues. It's a product of the evidence. I don't have the view I have because I was swept up in trendy groupthink.

I continue to be puzzled about how "wokeness," which I understand to mean awareness of and sensitivity to injustice, has become a sneered epithet. Indifference to injustice is no virtue. Sarcastic put-downs of people we disagree with don't get us anywhere.

I'm not sneering. It's their word and they're proud of it. Am I not allowed to use it?