Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Dionne Searcey covered a ritzy Hamptons gala for the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island. The gala, called “Echoes of the Cosmos,” attracted the typical millionaire and billionaire class, raising a total of $1.4 million when all was said and done. Searcey noted that galas like this have become more important for the arts community now that federal largesse is drying up. “This year, the pressure on nonprofit institutions to raise money at events like these is higher than ever,” she writes. “Federal support for the arts has become unreliable, and tapping just a little bit more of the immense wealth in the Hamptons could make or break an institution.”
From posh museums to humble local theaters, the arts community across the US has been echoing these sentiments, and understandably so. On May 2, an email from the Trump administration was sent to hundreds of arts groups across the US notifying them that their grants were being terminated. “The NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President,” the email said. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”
That same day, Trump’s discretionary budget request was released, and, consistent with previous Trump budget requests, it called for the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The stated reason for the cuts was “to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities.”
The opposition to these moves from the arts community was swift. “The nonprofit sector is under siege by our own government, and arts organizations are especially vulnerable,” said Rob Lentz, the executive director for one of the organizations that had a grant canceled. “…When chaos and cruelty are the order of the day, all I can ask for is solidarity and resistance.”
“Any attempt to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts — by eliminating funding, reducing staff, or canceling grants — is deeply concerning, shortsighted, and detrimental to our nation,” said Erin Harkey, CEO of Americans for the Arts. “The NEA plays a vital role in the lives of millions of Americans and the thousands of nonprofit and governmental arts and cultural organizations that bring America’s story to life.”
With a budget of $207 million, the NEA is one of the smallest federal agencies. But as the past few months have demonstrated, its supporters see it as an important source of finances for a valuable industry.
The Case Against Government Arts Funding
Trump’s cuts and rhetoric are raising questions that haven’t been seriously asked for many years: which kinds of artistic initiatives should the government be supporting, what exactly is the correct amount of government funding for the arts, and what levels of government should be responsible for that funding?
But there’s also a bolder question this story raises that goes back to first principles: Should governments even be in the business of funding the arts in the first place?
The standard defense of the affirmative answer is familiar to just about everyone. Advocates argue that these programs help to provide jobs, foster community, and ensure a cultural richness that would otherwise be lost. These benefits are undeniable, and if they were a free gift it would of course be foolish to renounce them. The trouble is, they aren’t free.
This raises both an economic and an ethical objection to government arts funding. The economic objection stems from concerns about meeting the most urgent needs of consumers with society’s scarce resources. If more important projects — perhaps healthcare, education, housing, or food — have to be neglected so that resources can be channeled toward the arts, maybe that’s not a particularly wise use of funds. Maybe it would be better for our general prosperity to let the free market allocate resources based on consumer demand, rather than having the government allocate them based on…something else.
The ethical objection to government funding of the arts is rooted in the idea that taxation is coercive, and that it is immoral to make our fellow citizens become coerced benefactors, even for a good cause. The twentieth-century German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer highlighted the coercive nature of the political process in his 1907 book The State:
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others… I propose…to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others “the economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means” … The state is an organization of the political means.
Consider the case of funding for the arts. Institutions like the NEA seek to fund the arts by using the political means, that is, simply taking the money by force regardless of whether the individual taxpayer-benefactors are on board with the NEA’s preferred initiatives. A gala, on the other hand, is a perfect example of the economic means: people are voluntarily funding a cause with their own money because it is something they personally endorse.
Conceding that a certain amount of arts funding will always exist from voluntary contributions, some may still be concerned: wouldn’t a lack of government funding at least mean artistic institutions have less money to work with? As it turns out, even that isn’t necessarily the case. For instance, the $1.4 million raised at the Echoes of the Cosmos gala more than made up for the loss in federal funding for the Parrish Art Museum. Cutting back on federal funding didn’t mean the Museum had any less money in the end; it just meant that donors stepped in and voluntarily made up the difference.
As Russ Greene observed, that seems like a win-win. The people who care about this institution still get to see it thrive, and taxpayers get to keep more of their money.
The fact is the arts don’t need government support to flourish. For centuries they have done immensely well on a purely voluntary basis — largely thanks to market-driven prosperity. Bruce Walker highlights this historical reality in a 2009 article:
The Gilded Age captured in the literature of Mark Twain and Edith Wharton was highly fruitful for the nation’s art, witnessing the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870, New York), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 1876), the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (1879), and the Corcoran (1869, Washington). All opened their doors without government money, as did a plethora of other museums, private collections, and art schools.
The fundamental principle here is that people should not be forced to fund things that they don’t want to support. There are plenty of great initiatives out there that do a lot of good in the world, from arts and culture programs to charities for the poor to cancer research. But which of these receive our hard-earned money — and how much of it — is a deeply personal choice that should be left to the individual. The will of the majority should not supersede your own values on the question of what to do with your money. The priorities of the majority should not be imposed on those who don’t share those priorities, or who think there is a better way of achieving them. Part of living in a free country should mean being free to spend your own money as you see fit, rather than having the government make most of your charitable decisions on your behalf.
The political means may be expedient, but it is not the right way to fund a cause — and it becomes especially disconcerting when those from more humble backgrounds are forced to fund lavish art museums in the Hamptons.