In a New York Times op-ed, Laura Raicovich and Laura Hanna call for a generous increase in the way the government, in particular the federal government, funds arts institutions: As policymakers in Washington gather to draft a new budget for fiscal year 2025, they could solve culture’s current financial crisis and radically reshape how we think about sustaining the arts. They could do this by tapping into abundant appropriations that already enjoy bipartisan support. To make this possible, first we need to stop treating museums, theaters and … [Read more...]
The search for the very nice arts philanthropist
Last month, the Scottish government came up with a one-time grant of £300,000 to cover the Edinburgh International Book Festival, after pressure from environmental protestors caused the previous sponsor, Baillie Gifford, to back out. This week in Canada, its premier book award, the Giller Prize, having lost its primary sponsor, Scotiabank, after protests, has appealed to the Canadian government to keep things afloat: Without stable funding, the Giller Foundation says the prize will be forced to end operations at the … [Read more...]
Should we subsidize arts consumers, art producers, or neither?
My friends Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan have started a new venture, Arts Analytics, where they hope to bring more extensive, and shared, use of data into arts policy thinking, and also to spur discussion. A recent post of theirs asked what is actually an old question in the arts policy world: if we are going to subsidize the arts, is it best done through grants to arts producers, or through running the subsidy through arts consumers? They think we ought to give more consideration to the latter: A demand-centered reframing would … [Read more...]
On the frontiers of AI
Prelude, from The Onion: Now then. A few days ago, my son googled “Franz Kafka Airport” and here is what Google AI came up with: Being a public spirited sort, son informed Google that they might want to tweak this a wee bit. And so I had to check this afternoon for an update, and I get something new: Well, it’s a start? But of course there is no “Business Week” 2009 report - that was a fiction from the Onion story. The future’s so bright I’ve got to wear shades. Prompted by reading the always insightful Timothy … [Read more...]
Children of Men
At Indiana University each spring there is an arts festival in honor of Kurt Vonnegut, Granfalloon. This year’s theme is his novel Cat’s Cradle, which is the book where he introduces the term Granfalloon (although, to my mind, not really as something one would celebrate; Karass would have been a better choice to name a gathering?). Since that novel is about the end of the world, the IU Cinema is showing films with that theme, including Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), drawn from, though with differences, … [Read more...]
Even more on the economics of live theatre
The Freakonomics series on the economics of live theatre continues with this third and final episode, in which I talk about its value - no, not economic value: all the other kinds... … [Read more...]
On the hidden economics of live theatre
Freakonomics Radio has a new three part series on the economic landscape facing live theatre. Part One is here, and part two is here, which as a supporting act in an episode with Lin-Manuel Miranda, has me trying to coherently explain cost disease in the theatre, where it comes from and its implications. Part three will come next week, but if I say so myself it is a really informative series so far. … [Read more...]
What to do with the NEA? Make it Conservative?
In my last post I wrote about the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne’s call to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. Here I will consider a different approach from the right, Mark Bauerlein’s “MAGA needs High Art, Not just Kid Rock”, from the New York Times. He writes about the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the NEA, but I will focus on his thoughts about the latter (to this point, the NEH has taken some heavy cuts, but not so the NEA). Here are some selections from the op-ed: But for the Trump … [Read more...]
What do to with the NEA? Pull the plug?
Two opinion pieces were published this week giving different conservative takes on what to do with the NEA. I’ll talk about Mark Bauerlein’s New York Times Op-Ed in the next post; here I look at the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne’s briefing paper “End the National Endowment for the Arts”. To begin I’ll skip all the way to his last paragraph, which begins: There is no robust economic case for direct taxpayer funding of art. And, as I wrote in chapter two of my book on arts funding (an ungated working paper version of … [Read more...]
On the aesthetic education of the young
From Book III of The Republic, by Plato (circa 375 BCE, translation by F. M. Cornford). Socrates is speaking with Glaucon: One thing, however, is easily settled, namely that grace and seemliness of form and movement go with good rhythm; ungracefulness and unseemliness with bad. Naturally. And again, good or bad rhythm and also tunefulness or discord in music go with the quality of the poetry; for they will be modelled after its form, if, as we have said, metre and music must be adapted to the sense of the words. Well, they must be … [Read more...]
What was I thinking?
“There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.” Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night (1959). … [Read more...]