Bad Art and Red Ink

I recently received a circular email which announced, in somewhat alarmist terms, the imminent death of several public arts outlets: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and others. As it turns out, the email was a sham; I had read, only a few days before, a news article which touted instead a new, less controversial NEA, the budget of which was likely to be passed without murmur by Congress. In any case, these two pieces of media have brought my mind back to a question that has nagged me for a long while: how should the arts be funded? And of course, the perhaps even more pressing question: why do the arts struggle so much to gain funding in the first place?

The two questions, of course, are inextricably linked. If individual painters, opera companies, art museums, etc. were perpetually in the black, there would be no need to even debate the merit of public grants. However, as affairs lie, such institutions are far from flush with capital. And considering that the stereotyped “starving artist” is fairly well ingrained into the national consciousness, it appears to have been the case for some time. Perhaps this is just a fact which we have to accommodate, but surely there are rational causes for this state of affairs. This post will examine the fundamental problem; it will be followed soon by another which debates potential solutions.

At the risk of sounding snobbish, I will venture that one of the reasons is humanity’s tendency to take the path of least resistance. I implicate myself as much as any other: it is pure human nature. After all, if one path seems easier than all others, and promises roughly the same benefits, who would not choose it? Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that the most truly beneficial course often includes difficulty early on, and humans are notoriously reluctant to take the “long view” of affairs. Thus it comes about that producers of objects d’art who have a mind more fixed on profit than creative integrity will market “art” that is pre-packaged, easily digestible, unchallenging, full of hooks and gimmicks. The nobler artist, while not necessarily shunning the tastes of the public, allows ease and accessibility to take second place to the Idea and Craft that shape his work. Naturally, the appreciation of the second is ultimately better than that of the first, but the second artisan will find it difficult to compete with his rival, simply because the instant gratification offered by the rival is so hard for humans to overlook. Any film critic will tell you that Kurosawa is the superior craftsman to James Cameron, but who produced the largest grossing film in history?

The second obstacle to the success of the Arts is the joint-stock corporate paradigm. While simple human motivation helps explain artistic foundering on an individual level, this paradigm operates on a more systemic level. The joint-stock corporation, as most are aware, is one of the most brilliant innovations of the Anglo-Saxon mind, developed around the time of the discovery of the New World. It came to early fruition in the shipping industry: no longer would the Antonios and Bassanios of the world wait with trepidation on the Rialto for news of sunken schooners. Instead, a “board of trustees” would all invest a stake in a single ship, and thus minimalize risk the risk for each individual. A capitalist could therefore invest in ten ships instead of just one, so even if two or three went down, he would still be far from ruin. This is now the model which dominates all business in the Western world, and a company’s “going public” is a major business event that usually results in great multiplication of profit for the newly-created corporation.

Of course, the system comes with some built in stipulations: for one, no group of investors will throw money into a venture which no one believes will be profitable. As with any purely market-driven system, the arrangement fails to work if marginal benefits cannot be offered to both parties — investors and company executives. Here we see how problem one creates problem two, and problem two feeds problem one in a sort of unfortunate symbiosis: if an artistic institution is run as a joint-stock company, then it cannot simply suck money away from investors, but must give them a reasonable expectation of profit. No investor without a profound streak of altruism would invest in the found-sound histrionics of German band Einsteurzende Neubauten, the experimental novels of William T. Vollman, or the expensive and little-known Berlioz opera, Les Troyens. While debate could rage on about the merits of the former two, the last is an undisputed classic of the opera world which just a few years ago finally received a second competent recording — and that was a live recording; studio technology would simply be prohibitively expensive.

Consequently, pressure arises from boards of trustees and the result is our current artistic moonscape: bevies of whipped-cream-lite chick lit stacked on Barnes & Noble’s “literature” table, the proliferation of repetitive hack-painters like Thomas Kinkade, pre-packaged and overproduced concoctions of lowest-common-denominator collaborations passed off as the original work of a singer-songwriter who is actually a glorified lip-synch artist, opera companies forced to put on little more than doggedly traditional productions of one or two Puccini or Verdi standards a year, symphonies channelling more than half their energy into relatively frothy “pops” concerts that advertise film score suites with pictures of Darth Vader.

Undoubtedly, I have overlooked a significant number of other causes, but this is the fundamental cycle which I see perpetrated in the modern world, and perhaps the main reason for the current poverty of what is passed off as “art.” This, then is the problem, and I shall soon post some stabs at the solution.