Americans for the Arts announced earlier today that the $50 million package of arts stimulus funds to be distributed by the National Endowment for the Arts has been reinstated (after being temporarily removed in the Senate). The Coburn amendment, which characterized granting stimulus funds for certain kinds of arts organizations as “wasteful,” was successfully removed (thereby increasing the chances that Coburn’s own daughter, an opera singer, will be free to pursue a successful career). The bill still needs to be voted on in the Senate, but the fact that both Americans for the Arts and the NEA have claimed victory after having kept out of public sight through the ups and downs of the bill’s passage strongly suggests it’s a done deal.
For anybody who cares about the role of the arts in a civilized society (including their routinely underestimated contributions to economic prosperity) this has to count as a victory. And for those of us who tried to face down right wing attacks on arts funding by the likes of Jesse Helms in the late eighties and early nineties... well, what a turnaround. True to form, we watched his right wing successors salivating and dragging out whatever machinery they keep in those closets at the sight of their trusty old whipping boy, the NEA (and experienced the familiar horror when those we thought knew better caved - like Feinstein and Schumer, for chrissakes, it was the Mukasey confirmation nightmare all over again). But this time, articles vehemently supporting the arts started popping up all over the country, supported by hard economic facts that cannot be denied. Kudos to all those who spent years, maybe decades crunching the numbers and producing the books and reports that made this possible.
This isn’t by any means all the federal funding the arts need to right a chronic long-term imbalance in public/private funding. By my calculations, if the NEA divided their share of the stimulus package equally among the organizations it currently supports, that would amount to under $15,000 each. William Ivey, the arts advisor on Obama’s transition team and former Chairman of the NEA, is rumored to have initially asked for hundreds of millions in stimulus funds. This is actually more like it when you consider, for example, that Germany increased its federal arts budget this year to $1.47bn – 10 times the amount of our budget for just under a quarter of the number of people. Moreover, Germany was way quicker off the mark, passing $130m of arts stimulus funding over a month ago (and the French, with Sarkozy’s apparently enthusiastic approval to boot, followed suite for exactly the same amount).
So, while I wouldn’t argue that we should try and match European government funding levels (for complicated reasons well documented elsewhere) I do think we’ve got a ways to go. But this is a truly significant breakthrough, and could mark a real new beginning in terms of lifting the arts in America up to the level they belong. With Obama being the only presidential candidate in history to include an arts platform in his campaign, we haven’t had such good reasons to be optimistic in a very long time.