Julia Nelson's List: Comp II Project: Arts Funding

• If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

   

  If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
• In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society--in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.

• Almost all arts funding is administered on the state and municipal levels. They reason that local arts administrators will best know the interests of the community, as well as the quality and needs of the artists who live there. Each city invariably takes great pride in its cultural offerings. They feel that a rich and locally autonomous cultural life not only contributes to the quality of their lives, but also adds prestige to their community. 
• There is a strong belief in many smaller European cities, if not most, that meaningful culture has to be communal, and that going to a larger city to see something is just borrowing culture that is not your own.
• The vast majority of the funding goes to the cultural institutions the cities own and operate -- their museums, galleries, operas, symphonies, theaters, ballet companies, etc. -- but a smaller fund is also reserved for independent artists. Munich, for example, has about 30 small, private theaters which offer cabaret and serious plays. About half of them have resident companies that perform local playwrights, though the artists can seldom live from their work. Most larger cities own a number of ateliers which they make available to visual artists on a permanent basis, and most cities own black box and studio theaters for smaller experimental and guest productions. 
• The cultural minister is often an elected official and usually has professional training in arts administration.
• They focus on large institutions such as State Theaters and their state owned radio and television stations which always have one or two 52 week season resident orchestras and a full time, professional choir. A specific function of the radio orchestras is to perform and record new music.
• Germany did not even have a federal arts minister until two years ago, and when he was appointed there was an uproar. The states and cities felt the federal government might try to compete with their own arts ministries. This contrasts with the USA where state and local funding is often even more paltry than federal funding. Europeans would find it strange for a federal government to fund the arts in any specific way because it is so difficult at that level to have direct contact with the lives and work of artists and the communities they will serve.
• Private sponsorship of the arts is rarely encouraged and is viewed with extreme mistrust. They feel this will lead to less funding based on the sporadic whims of patrons who often have superficial tastes. Embarrassingly, it is often referred to as the American model.

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• Overall there is a distinct theater world, a well-established network of state, municipal, traveling, and private theaters. In Germany a lot goes into this system: in terms of stimulus, attention and money. For many this is a luxury, especially as box office takings amount to a mere 10–15 percent of theater expenses. The system has long since passed its zenith and is now in a difficult position because time and again art is measured in terms of the material requirements.
• • Discontent

• Operation Homecoming is made possible by The Boeing Company.

• Department of Justice: The agency has partnered with the Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention on several projects to bring the arts to underserved youth including the Arts Programs for Youth in Detention and Corrections, Partnership for Conflict Resolution Education in the Arts, and the Youth Arts Development Project.
• Arts for Learning (A4L) is an innovative initiative based on the idea that all students can meet - and exceed - learning goals while at the same time develop a lifelong affinity for the arts. Supported through an Arts Endowment Challenge America Leadership Initiative and led by Young Audiences, Inc., the initiative presents Web-based information from a range of arts disciplines and organizations to teachers and others who can integrate the arts into the curricula.

• Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experiencepreserves the stories and reflections of U.S. military personnel and their families.  Since 2004, the program has brought more than 60 writing workshops to troops at more than 30 domestic and overseas military installations.  An open call for writing submissions resulted in more than 1,200 submissions; in 2006, Random House published a critically acclaimed anthology of select writings. The program has inspired two award-winning documentaries, including one that was nominated for an Academy Award® and received two EMMY® Awards.  Most recently, the program has brought writing workshops to Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers and affiliated centers in the U.S. and abroad.

• CHEKHOV wrote that, ''We must strive with all our powers to see to it that the stage passes out of the hands of the grocers.'' Because he wrote this in 1895 he could not have known that the threat would come not from a supermarket chain but from the automobile and airline companies that are now branding our marquees and ''enhancing'' revenues. Is it wrong to succeed? That question, unthinkable now, was a subject of much discussion at Princeton in 1974.
• The road presenters poll their audiences' response to various titles and stars before deciding on their seasons. The stakes (read costs) have simply become too high to assume undue risks. There is still a quotient of wonderfully reckless independent producers, but those careers usually don't last long.

• The Illinois State Board of Education endorses the belief that society and all who learn must be provided with no less than a high quality, fully integrated education. In 1985, the School Code of Illinois was amended to include the fine arts as one of the six fundamental areas of learning.

  In 1994, Goals 2000: Educate America Act wrote the arts into federal law as well. Goals 2000 acknowledges that the arts are as much a core subject as English, math, history, civics, government, geography, science, and foreign languages.
• Either/or thinking is short-sighted

• Conservatives who support the killing of the endowment assume that the free hand of the market will shake things out and take care of everything. But will it?

• arts represent elitism of a kind that America ought to find useful if it is to continue to have a sense of its own progress as a superior country.

  "The arts are nothing if not an elitist enterprise, but they are elitist in the best American sense. They represent elitism detached from social class and privilege; they represent democratic elitism.

• inestimable gift
• From an economic standpoint, the arts employ several million people and create an economic base of several billion dollars in this country alone--a big return for a paltry investment of only 64 cents per American per year for the National Endowment for the Arts.
• Paltry especially when you also consider that other countries, all poorer than the U.S., fund the arts at 50 times our level. No country has ever gone bankrupt funding the arts. But many have gone bankrupt funding defense.
• For so many of the world's cultures, the creative process and the preservation of its product are the bailiwick of the educational systems: the village elders, the school houses, the public universities. In these institutions, much of the creative life of a culture--the arts--are nurtured and sustained. It is in part because of help from the NEA that these institutions are able to keep the arts accessible, available to rich and poor alike.
• If government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts is to be eliminated, is it not a very easy step then to eliminate federal funds for students who want to study in the arts? Will the next step be that the government decides in which areas students may study and receive degrees? We cannot and must not be brought even close to this.
• Instead of eliminating funding for the NEA as members of Congress propose, I suggest we increase government funding for the arts overall. In this way we will ensure the flourishing of our culture, enhance the education of our children, increase and diversify our economic base and secure our place as a nation with a culture both rich and diverse that is counted among the great civilizations of the world.

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