Stimulating Arts

Critics of the economic stimulus plan (read: impotent Republicans in Congress) have, throughout the debate over the size and scope of the package, cherry-picked various programs—ones, of course, that they don’t like or that run counter to their ideology—as evidence of “pork.” And in some cases, both in the House and especially in the Senate, Democrats have caved, stripping billions of dollars from the package in the name of bipartisanship, despite the obvious ways in which these programs would have played important roles in moving this country forward during tough economic times.

President Barack Obama, in his first forceful and effective speech on the economic recovery plan last week at the Department of Energy, highlighted a perfect example:

Now, I read the other day that critics of this plan ridiculed our notion that we should use part of the money to modernize the entire fleet of federal vehicles to take advantage of state of the art fuel efficiency. This is what they call pork. You know the truth. It will not only save the government significant money over time, it will not only create manufacturing jobs for folks who are making these cars, it will set a standard for private industry to match. And so when you hear these attacks deriding something of such obvious importance as this, you have to ask yourself—are these folks serious?

The answer is obviously no. Many in the party that has been roundly defeated in the 2006 and 2008 elections continue to peddle the idea that tax cuts will somehow stop the recession. That is, in a word, laughable. First, there’s no reason to trust that those largely responsible for getting us into this mess now have the solution. Second, many of these same Republicans never balked at giving $700 billion to Wall Street, and now—when a similar amount of money is slated to create/save American jobs, assist state governments, and actually initiate programs to stimulate the economy—they have issues with the size and cost of the plan. Finally, we all remember, though no one ever seems to bring it up during this current government-spending-versus-tax-cuts debate, those “rebate” checks (or bribes, as I like to call them) we received last year from the Bush administration, which clearly failed to achieve the supposedly desired results.

Conservative objections have concerned programs that make up less than 1 percent of the total package, yet you wouldn’t know that by the way they have breathlessly whined on TV news shows and stomped their feet on the Senate floor over the last couple of weeks.

One of the items included in the recovery plan that has, all too predictably, provoked Republican scorn is the $50 million allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana has said such a measure won’t create jobs. Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia tried to transfer the NEA money to highway construction: “We have real people out of work right now and putting $50 million in the NEA and pretending that’s going to save jobs as opposed to putting $50 million in a road project is disingenuous,” adding that all of NEA’s current funding should be examined.

These two congressmen, among others, are either unbelievably uninformed or ideological idiots—or both.

The NEA portion survived, in full, the House vote but was not included at all in the Senate bill, which will likely pass within 24 hours. Then, in the next week or so, the House and Senate will attempt to reconcile their two bills before a final vote. During this negotiating period, arts groups like Americans for the Arts hope that the $50 million in recovery funds for arts groups will be restored. While that would be a start, a much larger piece of the economic stimulus pie should be aimed at artists and public arts.

Ben Adler, writing on The Atlantic’s business blog, Brave New Deal, makes a compelling case for “Why stimulus spending should go to public art.”

“Arts are actually a great form of economic investment, particularly public art, and they should be amply funded in the stimulus package,” Adler writes, providing the statistics to support his claim. “Every year nonprofit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government, according to Americans for the Arts.”

Perhaps even more importantly, as Adler argues, the money spent on public arts will have a near-immediate impact on the economy:

The money for artistic projects is almost by definition ready to be injected into the economy. It may take years to draw up a plan for a highway, obtain the right of way and fend off legal challenges before the bulldozers start rolling. But to buy a canvass and some paintbrushes, or even some metal for a public sculpture, is comparatively straightforward. That puts quick money into the pockets of the companies that build, sell and ship those artistic materials as well. 

Furthermore, investment in public arts seeps into other important sectors of the economy: “A well-designed public space can boost real estate values and create opportunities for small local business to thrive,” he writes:

If one agrees, even just in part, with Richard Florida’s “creative class” theory—that a welcoming environment for creative professionals is the key to helping cities and even countries retain a competitive economic edge, as he compellingly argued in The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class—then supporting the arts in general, and public art in particular, would be the ideal way to spend some of the stimulus dollars.

For many artists, save for a lucky few, the economy always seems to be in recession.  So in times like these, that dreaded word “depression” becomes the more accurate description of their financial situation. “Life for most artists is tough even in good times, but in bad times artists are among the most vulnerable people in the workforce,” writes Scott Lilly in a February 6th article for the Center for American Progress highlighting the ignorance, idiocy and irresponsibility of people like Pence and Kingston.

‘Arts jobs are jobs’

As Lilly aptly points out, most self-employed, independent artists earn income by selling what they create, and in an economic environment that has nearly everyone spending less and less—well, you do the math. “Still others,” writes Lilly, “perform at venues ranging from restaurants to night clubs and concert halls, all of which are struggling in an environment where entertainment is one of the first victims in shrinking family budgets.” And those artists—and other workers!—who are employed by a theater or opera company, a non-profit organization, a museum, or a symphony orchestra are losing their jobs, as contributions and ticket sales alike decrease, in ways no different than those working in other sectors of the workforce. “When they lose their pay checks,” he adds, “it affects the economy in precisely the same manner as if anyone else had lost a job.” A common-sense truism—unless, of course, you’re a blowhard, philistine politician, hell-bent on keeping alive absurd misconceptions that artists aren’t “real” workers and that the arts isn’t a strong economic engine. 

To reiterate the obvious, I quote Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, from an article in the New York Times about a week after Obama’s inauguration: “The artist’s paycheck is every bit as important as the steelworker’s paycheck or the autoworker’s paycheck.” In the same article, Marc A. Scorca, president and chief executive of Opera America, echoed the seemingly self-evident sentiment: “Arts jobs are jobs…these people are taxpayers and rent payers and mortgage payers, just like every other employee.”

So while the House has included $50 million to the NEA in its version, we’re talking about a stimulus bill that will likely exceed $800 billion. And some of us, as John Cavanagh, E. Ethelbert Miller and Melissa Tuckey put it in an article they co-authored for The Nation, “have the audacity to suggest that they do more.”

Calling for 1 percent of the stimulus to be spent on the arts, the authors highlight the successes of FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), which “created jobs for more 40,000 artists, musicians, writers and theater workers who were paid a living wage to create public works of art.”

Their proposal for a 21st Century New Deal for the arts mirrors, in many ways, the platform offered by Obama and his arts policy committee during the campaign—with a few additions, like the creation of a secretary-level post for culture and the arts (an idea supported by Bill Ivey, head of the arts/culture Obama transition team, and more than 230,000 people who have signed this petition):

[I]ndeed, the United States and Germany are the only wealthy nations without a minister or secretary of culture. The new secretary of arts and culture could then help allocate funds on a much grander scale than simply a small new infusion for the national endowments for the arts and the humanities.

Mark I. Pinsky, writing in The New Republic about a month after the election, suggests that Obama resurrect the Federal Writers Project—a WPA program—as a means of “providing some way to provide young journalists a way to get started, or displaced media workers a way to transition to new occupations, or to retirement.” Not only would such a program create jobs, Pinsky argues, it could—just as the FWP did—produce “some lasting contributions to American history, culture, and literature.”

Spending stimulus dollars on the arts will, unquestionably, create jobs, but it also does a lot more than that: reinvigorating arts education in ours schools; rebuilding communities through public art (literally and figuratively) and thereby increasing local property values, improving the real estate market and making a place more attractive to small businesses; engaging new and otherwise financially shut-out audiences through free musical and theatrical performances; revitalizing and modernizing our public library system; and, in general, renewing the role of the arts in our culture, recognizing how it can boost our economy, placing value again in its transcendent powers.

A New Deal
for the Arts

Whether or not the bill that comes out of conference between the House and Senate and is eventually signed by the president features the $50 million NEA funding remains to be seen. While it’s still a possibility, there’s little (if any) chance that Congress will include “1 percent for the imagination” in the stimulus package. Nonetheless, President Obama should move to enact the arts policy agenda he proposed during the campaign in short order, and his administration should seriously consider installing a cabinet-level arts/culture position and creating fully funded WPA-style public arts programs across the country.

As Cavanagh, Miller and Tuckey put it, “A democratic and free society is exactly the kind that needs public art.”