In economic stimulus package, arts deserve place in line
Chicago Tribune
Chris Jones

In the recent debate over the Barack Obama administration's economic recovery bill, proposals to spend government money on the arts have become poster children for pork.

"The National Endowment for the Arts," wrote sarcastic editorialists at the National Review last week, "is in line for $50 million, increasing its total budget by a third. The unemployed can fill their days attending abstract-film festivals and sitar concerts."

In the Senate, an amendment sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) lumped museums, theaters and arts centers (a terrifyingly vague term) with such frippery as casinos, golf courses and swimming pools as recipients who must be stopped from getting any of this funding. The amendment passed 73-24 on Friday, with many Democrats voting in the majority.

It is time for the American arts community to confront its stunning political ineptitude. It has arrived at a place where there seems to be no one to make its case; no one, at least, free from the taint of self-interest.

After all, the argument that the labor-intensive arts are not job-creation engines is patently absurd; they just fuel different kinds of struggling workers, workers unaccustomed to bonuses. Their role in generating billions of dollars in ancillary economic activity for stores, restaurants and the travel business has been proven in bucketloads of surveys and analyses.

The contrast in priority with the last comparable American stimulus package is simply breathtaking. Funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration made the arts a priority. Federal Project Number One -- home of the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Music Project and the Federal Art Project -- was, believe it or not, the largest of the WPA's endeavors.

Its mission was to give more Americans the chance to experience what Roosevelt called "a fuller life." Its legacy -- from invigorating murals to landscape paintings to the careers of Arthur Miller or Orson Welles -- is everywhere you look.

In less than 75 years, the arts have gone from the single largest priority in a government stimulus package to a toxic joke, with a popular special amendment keeping them out. It is a stunning turnaround.

How did it happen?

Somehow it has come to be broadly accepted that concrete, asphalt and medicine for the body (as distinct from the heart and soul) have greater moral worth.

Artists must shoulder some blame. The last massive federal involvement in the arts nurtured propagandists and political absolutists. The controversy surrounding the so-called NEA Four -- the subversive solo artists whose grants became political footballs in the early 1990s -- extracted too great a price from the sensibilities of the ordinary public. Too little attention has been paid to making the long-term political case that culture is important and accessible to ordinary people and thus worthy of financial support. Too few artists embrace populism, preferring to heap scorn on work with mass appeal.

Without their people-magnet cultural institutions, New York and downtown Chicago surely would be in much worse economic trouble. Yet few of the business or local government leaders who would benefit from arts funding have been speaking up.

More significantly, the arts have thrown up precious few, articulate, clout-heavy American leaders of their own. That needs to change. Old economic arguments must be articulated anew.

Be all that as it may, some common sense must prevail as the newest government stimulus package winds toward President Obama's desk.

Economic stimulus is dependent on the human spirit. The arts create confidence and self-worth, and those qualities in turn foster fiscal activity. The arts build neighborhoods and can help stem the decline in property values. The current recession is most devastating in inner cities, precisely where the arts are at their best.

An artist with an instrument is every bit as "shovel-ready" as a potential new highway. In fact, without some help maintaining jobs in culture in, say, struggling downtown Cleveland, there is one fewer reason to build another way to get there.

If you want to prevent the building of another bridge to nowhere, it does not make sense to condemn everything beautiful at the end of that bridge.

Artists deserve to be held accountable by anybody paying their bills. And in a job-stimulus package, money given to the arts should go directly to the creation of artistic jobs. But those jobs, and those workers, are just as important as those who pour concrete.

The arts are not, ipso facto, cheap pork. They are education. Health care. And they make up an American infrastructure of a different, more important, kind.