Indeed, there are plenty of non-recipients of public dollars who are prepared to claim that guidelines and procedures of public agencies are even less fair than decisions of private-sector donors. For example, two years ago, the city of Austin Texas’ Economic Development Department enacted a huge overhaul of its arts grants program to create more opportunities for so-called “historically marginalized groups.” In doing so, they eliminated funding for important players in the community that had been historically funded. One organization, Zilker Theatre Productions, was forced to lay off staff, cancel its warehouse lease, and sell a large portion of its costume library. They will probably have to follow up with a second sale, getting rid of props and scenery.[8] Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, it was fifteen of the smaller arts organizations that complained that it was unfair that major arts institutions were getting such a large a slice of the funding pie.[9] Fairness, it seems, is in the eyes of the beholder.
One of those complaining about the system of private philanthropy is Kate Dwyer, whose September 30, 2024 article in Esquire was typical of the genre. She laments the end of a thirty-year funding relationship between a small private press and a private foundation. What she does not acknowledge is that most direct funding from the NEA and state arts agencies would have lasted only a fraction of that number of years. She quotes Laura Callanan, the founding partner of the impact investing nonprofit Upstart Co-Lab, who was formerly the senior deputy chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts under the Obama administration. In other countries, Callanan explained, “government has decided that it’s going to be responsible for supporting a lot of important issues, whether it’s education, health, culture—a whole range of things that are important to thriving communities. In the U.S., our government doesn’t play that role.”
Oh, I beg to differ—the U.S. government does play the role of support to many sectors including the arts and it does so at a much higher level than other countries by almost any measure. But in the U.S., the approach is overwhelmingly to let the private sector direct government funds through an extraordinary tax deductibility matching scheme.
For those who don’t like the system, are they willing to give up more than $5 billion in annual indirect government support to the arts in the U.S. for a system of direct grants, even if the NEA’s budgets and those of state and local arts agencies were to grow ten times larger than what they are today? Such a system would leave more than $2 billion dollars of government arts support on the table.
