Divider Effects

No good arguments remain for federal arts funding.

Pity Michael Rushton. He is an economist who teaches in the Arts Administration programs at Indiana University in Bloomington and is the author of The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (2023). As such, he is condemned to explain over and over again to a progressive-tilted readership that multiplier effects are bunk. His audience no more heeds him than the Greeks heeded Cassandra.

The case of multiplier that Rushton is obliged to disprove is that government art subsidies create downstream economic benefits. If the literal or figurative state funds a museum, for instance, tourists who visit the museum will need hotels and restaurants, those businesses will need workers, and so on. Advocates for arts funding often concoct economic impact arguments purporting that a given dollar of state subsidy will produce greater than a dollar of benefit.

However, the state is taxing those dollars out of the productive economy. That’s degrading everyone’s spending power, which likewise multiplies—negatively. People with less money can less afford restaurants, which then need fewer workers, and so on. Multiplier effect arguments hinge on the benefit to a specific industry. But the benefits require the injury of all fields not under consideration, and the net benefit is assumed to be zero. Zero may be optimistic because the taxation regime requires funding, so the dollars do not survive intact on their way from the taxpayer to the museum. As such, the scheme damages the taxpayer at a greater rate than it benefits the subsidized activity.¹

Another criticism of the multiplier effect is that it assumes a given sector of the economy (the arts, for instance) is underutilized rather than undemanded. Implicit in the multiplier effect argument is that consumers are not properly funding the initial concern that generates the downstream benefits. Those making the argument view that as a market failure which the state should remedy through subsidy. This disregards revealed consumer preferences. The market may be operating perfectly, and the real audience is smaller than the arts advocates would like. In that case, it’s incoherent to claim that restaurant jobs justify a subsidy to a museum.

This week, NPR ran a hopeful piece indicating that the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be spared cuts in the second Trump term, despite the promise from Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to create a Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate $2 trillion of federal spending. The reporter solicited a comment from a director at Americans for the Arts who claimed, “People who go to performing arts events and how they spend on average of about $38 on things that are not part of the price of admission—so thinking about things like going to restaurants, going for drinks, the cost of hiring a babysitter.” Rushton is tired of this noise.

[The] “argument” given, using the term very loosely, comes from the Americans for the Arts, whose spokesperson explains “economic impact” in terms of when people go to a show, they might also go for a drink, and hire a babysitter. I’ve made enough [I think he means “too many”—F.] posts on this blog to link to them all – here is a relatively calm one – but, folks, this is, respectfully, daft. It is not an argument to have a federal arts funding agency that people, when they go off to see Cats, hire a sitter. Hiring a sitter is a cost. A cost of enjoying the arts. It would be like if Americans for the Cars said the federal government ought to subsidize the auto industry because people often have fender-benders which means they need to take their car to the body shop. This lobby group has persisted with this nonsense for decades, and they ought to be shunned—do not listen to them.

Furthermore, in the “relatively calm” post, Rushton doubts that such arguments are effective rhetorically.

[The] whole point of arts advocacy is to make the case that the arts are different from other sectors. You might take the externalities / public goods approach of the economists, you might take the “our identities are tied to our cultural communities” approach of the communitarians, you might take the “we have an obligation to pass a rich cultural palate on to future generations” approach of [Aaron] Dworkin, but you’re saying the arts are special. But “economic impact” makes it no different from cranberry farming, stock car racing, petro-chemical production, or any other sector, since they all have “economic impact”.

In the comments of his latest post, he summarizes the problem brilliantly: “We don’t subsidize macaroni because people will buy more cheese.” In the main essay, he boldly concludes, “What might just be crazy enough to work would be to talk about what seems to be missing entirely from the NPR story: art. That it matters, and a federal agency to preserve the best of our cultural heritage, and to foster the creation of the new, matters in some significant way to what is left of our civilization.”

Unfortunately for that laudable proposal, the museums have done all they could for the last half-decade to undermine the value and veracity of cultural heritage. Every time a museum exhibition tore down an effigy of Western culture, every time it presented art through a lens of siloed identity, it broke apart the “our” that would otherwise inhere in the notion of “our cultural heritage.” Who is the first-person plural in that possessive? North Americans? The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston goes out of its way to implicate them, their European ancestors, and their cultural antecedents in ancient Rome and Greece for countenancing slavery. They give the Islamic world a pass on that criticism, though slavery there was objectively more prevalent and qualitatively worse. The Egyptian trade in Nubian slaves dates to 2600 BC and apparently one can still buy a Togolese child for $20 wholesale, but good luck finding any mention of it in the MFA’s displays regarding the African continent.

My thesis is that multiplier effects are humbug, but divider effects are real. You can, all too easily, sow divisions in a cohesive populace by denigrating the source of the cohesion. In our case, that’s the Western liberal order of tolerance, equality, individual rights, and markets. Celebrations of that beneficent order have become all but nonexistent in the arts. I said of a 2020 exhibition at the MFA Boston recognizing the centenary of women’s suffrage that it was “as festive as appendicitis.” Almost without exception, the arts are a culture in which patriotism is embarrassing, and even to concede that white men got one or two things right over the last few centuries is painful.

Pace Rushton, to appeal to “our cultural heritage” in 2025 would be akin to the sudden rediscovery of principles of free expression by Harvard in late 2023, when it became clear that students could not call for worldwide violence against Jews without running afoul of a code of conduct aggressively revamped for a decade prior to penalize speech that demeaned anyone’s identity. To make an essentially conservative argument about shared cultural patrimony, just as Vivek and Elon show up with sharpened axes, will not be credible.

As for “the creation of the new,” I’m thinking of Mickalene Thomas’s Sandra, She’s a Beauty (2009), which hangs uselessly on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “Clothed in regal red,” says the museum,

…Sandra Bush, mother of multidisciplinary artist Mickalene Thomas, both recalls and rejects the dominant canon of Western portraiture with a radiant smile. An artist whose work aims to embolden, Thomas began to photograph Sandra while she was still a student at Yale. This lightning rod moment gave birth to numerous paintings, collage works, and photographs that serve as a daughter’s homage, aspirational mirror, and practice through which to examine the power of self-possessed beauty. … Thomas simultaneously immortalizes her first muse and interrogates the nature of how Black women are represented across historical art and contemporary culture.

I’m thinking of the six-digit commission awarded to Victor Quiñonez by the Mellon Foundation via the city of Boston to stack thirty or forty coolers into a pyramid. I’m thinking of the multi-ton bronze ode in the Boston Common to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s immense manhood. If institutional treatment of cultural treasure is tendentious, its fostering of new work is even more so. Institutional taste reflects a tiny subset of taxpayers. Morally, the people who want Mickalene Thomas to simultaneously recall and reject the dominant canon of Western portraiture and simultaneously immortalize her first muse and interrogate the nature of how Black women are represented across historical art and contemporary culture should pay her directly for the service.

While Rushton is pessimistic that the NEA and NEH can be saved, I’m optimistic that they won’t be. This week the US national debt hit a new record of $36 trillion. Note that it was $35 trillion in July, $34 trillion in January, and $33 trillion the prior September. This is the tick of a time bomb that will blow up the economy in a manner that would make the Great Depression look like a walk in the park. The Department of Government Efficiency is the first time in my politically aware adulthood that an administration was talking seriously about defusing it. The economy is fake, as I have been saying for some time. Eliminating the deficit, which would require a $2 trillion reduction of spending, would steer it toward reality.

Would eliminating the NEA jeopardize the preservation of cultural heritage? Not more than the economy getting nuked. Would it stymie the production of new art? How badly do you want that pyramid of coolers?

The revelation of economic fakeness and correction toward realness will be painful. But the brunt of the difficulty will be absorbed by a bureaucratic class that is responsible for most of the un-American-ness in contemporary American life. That includes an embarrassing portion of the arts, and I’m ready for them to reap the whirlwind.

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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Working Space by Frank Stella. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

1. See “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen” by Frédéric Bastiat. Most of what you need to know about economics is contained in this 1850 essay. A modern treatment is Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, which is easy to find in print and available as a PDF.