Priority Retort

Americans for the Arts argues for continued federal arts funding by citing Minnesota. Minnesota makes the opposing case.

Minnesota, according to Grok.

If you or your organization applies for a Cultural Expression Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the application requires you to fill out forms regarding your personal or group demographics. The program guidance document explains, “The Arts Board... will use the information to allocate funds, ensuring that priority groups receive a percentage of grants awarded that is equal to or greater than their proportion of the total applicant pool.” For organizations, it instructs, “In the age, additional characteristics, geographic location, and race/ethnicity sections, please provide percentages of individuals in each group.” “Individual applicants,” it continues, “will be asked to describe themselves, the communities they are part of, and the communities they serve elsewhere in the application.”

The group of highest priority is “individuals who are Black, Indigenous, or a person of color; or [o]rganizations in which Indigenous people or people of color comprise 50 percent or more of the board and staff.” After them come “individuals with disabilities; or [o]rganizations in which individuals with disabilities comprise 50 percent or more of the board and staff, and/or organizations that primarily serve people with disabilities.” After them come individuals and organizations located in Minnesota, which can hardly be called a priority group, given that residence in Minnesota is a requirement for grant eligibility. Applications are scored in large part based on the degree to which “Underserved populations benefit from the applicant’s arts programming.” These include, among others, “individuals in institutions” (what kind they don't say—mental, perhaps?), “individuals who are Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color,” and “LGBTQIA+ communities.”

The program bears mentioning in light of a recent missive published in The Art Newspaper by the interim co-chief executives of Americans for the Arts, an advocacy and lobbying group based in Washington, D.C. “Beyond the ways the election results will affect the culture sector,” write Jamie Bennett and Suzy Delvalle, “we have also been asking ourselves how the sector will impact future elections.” Without further elaboration they go on to observe, “Our country remains deeply divided in many ways, and much of the work ahead will focus on building a shared American identity strong enough to hold us together despite our differences—strong enough to keep us united, even in moments of polarization and division.”

Their argument on behalf of federal funding—around $200 million through the National Endowment for the Arts, they cite, with another $800 million disbursed through other programs—appears prompted by recent news of the Department of Government Efficiency, a proposed commission advised by Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk charged with cutting $2 trillion of federal spending. DOGE threatens to eliminate whole federal entities, including the Department of Education. It stands to reason that the NEA might be one of them, given that some Republicans have sought to tear down the program for decades. (Amid the 1995 controversy that resulted in the discontinuation of individual NEA grants, Newt Gingrich said, “I’m against self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends.”) The other $800 million of various kinds of federal arts support is probably in equal jeopardy.

Bennett and Delvalle cite Minnesota as a model of unity. In 2008, Minnesotans passed a sales tax hike to fund outdoor recreation and cultural heritage, proving that broad majorities would support arts funding, at least under a wide fiscal umbrella that included ice fishing. “With more than 262 racial or ethnic groups and 778 Native tribes, Minnesota is a microcosm of the complexity and diversity contained within our country’s identity,” they write. “If Minnesotans can be united in a shared love of the Timberwolves basketball team, the Minnesota State Fair and When Doves Cry, we know our entire country can do similarly.”

It’s hard to imagine Prince, the legendary Minneapolis musician whose When Doves Cry was a certified Platinum hit forty years ago, filling out a form to describe his demographic data and community affiliations for the benefit of the Minnesota State Arts Board. Moreover, arts organizations have invested enormous efforts in the cultivation of disunity. Such is the inevitable result of arts programming in which representation of minority enclaves matters more than concept or execution. The last decade in the arts has seen a protracted attack on the shared identity to which Americans in the Arts is now trying to appeal to keep the cash flowing from the federal government.

Examples are legion, and one can find them within Minnesota itself. The state has two major institutions that show contemporary visual art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center. At the time of publication of the Bennett and Dalvalle op-ed, neither museum is exhibiting the art of a living white man. The same goes for the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota and the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. That’s not to say that none of the shows are excellent (Stanley Whitney is a master and his Walker exhibition promises to be extraordinary), but that the museums have taken such a totalizing approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion that many people in the three-quarters white population of Minnesota are going to find themselves unrepresented there, except among the deceased. The message is unmistakable: white men belong to a dead past; the present and future belong to everyone else.

While digging through the current-run visual arts offerings in the state, I found a Minneapolis gallery with one of the most strident land acknowledgments I’ve ever seen (sic throughout):

We acknowledge that HAIRandNAILS is located on land stolen from the Dakota and Ojibwe tribes that once freely lived here. This land was stolen through duplicity and horrific violence. It is important to consider that this genocide happened in the not so distant past and that the effects have a direct bearing on the present day circumstances of Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous peoples throughout North America and the world.

Aspects of that history are indeed painful but there is not a nation on earth that was conceived without violence, including what some call the First Nations. By such acknowledgments, progressives aim to demean the founding of the United States as uniquely wicked, with the intention to one day discard its founding principles of liberty and the rule of law and establish the progressive order that those principles prevent.

Such an order would feature state-sanctioned speech and aggressively redistributive economics. We know this in part because, as mentioned previously, they’re the revealed priorities at the Minnesota State Arts Board. There’s a question about whether their schemes of identity sorting are legal. Analogous programs, such as Biden’s Minority Farmer Aid Program, instituted to provide disaster relief and compensation for COVID-19-related income loss to non-white farmers, have collided with the Fifth Amendment. It’s certain, however, that they are being unfaithful to an American ethos that values equality of opportunity and disdains the state to decide who is allowed to express themselves and why.

The arts barrage its aficionados with explicit and implicit progressive messaging. We who love the arts, but are not progressives, live with it. What’s offensive is that Bennett and Delvalle are trying to appeal to the American taxpayer with phony Kumbaya about overcoming differences, while the arts run on “priority groups” specifically intended to divide people. Underpinning that division is a deficit of belief that art has transcendent value that can overcome silos of identity. The arts took it upon themselves to lecture the rest of the world about the evils of the West in general and Trump in particular, and the emptiness of bourgeois mores like those that would incline someone to visit a museum in the hope of encountering the sublime. Their advocates do not now have the standing to invoke basketball, state fairs, and Prince’s music—which we appreciate because they value merit—to talk us into continuing to underwrite them.

Americans for the Arts seems to realize that the case for federal funding hinges on the broad public never finding out the details of how American arts are managed. People should understand that examples in Minnesota typify the rest of the country in their anti-Western orientation. Opportunities to exhibit and subsidies to create are doled out based on a regime of identity-based favoritism. The progressive political slant in the arts is perhaps even more extreme than it is in academia. One of its few taboos is patriotism. Bennett and Delvalle conclude their essay by saying they “will continue to support all the ways that artists and arts organizations can help America build an even bigger ‘we’, one expansive enough to include all of us in what remains the oldest multiracial democracy in the world.” But the arts have so aggressively deconstructed that “we” that there is no longer any “us” of whom to ask for more money.

Even supposing favorable political conditions, there are ethical questions about whether the citizenry should be made to pay for art through taxes, particularly when analysts value the American art market at around $27 billion, and the government subsidies are known mainly to benefit older and wealthier audiences. But the country is in one of its moments of polarization and division, and Americans for the Arts cannot adequately answer the question of why the citizenry should want to pay for art through taxes. Implicit in Bennett’s and Delvalle’s unelaborated musings about how the arts will impact future elections is the admission that the arts affected the recent one, moving a majority of Americans to elect an administration that may finally kick over the public trough at which the arts have long fed.

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