The Case for an Arts Czar
by Adam Huttler, Executive Director at Fractured Atlas
Isaac Butler makes a compelling, well-reasoned case for why President-elect Obama ought to create a cabinet-level position focused on the arts and cultural policy:
It is necessary, after all, and a good thing to have the President say the arts are important. It would be great to have a Cabinet level arts person. It would Send A Message. Okay fine, sure, but the problem is not our Government’s rhetorical and symbolic commitment to the arts. Every President since Kennedy has reaffirmed that commitment rhetorically and symbolically, even while cutting the NEA’s budget. There’s a Congressional Arts Caucus as well (described by a friend of mine in Government as “one of the feel good/do nothing caucuses you find all over the place in the House”). What we need are fewer statements about the importance of art and more actions that will make art important….
Well, it turns out there’s a good case to be made that we need some kind of Minister of Culture or Cultural Policy Coordinator position in our government. Here’s why…. and this is my own belief although I’ve noticed it start to percolate out of other places and a lot of this comes from the arts committee work I did so I guess this is one of those organically reached consensus moment: The future of arts funding in America is not solely about increasing funding the NEA and State Arts Councils. It is instead about embedding the arts comprehensively throughout federal and state government agencies. It’s about arts based diplomacy at State, it’s about using Community Development Block Grants to help with arts real estate issues, its about using the Small Business Administration to help new arts organizations start. It’s about different agencies having resident artists (did you know Laurie Anderson was NASA’s resident artist for two years?). It’s about the Department of Education handling arts education. Its about viewing art as a necessary part of society that’s therefore integrated into the levers that make that society move.
Think for a moment about the way science is funded by the government. Science is funding by all sorts of different agencies and quasi-gov’t entities. You have the NIH, the Army Corps of Engineers, NASA, the NSF etc. and so forth. Some of it is very practical and has to do with societal needs, some of it is basic/pure scientific research. Who funds what might surprise you (did you know that the bulk of prostate cancer research is done by the army not by the NIH?).
There’s more good stuff, but that quote is long enough already. It’s exciting to see the extent to which Obama’s election has energized and mobilized the arts community to think big about cultural policy. (It’s also a little scary, because there are about a dozen efforts operating in parallel, seemingly without a whole lot of communication or idea-sharing among them. And those are just the ones that I know of…) The most promising, in my view, are the ones that have broken free of old language and narrow priorities to embrace a more expansive view of government and the role it can play in supporting a healthy cultural infrastructure. I wholeheartedly agree with Butler’s contention that our priority needs to shift away from “more money for the NEA!” and towards a more comprehensive and integrated strategy. Having said that, it’s worth noting that Dana Gioia has actually been extremely effective at lifting money from unlikely sources, such as the Dept. of Homeland Security, throughout the federal government. Let’s just say that any effective arts czar would need to have Gioia’s political skills.
Adam Huttler is the Executive Director at Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit technology company that helps artists with the business aspects of their work. To learn more about Fractured Atlas, or to get involved, visit us here.
