Originally written for my English 325 - Intermediate Composition course at Ashford U.
Among
the most indelible images surrounding the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was that
of Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich seated alone at the Brandenburg Gate,
playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 for an audience of no one and of billions.
Music, art, theatre, and dance were once emblems of erudition, education, and
civilization for the ruling classes of monarchies; our culture, however, has
come in recent years to see the arts as pretentious entertainment for the
wealthy, who can afford to pay for their own art. School music and art
programs, often a child’s only lifetime exposure to high culture, are slashed
mercilessly, in spite of the tremendous growth of interest in these programs on
the part of young people as a result of singing and dancing competition reality
TV shows and of other entertainment outlets such as the TV show Glee.
Congress has recently voted to de-fund
National Public Radio and PBS, again because they are seen as something that
only the elite can enjoy, despite their being the only exposure many have to
classical music and other educational programs not offered in their own
communities. In viewing these entities as frivolities that the country can do
without during tough economic times, government decision-makers commit the
error of considering the intellectual and expressive needs of the nation to be
unimportant, and they run the risk of creating a climate of malaise and
cultural decline even as the country attempts to pull itself out of its
difficulties.
In
previous centuries, classical music and fine art, though funded by the ruling
classes, were present in the immediate environment of most, to be enjoyed by
all, regardless of class. Walking through a 15th century church in
Florence, one may round a corner to find a wall filled with murals painted by
some of the great masters of that day. Average people went to church each
Sunday in early 18th-century Leipzig, Germany, sat down in a pew,
and listened to new works by Johann Sebastian Bach, all for the price of a few
florins in the collection plate. While
popular folk music has also always been present, the deep divide between what
is entertainment for the educated and well-to-do was never as distant from the
popular entertainment tastes of the masses as it is now. The quality even of
pop culture has been in decline for decades now, which may be at least partly
attributable to the lack of information the general populace has about the
potential of art, music, theatre and dance.
Some
of the antipathy toward state-funded arts and arts education may lie in the
history of Western arts patronage. Support among the ruling classes for
lower-caste artists dates as far back as ancient Rome, when the patrician
Maecenas lent his economic support to the poets Virgil and Horace. (Ranocchi,
2010) During the Italian Renaissance
(1350-1600 AD), rulers and noblemen such as Lorenzo de Medici made sponsorship
of art a mark of socio-political prestige and position (ibid.), creating a
climate in which painters, sculptors, musicians, and other artists flourished;
as a result of this patronage, Western culture received the works da Vinci,
Michaelangelo, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, and many other of the great
creative talents of their day. (paradoxplace.com, n.d.) Throughout the era of
powerful monarchies and Church hegemony in Western Europe, artistic patronage
was a part of the ruling classes’ noblesse
oblige, as well as an emblem of power, wealth and sophistication.
The
association between Western high culture and the monarchs and religious despots
whom our democracy overthrew may cause some to view classical music, fine art,
and other high-culture disciplines as mere entertainment for the elite, and
therefore somehow intrinsically un-democratic and un-American. In stating that,
“It would be unconscionable for any politician to suggest we set aside tax
money for even one more mural or one more sculpture until the state budget is
back to where the fundamental needs of people are being met,” columnist Ken
Schramm (2011) argues that the arts are a luxury that the state cannot afford
to support in tough economic times. While he allows that, “By any account, the
amount of tax dollars spent on public art is relatively modest,” he presses on
to say, “Then again, toss a million here and a million there and pretty soon
you're talking about real money.”
(ibid.) To Schramm and those who think as he does, the arts are
something extra, something less intrinsically valuable than, for example,
social services such as subsidized health care and food programs. To those on
the left, those who advocate funding the arts are plucking morsels from the
mouths of hungry children in order to finance some rich man’s entertainment.
Those more to Schramm’s political right might
go even farther, believing that not only the arts programs, but also the social services should be cut,
in favor of balancing the budget or of giving tax breaks to the citizenry. In recent weeks, a group of conservative
Republican Congressmen has advocated completely defunding the National
Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part
of the group’s Spending Reduction Plan, which proposes to cut some $2.5
trillion from the US budget, including the NEA/NEH’s $167.5 million. (Trescott,
2011) Some exponents of conservative
philosophy denounce, across the board, any government spending on programs from
which they do not personally and directly benefit: public education (for
others’ children), social programs for the less fortunate, disabled and
elderly, and publically-funded arts among them.
Many corporations contribute significant sums of money to arts
organizations, public broadcasting, and other cultural institutions, as do many
well-heeled private citizens. While not all Republicans (and wealthy Americans
of other political persuasions) are fans of classical music or other high-art
forms, some may feel that they already have given significant contributions “at
the office” or privately, and that their tax dollars should not also go to
support the same institutions. Moreover, they may balk at the notion of
supporting art that generates too little interest for the free market to
support it, while artistic programming such as film, television, and recorded
music generate billions of dollars in revenue and do not ask for hand outs.
Still others fear that state funding of art means state control of art,
believing that art is only assured its freedom when privately funded or left to
its own devices. To a Republican, funding for the arts is not taking food out
of babies’ mouths: it is unjustly taking money out of their own pockets.
On
both the right and left, then, the arts have acquired the reputation of
something profoundly unnecessary, less important than social spending, to the
left, or keeping the money for oneself, to the right. Both assessments are short-sighted and
self-contradictory. Those who believe
that funding art is less important than creating jobs seem to believe that
artists do their work for free, and that the money simply vanishes into an
imaginary whirlpool. On the contrary, artists make their living in their art
forms: putting food on their tables, putting their children through college,
and putting their earnings back into the economy.
A
typical opera production employs several hundred people, including leading
singers, conductors, pianists, stage managers, designers, producers, directors,
orchestra players, librarians, prop builders and managers, public relations
professionals, artistic administrators, subscription salespeople, fundraisers,
and stagehands. The stagehands’ union,
the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), is a
subsidiary union of the AFL-CIO and has more than 110,000 members. (IATSE,
n.d.) The American Federation of
Musicians, the orchestra’s union, has more than 90,000 members (AFM, 2011) Unions
representing other performers also have memberships in the tens of thousands.
All of these people – with their contributions to both the treasury and the
economy – would be out of work if those who wish to eliminate all arts funding
got their way. Would those who want to
eliminate funding for arts programs approve drastic cuts in assistance to other
industries that support nearly half a million people?
Artists,
moreover, have a highly specialized set of skills and may have a hard time
finding jobs in the conventional economy, forcing the public which had just
eliminated their livelihoods to spend social-service tax dollars on them. Those on the right who gleefully trumpet their
spending cuts might find that their boisterously proclaimed elimination of arts
funding added an equivalent amount of expenditure to the unemployment rolls. In
addition, the economy would lose these employees’ spending. To paraphrase Mr.
Schramm, those employees’ lost expenditures might not amount to much, but when
taken as an aggregate, the economy could ultimately lose millions, and the tax
coffers corresponding millions in revenue.
What
of the art itself, though? Some might ask what the government is doing, paying
to keep alive the high culture of past times and foreign countries, which only
the moneyed elite in America seem to care about. In fact, corporations and
wealthy individuals give many millions each year to high-culture organizations,
both for the tax credits and to ensure the survival of art forms which the
donors appreciate. In our modern day,
the ultimate reason that government both funds and defunds art is the lack of
interest in it among the general public. Government has taken on the role of
the royal patron, providing a living for those who create and perform art, and
who would have no other source of income.
That art, when produced for the public, attracts only a handful of
spectators, most of them elderly and wealthy. Meanwhile, Britney Spears
released an album of simple popular ditties that sold 10 million copies and
that earned $25 million. Where else but in art (and perhaps farming) have the
laws of supply and demand been so utterly defied?
Western high culture has a great deal to
answer for, having brought a good deal of woe upon itself. At the dawn of the
20th century, high culture ruled the recording industry, the concert
halls, and the media. The 78-rpm discs of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso were
played on mainstream radio. Paintings represented a view of real life, and were
more than apparently random paint splatters on the canvas. No one had the gall
to create a work of art simply to shock and inflame, as with photographer
Andres Serrano’s 1989 photo of a crucifix placed into human urine. (USC, n.d.)
At the turn of the 20th century, high art was beautiful,
accessible, and elevating to the spirit.
From
1915 through the late 1920s, artistic movements began which would cause a
serious and long-term rift between the world of high culture and the public. In
Europe, composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and others of their
school abandoned the gloriously beautiful composition of their early careers in
favor of academically exalted but dissonant and inaccessible serial
(mathematical) composition techniques. Melodies became something of the
unenlightened past, with orchestras, opera companies, and other entities
eagerly programming those works, expecting the public to embrace them as
symbols of modernity and erudition. Audiences abandoned concert halls in
droves, embracing instead the new art forms on the scene: rock ‘n’ roll,
popular blockbuster films, and the Pop Art of populist new artists like Andy
Warhol. Just as many of the opera
houses, concert halls and museums around America were being built, the new
music and art being generated for them by academically and publicly supported
creators was increasingly unpalatable to a public genuinely hungry for beautiful music and art. It was also at
this moment that the US government created the organizations that funded such
art and supported its programming in the United States. Ever since, those
government agencies have been under attack – while Britney Spears made her
millions.
In
recent years, the pendulum in high art has swung back toward the realm of
public acceptance. Opera companies have begun to show their productions in
movie theatres, and have enhanced production values in order to please a
film-savvy, opera-skeptical public; they are rewarded with record-setting
audiences and a new generation of dedicated opera-goers. Popular musicians have
become composers, while opera singers and classical instrumentalists have made
rock albums. Even more tantalizingly, television programs such as American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and
Glee have begun to give adults and youth alike a surrogate musical
education, filling in for the elementary and high school music programs that
have been eliminated or severely cut.
Thus,
the culture has proved it has an interest in and can support art, even spending
vast amounts of money on it. The
National Endowment for the Arts provides only a small fraction of the support
needed to undertake a top-level, professional artistic production, with the rest
coming from private donations and subscription sales. Maintaining the NEA’s
leadership is vital, because without a national agency leading the way and
showing other organizations that the arts deserve support, those other
organizations may decide to invest in some other charitable interest to gain
their tax breaks. The NEA also funds
smaller, less-prominent artistic exhibitions and performances, all of which
enrich the cultural life of their communities.
It is a critical time in cultural history, a time when the reemergence
of a popular high culture which relies less on patronage seems intriguingly
near; if funded, the NEA and the NEH can provide crucial leadership,
encouraging those who would create new, great works of art that most Americans
find appealing.
There
can be no arts, of course, without early training for future artists. Even as far back as 1983, I watched with
dismay as my school’s music program received less and less support from our
county, which had turned instead toward “hard academics.” Such cuts in arts education have swept the
nation, usually ordered at the school-board level, as cash-strapped school
districts find places to slash in their budgets. The assumption, once again, is
that the arts are something expendable and unimportant; however, studies have
shown that school music and art programs can actually keep students in school.
(NEMC, n.d.)
The artists who create great art do not simply
spring, fully-formed, from the ground, but must be educated and nurtured from
the time they are very young, in order for them to be accomplished enough by
their late teens to pursue careers in their chosen art forms. School music
programs which have been cut must be restored. Children must be able to sing in
their glee clubs, or to play in their school orchestras, which in turn give
them even greater interpretive knowledge, discipline, and desire to pursue ever
higher goals in their art. As popular culture and high culture move closer
together once again, it is critical that young people have access to the same
artistic tools that Haydn and Mozart had in order to create art that stands the
test of time. If they do not, the quality of what they create will be
diminished, and in turn, so will our national cultural heritage.
If
that weren’t enough, the lifetime benefits of arts education are
well-known. According to the National Association
for Music Education (MENC), “The arts can provide
effective learning opportunities to the general student population, yielding increased
academic performance, reduced absenteeism, and better skill-building. An even
more compelling advantage is the striking success of arts-based educational
programs among disadvantaged populations, especially at-risk and incarcerated
youth. For at-risk youth, that segment of society most likely to suffer from
limited lifetime productivity, the arts contribute to lower recidivism rates;
increased self-esteem; the acquisition of job skills; and the development of much
needed creative thinking, problem-solving and communications skills.”(MENC, n.d.)
MENC further
supplies the stunning statistic that, “Nearly 100%
of past winners in the prestigious Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math,
Science and Technology (for high school students) play one or more musical
instruments.” (ibid.) The organization
also states that schools with quality music programs have a higher graduation
rates and test scores than those who do not. (Ibid.) School music programs not only prepare the
next generation of musicians to enter the field, they also provide benefits for
the entire student bodies of their institutions.
Another access point to the arts is
National Public Radio, which along with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
are often the only exposure the people of a community have to the arts in
America. The Metropolitan Opera
broadcasts, now airing in some markets on NPR rather than on commercial
classical stations, have arguably exposed more people to opera over the decades
than any other media outlet. The House of
Representatives recently passed a bill to eliminate public funding for National
Public Radio’s programming, thereby demolishing the “public” element of NPR’s
avowed mission. Ironically enough, when the Congressmen were looking for NPR
programming to ridicule as part of their dismissal of NPR, they imitated a
character from NPR’s program Car Talk – precisely the program for which
budget-conscious programmers within the station had threatened to remove
classical music programming to make room. (Cornish, 2011)
Since
the 1960s, America’s access to high art and culture has depended on public
outlets: school music programs, public radio and television broadcasting, and
government-assisted cultural organizations such as those funded by the National
Endowment for the Arts. The US gives
more in foreign aid and pays more for a single attack aircraft than it provides
for the entire budget of these programs, which enlighten and educate, improving
the quality of life for all those who tune in.
However,
even token public support, as well as the exposure of the great works of high
culture to the masses via public broadcasting and government- funded
performances, make a strong and clear statement to the masses that our society
aspires to the best in art and entertainment, and that in turn the popular
culture should use such cultural events as inspiration to elevate all of the
culture. Supporting the arts gives millions of people who would not otherwise
have access to the richness and beauty of great masterworks the opportunity to experience
them. Without high art as a touchstone,
our culture will spiral downward into least-common-denominator oblivion, until
we wake up one day and discover that we have become less as a people: less
enlightened, less appreciative of beauty, and less able to create at the
highest level. Defunding the public’s access to great art ensures that our
culture will create none of its own.
Resources
Ranocchi,
M. (2010) “The future of art patronage in an evolving society: From the Roman
Empire to the Sheikhdom of Dubai,” Tafter
Journal. September 16, 2010.. Retrieved from http://www.tafterjournal.it/2010/09/16/the-future-of-art-patronage-in-an-evolving-society-from-the-roman-empire-to-the-sheikhdom-of-dubai/
on March 28, 2011.
